2026 Season Review

The OLSD Cricket Team has been playing matches against other local churches, pubs and businesses for well over 30 years and has involved many parishioners, family members and friends.

We have always seen cricket as a form of outreach, for example it has been a great opportunity for  non-Catholic partners of parishioners to feel immediately included in this community activity.  In recent years our ranks have been boosted by players originally from South Africa, West Africa, East Africa, Sri Lanka and India, reflecting the increased diversity of our parish.

We also hope to demonstrate Christianity in action on the field (we are competitive but always honest and usually kind – although we sometimes get carried away by our appeals).  By playing against other community clubs we can fly the flag for Catholics and it’s surprising that we are sometimes asked questions about our faith or what we do when we chat with opposition players.  It’s also good for ecumenical relations and the biggest shame is that many of the churches we used to play no longer field teams (Cove parish and St Mary’s Camberley being two such examples).

We play on summer evenings when there is enough daylight to complete a Twenty20 match (that’s 240 balls bowled) with a 6.00pm start.  We always encourage spectators and this year we have enjoyed Charmaine, wife of our captain Enrico, cheering us on with her two young children.  Valerie our Diversity and Culture Lead, who as well as recruiting new players in the parish has also come down a couple of times to support, as has my wife Jo who is always keen to take a team photo for the parish website!

This year we arranged seven matches but ended up playing only four against just two opponents.  We played two matches against The Prince of Wales pub on Rectory Road which provides not only a very good place for after-match refreshments but also regularly gives us our best matches. These are invariably close and the result is not decided until the final over.  This year was no exception and although OLSD was short of players in both our matches, POW sportingly provided us with an extra fielder or two and allowed a couple of batters to get a second bat.  As a result we narrowly won our first match and narrowly lost our last one.

In between we played St Peter’s Old Parish Church Farnborough twice but they seemed to have a number of excellent batters this year and both times just scored too many runs.

We always encourage spectators and this year we have enjoyed being cheered on by Charmaine, wife of our captain Enrico, and her two young children.  Valerie, our Diversity and Culture Lead who, as well as recruiting new players in the parish, has come down a couple of times to support, as has my wife Jo who is always keen to take a team photo for the parish website!  We also really appreciated support from Br Malachy who came all the way down from Battersea one Thursday evening.

We will finish the year with a meeting and a social activity.