Michael Phoenix is Head Groundsman at Great Melton Cricket Club in Norfolk.
Typical of many volunteer groundsmen in cricket, he has to juggle full time employment and family commitments with the requirements of one of the biggest clubs in East Anglia
PHOENIX from the ashes... W
hen people ask me how I came to be groundsman at Great Melton Cricket Club
I must confess I really have no idea. I must have stuck my hand up during a moment of madness at an AGM in 1992, and my fellow club members duly voted me in before I had time to change my mind. As I was the only club member actually living in the village, and coming from a farming background, they assumed, rather misguidedly, that working on the land and preparing cricket pitches had some sort of connection, and being ‘Johnny-on-the-spot’ was an added bonus.
“I must have stuck my hand up during a moment of madness at an AGM in 1992”
14
The square I inherited in the glorious setting of the ruined Great Melton Hall grounds was, at the time, a rather sad-looking thing that had been laid in 1991 by our extremely enthusiastic and cricket-mad patron and landlord, Sir Edward Evans-Loombe, as part of an agreement my late father had made with him on giving up the tenancy to his small farm in the village.
This had fulfilled a life long ambition for our club to have its own ground as, prior to that, we had a nomadic existence playing our home matches at various locations since the club’s formation in 1974. The 9-strip square did
‘resemble’ a cricket pitch after the hard work of my predecessor and his group of willing volunteers, including myself. But, ‘resembling’ one was about all you could say as many a batsman could vouch for in that first summer of 1993 as they trudged off, their stumps shattered or their toes bruised, by yet another grubber.
Oh for websites and magazines
like Pitchcare in those early days! Their help would have been invaluable. We had to rely on books and, wherever possible, questioning our fellow groundsmen on our travels to matches, to gain knowledge and help. I say ‘we’ because, throughout my time as groundsman, I have been assisted by another club stalwart, Grenville Ireland, without whose help the job would be impossible. It also helps to have an understanding wife who accepts lots of lonely hours during the cricket season - sorry Ness.
The turning point came when a club member loaned us the money to buy an old Aveling & Barford roller that was originally a two man job to start, but something I mastered in time after a lot of swearing and cranking, especially on those cold, pre-season, March mornings.
In hindsight it was too heavy for
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