• 2009 Presentation Dinner
• Report of AGM
• Season 2008 Trophy winners
• Fiftieth Season
• News archive

Presentation Dinner details

The annual presentation dinner will take place at a new venue this year, in the shape of the South Hatch Restaurant (in whose grounds some Badgers will have played a cricket match or two back in the early Nineties). The establishment can be found on Burgh Heath Road in Epsom and the event will take place on Saturday 21st November. The bar will be open from 19:00 (7pm) with dinner slated for 20:00 (8pm) and carriages at midnight. The cost per head is £25 but there will not be a disco this year in an attempt to address some of the criticisms of recent dinners, as highlighted by Foxy’s pre-AGM survey.

I have added the exact location of the restaurant to the Google Map showing the grounds we play on and you can obtain slightly less accurate indications of the location using this postcode-based link to a map of the area in Multimap or this rather more accurate one using Streetmap.

AGM – 26 Feb 2009

A dozen hardy Badgers gathered at Mark’s house for the 2009 version of the Annual General Meeting, but things did not get off to a good start with Dave Tickner stuck on the hard shoulder of the M25 (with what turned out to be a blown head gasket – he never did make it to the meeting), Graham Davenport unable to read the curry menu due to having left his reading glasses behind (although remarkably Allan Butt’s loan of his own pair seemed to do the trick) and Patrick having to ‘read the minutes’ from his scribbled notes, having failed to type them up over the past twelvemonth (although, to be honest, they could have been the minutes of any AGM from the past decade or so).

I shan’t bore you with too much detail (I took notes on the laptop throughout proceedings, so I am not constrained by my usual haziness) but suffice to say that there was little contentious in the reports from the committee or the captain, and that the accounts were passed, with the funding of the club deferred for later discussion.

It is worth noting here – especially since I shamefully forgot to include it in my review of the fiftieth anniversary celebrations – that an EGM convened at that event elected David and Alan Tickner, Mick Willmott and Keith Miller as honorary members of the club in recognition of their contributions to the club down the years.

Things did get interesting when it came to the election of officers, but whilst Simon Fox stood down as Chairman, Keith Miller finally ended his stint as Hon. Treasurer after twenty-two years in the saddle, and Patrick relinquished the mantle of vice-captain, there were no bloody battles for the vacant posts and the meeting duly elected Allan Butt to the Chair, Simon to the (offshore, as in recent years) post of Treasurer and Graham Ward (in absentia, due to sickness, but with his foreknowledge) to the vice-captaincy. On a more mundane note, Chris Turner was proposed and accepted for membership of the club.

The new fixture list was distributed and discussed, with particular interest in new fixtures and which ones had been dropped, and then proceedings moved on to the thorny topic of tour. After considerable discussion it was decided that there was not sufficient guaranteed interest in actually staying away for the two days and therefore tour will be cancelled again this year. Those of us that remember the heyday of the Cotswold tours will no doubt be disappointed by this, but since your correspondent is one of those who is unable to commit to travelling then perhaps I should not comment further.

Pre-season nets and the impending Reunion Dinner were covered, with Mark explaining that we were unable to obtain an earlier time at Nescot nor an alternative venue and Alan Tickner clarifying that the reunion was intended for former members only (ie. no partners) and that the price might have to increase slightly as he had been quoted for breakfast rather than dinner.

Simon reported back on the results of the questionnaire regarding the dinner and dance and it seemed that most were in favour of the status quo, but that the disco seemed to be the crux of any discontentment. This provoked a long debate amongst several of those present which failed to reach any meaningful conclusion other than that we needed to get our fingers out in terms of organising this coming November’s event whether or not we looked for alternative venues or forms of entertainment.

Due to the lateness of the hour there were then fairly rushed discussions of the proposed rules changes, which Pat was asked to amend on the basis of the points raised and to re-distribute prior to ratification at an EGM, and of the insurance situation, which seemed to be the cause of considerable confusion.

Finally the issue of subs and match fees was revisited with a proposal on the table to drop the match fees to an easier to collect five pounds whilst leaving the subs unchanged and thus to budget for a small loss rather than to break even. This was agreed and as the meeting came to a close just before eleven o’clock Mark requested that, where possible, people pay their subs via electronic transfer rather than cash or cheques – at which point several of those present produced their cheque books.

Badgers’ dinner – posh frocks and shiny cups

Purley Sports Club did us proud on the food front again this year and it looked like most folk had a good time, but to be honest this year’s event felt a little flat to me. Whilst there were a number of notable absentees, it is dificult to see why that should put a crimp on proceedings for the rest of us, and I wonder whether it was simply difficult for the dinner to live up to the legacy of the fiftieth celebration, even though they were very different affairs. For the record, the various bits of silverware found their way to:

There were a fair number of notable events this season. There was the small matter of the club reaching the end of its fiftieth season in existence during which the team passed four hundred wins, Pat scored the club’s first ever 99 whilst streaking past three thousand runs at a faster pace than anyone in club history, Graham and Richard Ward both reached the thousand run plateau (whilst Graham Davenport left us dangling over his passage to that milestone) and Steve Pitts reached 300 wicket keeper dismissals. On the individual front both Matthew Mann and Graham Ward recorded personal bests with the bat and Graham also rolled up his best ever bowling figures, reflecting the fact that his enthusiasm is reaping its rewards on the field as well as in his match reports.

Fiftieth Season Events

Badgers Cricket Club has just completed its fiftieth season, and marked this milestone with a celebration, held at Tadworth Cricket Club on Sunday 20th July 2008, to which all members past and present were invited and around 160 people attended. Full details have been moved to a separate fiftieth anniversary page.

News Archive

If you have a need to view out-of-date news items you may well be able to find them somewhere amongst the pages linked to below, as I’ve currently no intention of throwing anything away – after all, I may need to reuse it!!

To save the pain and heartache of waiting for an ever-growing page of historical news items to load, I will be archiving them by the original year of publication, so choose from the list below:

• News item archive for 2009
• News item archive for 2008
• News item archive for 2007
• News item archive for 2006
• News item archive for 2005
• News item archive for 2004
• News item archive for 2003
• News item archive for 2002
• News item archive for 2001
• News item archive for 2000