CRICKET
History
The two ‘ends’ are known as the Peasholm Park End and the Trafalgar Square End.
Cricket was first staged at the ground in 1863, when the tenancy of Jackson’s field on North Marine Road was obtained, matches having been played at Castle Hill in Scarborough since 1849.
Yorkshire has played here since 1878, with the MCC beating them by seven wickets. The first County Championship game was held in 1896 when Yorkshire beat Leicestershire by 162 runs. With the demise of the other outgrounds, Scarborough is the only regular venue for county cricket in Yorkshire other than Headingley Stadium, Leeds.
The end-of-season Scarborough Festival, staged to capitalise on the large numbers of tourists in the seaside resort, saw touring teams, county teams and Yorkshire play in a mixture of friendly, championship and one-day cricket.
The Fenner Trophy, a one-day competition featuring four counties, ran from 1971 to 1996 under the names of various sponsors. The centenary of the festival was celebrated in 1986, with Sir Len Hutton as president.
The ground has also staged two One Day Internationals, pitting England against the West Indies and New Zealand in 1976 and 1978.
The ground is situated close to the sea and features a raised cricket pavilion built, in 1895, at a cost of £2,150. A new seating enclosure was added in 1902 and further extended over the next five years. A concrete stand was added in 1926, at the cost of £6,700 and, in 1956, a new West Stand was erected, costing £16,000.
More recently, the Jack Knowles Building was completed in 1995, and cost £210,000, new all-weather nets and a press box were constructed in 1997 for £50,000, and the enclosure and tea rooms were refurbished in 1998 for £95,000.
After the 2010 county season, The Guardian named North Marine Road ‘Ground of the Year'.
professional groundsman. I spent four years there.”
“But, when Paul Harrand, who is now the Scarborough chairman, contacted me to say they were struggling, and would I like to take up the position of head groundsman, I jumped at the chance. As a young boy, I used to watch a lot of cricket here, and I have enjoyed every minute so far.” John has been head groundsman at the club since 2011 and one of the first things he noticed was that the training pitches needed some improvement; he also felt he could get more pace out of the strips. “When I came here, the practice facilities were not very good. We have county cricket here, and they would not use them. I was finding that, if I had a county match in July, by the time I had got practice and match pitches for them, I had nowhere left to play club cricket! To solve this problem, I made the decision to extend the square down towards the West Stand purely for practice.” “They are all constructed with Ongar loam, which is what is on the main square as well. I employed a contractor to construct the new pitches as it was easier for them to do with the equipment available to them. For example, they could use lasers to get the levels correct and follow the slope of the
96 PC October/November 2019
ground. They were built on the natural base with four inches of loam on top. The rest of the club pitches are very old and the chap who was here before me, who had a farming background, brought in a power harrow from the farm and power harrowed them all and mixed them up. This meant they were fairly slow, but I now dress them heavily with fourteen bags of Ongar a strip each year. They have now improved to a state where they are the quickest in the area.” John has twenty-four pitches, used for
junior, practice, club and county matches, but not all the pitches are the same. “The six county pitches are constructed in a slightly different way. Where you would normally have a ten-foot-wide strip, the county pitches are constructed with an eight-foot- wide, twelve-inch-deep slab of Ongar loam. One of the critical things with the square is that I must always have the exact point where the corners of the county pitches are. It is imperative that they actually play on the eight-foot.”
I am intrigued to know how John knows
exactly where they are year on year? “Well, I use an old method really. I just have a stump hole and, every time I go out with the stumper, just put the stump in again and have it there at each end, it’s just a basic old
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164
