Cricket taster goes down a treat

Forty people tried out two different forms of disability cricket at Rugeley Cricket Club on Sunday.

As well as three Kwik Cricket games on the outfield, players with more pronounced mobility issues played table cricket inside.

Steve Lightfoot, disability officer at Staffordshire Cricket, said: “It was a taster day to try and get as many people with disabilities together.

“It was brilliant, we had 40-odd people playing cricket for most of the afternoon on a really sunny day.

“There were people there who hadn’t tried it before and inside we had a new format called table cricket.

“It’s a game played ideally on a table tennis table, it’s for people in wheelchairs and with mobility issues. We set that up inside the clubhouse as well for people who couldn’t get out on the outfield.”

The taster day was designed to gauge interest in a new Kwik Cricket league for disability teams in the county.

Lightfoot is confident he will be able to set up a small four-club league this summer and hopes that next season, some new faces will provide back-up for an existing team.

“I run a learning disability team for the county,” he explained. “They play in the ECB Super 9s with an intermediate ball.

“This year in our group we’ve got ourselves, Derbyshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire, we play home and away and then the team who finishes top goes through the quarter-finals.

“What I’d like to see is a team playing at a level below that, a feeder team. If it doesn’t happen next year, we’d like to see it happening in 2020.”

As for this summer though, Lightfoot plans to set up a disability cricket league in Staffordshire.

“We’ve got to sit down and work it out,” he said. “I would hope that the league format will start by the middle of July.

“We’ll probably just do the Kwik Cricket style and I’m hoping we’ll be able to get four teams who can play each other once through the school summer holidays, leading into a finals day at Rugeley on August 19.

“We need to thank Rugeley for hosting the taster day and HaywardBefriending for sponsoring it. It was a big day to organise.”