Summer Sports - Cricket
It’s a Blast at Aigburth Liverpool Cricket Club
Teams of tired people have been shifting portable grandstands across Liverpool Cricket Club’s home turf, Aigburth Cricket Ground, in preparation for Lancashire Lightning’s opening fixture in the 2017 NatWest T20 Blast. A week earlier, those stands surrounded a tennis court on the same lawn. A couple of months earlier, there was a rugby union pitch where they stood. Jake Barrow headed to Liverpool 19 to meet Head Groundsman Terry Glover
L
ancashire Lightning were champions of the competition just two years ago, and were hoping to stage a repeat performance starting with the match in
Liverpool against Leicestershire Foxes on Sunday 9th July at 2:30pm. The men hoping to ensure that the
surface is up to scratch are Head Groundsman Terry Glover, 49, who is approaching a three-decade landmark as the head man at the club, and his longstanding associate Keith Ball, 51. The match was relocated to Aigburth
because of the substantial work being undertaken at Old Trafford to accommodate the semi-impromptu benefit concerts for the victims of the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, but this is just the most recent occasion in a long history of the Lancashire cricket team making the Liverpudlian ground its home.
In the 2011 season, for example, Old
Trafford was undergoing extensive renovations and the team made Aigburth its base for six of its eight County Championship matches, compared with one match during most seasons. Although this resulted in a greater workload, it also yielded much stronger publicity for the ground, as well as leading to one of its greatest triumphs. The triumph in question is one that Head
Groundsman Terry Glover maintains is the proudest moment of his career: when playing this unusually high number of games at Aigburth, Lancashire won the 2011 County Championship. This was the first time the club had achieved the feat as outright winners (they shared the honour in 1950) in all of seventy-seven years - since the lifetime of Lawrence of Arabia. Terry, of course, can’t help but assign some of the credit to the state of the
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