Summer Sports - Cricket
The Arundel Castle ground
Cricket’s finest
T
he Arundel Cricket Ground is set near the West Sussex town’s restored and much visited mediaeval castle. Surrounded by trees, with a single large gap giving
a far-reaching view across the Weald, it is undeniably a place to visit, cricket or no cricket. The game is, however, what sets it apart. I’m there to meet Grounds Manager Lee
Farquhar and we chat near the pavilion as Sussex Martletts and the Eastbourne College First XI do battle on one of his strips below. It’s very early May and the occasional sound of willow on leather, a few gentle claps now and again and the first real sunshine for ages, makes working outdoors about as good as it gets, we both agree. Lee has been involved in cricket pitch
maintenance all his life. When he was about fourteen, he helped out at Ruislip Cricket Club whilst playing Colts cricket there as a schoolboy. When he left school, he studied for Greenkeeping and Sportsturf Management qualifications at Brinsbury College and, in 1987, actually came to Arundel during his studies for work experience because family had moved to the area.
Dukedom...
County outgrounds are at the heart of English cricket. True cricket followers love them, but they are an endangered species as commercial forces govern the counties’ thinking. Neville Johnson went to Arundel, surely the loveliest of them all, to learn about its history and what makes it so special from the man who looks after the playing surface
A couple of years later, Arundel contacted him again when a job as assistant groundsman came up. He worked there for six years before taking a job at the Bank of England sports ground at Roehampton where he looked after the cricket pitches as well as eighteen grass tennis courts used for the qualifying rounds of Wimbledon. He moved on from there to become head groundsman at the Royal Sun Alliance Star Sports Club in Horsham and, two years later, when Colin Dick the then Grounds Manager at Arundel retired, he was offered the post as his replacement. That was eleven years ago and Lee has been here ever since. Lee tells me that the ground was
constructed in 1895 by Henry Fitzalan- Howard, the Fifteenth Duke of Norfolk, basically for his own use as a private cricket ground. Curved and fairly steep banking around much of the pavilion end gave it a distinctive amphitheatre feel, which makes cricket watching - big or small match - a delight. It is actually built over what was called Arundel Little Park, through which the road to and from London passed. “It coincided with other building projects on the estate apparently,” said Lee. “The mischievous story at the time was
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