• Fiftieth Season
• Indoor Nets
• Season 2007 Trophy winners
• Alan Wilkes 1951-2007
• News archive

Fiftieth Season Events

Badgers Cricket Club is in its fiftieth season, and will mark this milestone with a celebration, to be held at Tadworth Cricket Club on Sunday 20th July 2008 and to which everyone is invited. Full details have been moved to a separate fiftieth anniversary page.

Indoor Nets Season 2008

This season's indoor nets will, as in every year this millennium, be held in the sports hall at Nescot College, Reigate Road, Ewell, Surrey (Tel no. 020 8394 3133).

There will be five sessions, on the following dates:

Badgers' dinner – celebrations as another season passes

A new venue this year, Purley Sports Club, did us proud (even if there was much of it that yours truly was not allowed to eat) and a good time was had by one and all. Unfortunately I'm writing this months after the event so I don't remember a great deal, but I can tell you (thanks to Mark jogging my memory) that the various bits of silverware found their way to:

Not much in the way of record breaking this season – although Darrell took his first five wicket haul for the club and both Grahams, Davenport and Ward, made their first ever fifties (hence the joint award of the Frank Butt Cup) – but the team performances continue to vary wildly, with the now all too familiar big loss one week being followed by a big win the next.

Alan Wilkes – Requiescat In Pace

It is with great sadness that I must (rather belatedly) report the untimely death, at just 55 years of age, of one-time Badgers' stalwart Alan Wilkes. Alan played fifteen seasons for the club, 159 games from 1989 to 2003, and was a regular over those years barring two achilles tendon problems (the second being sliced by a pane of falling glass, if memory serves) severely curtailing his participation in a couple of seasons. For some reason I have a clear as a bell mental picture of meeting Alan for the first time on the occasion of his first game for the club, against Wallington Old Foresters at some school in Purley whose name escapes me, and where we only played the once. I can picture a wooden fence next to which Alan had parked, and remember being struck that I'd never seen anyone turn up for a game of cricket on a motorbike before – an Indian-made Triumph rip-off to boot.

I have no particular memories of the game from that first occasion, but I do remember the same fixture in the following season, played at the Fire Brigade ground in Ewell, where Alan made his best ever score for the Badgers – 80 out of 185 for 4 declared – in a muscular style. At the time we thought he looked quite useful and would probably make a few more innings of that nature, but he never really fulfilled his potential as a batsman for the club, and seemed to lose interest in batting as time went on. His best bowling figures for the club were 7 for 38 against Banstead in the first game of the 2000 season, and you can read a (rather brief) report of that performance, which was actually the first ever match report on this website.

Alan was a niggardly bowler who regularly supplied the sort of control on the opposition's scoring that was most welcome to me as captain of the side throughout most of his years with the club. He had been a league cricketer in a former life, which showed in occasional attempts to wind the other side up a little, but he adapted himself to the Badgers' ethos and took the gentle ribbing that he received about his fielding in good part. We didn't always see eye to eye on strategy decisions on the field, nor on when conditions were playable and when they were not, but those disagreements were always conducted in an amiable fashion and he was a good team mate. He will be missed and our condolences go out to his widow Helen.

Footnote: whilst researching this item I found tributes to Alan on various football-related sites, including the Football Association's own site and a couple dedicated to Chester City FC, including this unofficial site (you'll need to scroll down to find the item as there are no internal anchors for me to link to). However, I was amused to discover this item on the website of Eastwood Town FC whose nickname, in an almost unbelievable coincidence, happens to be 'The Badgers' (again, you may need to scroll down – only the last three paragraphs relate to Alan).

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:

• Season 2006
• Season 2005
• Season 2004
• Season 2003
• Season 2002
• Season 2001
• Season 2000