A few of us went to the club to watch our U14s side in the final of the Sussex Premier Division Cup yesterday. It was a pretty good game to watch, but after speaking to a few of the parents we were left feeling a bit disappointed as it was evidently clear that no-one has much confidence in the current Manager of the team.

The thing with Colt’s cricket, is that you nearly always get a manager who is just a dad of a player. They’ve barely played cricket in their lives and they don’t really have a clue about what they’re doing, how to instruct the kids and how to improve them so that they can play at the top of their game.

According to some of the parents, training for their kids has been very sporadic every week. Apparently, neither the manager or the team captain were ever at training. This leaves the 12, 13 and 14 year old players with very little training each week and no incenctive to improve their techniques or encourage their development.

These players are going to be the future of the club, and in 3-4 years they’ll be playing Men’s cricket, some of them maybe even sooner than that. They need the appropriate levels of coaching and encouragement to help them to move onto a more senior level of cricket and be part of the club which is growing and improving at a tremendous rate.

Both myself and Binky (Michael), feel that we could do a much better job with managing the team, and we will be putting ourselves forwards at the next AGM. Personally, I feel like I should be giving something back to the club who have been supporting me and encouraging my development since I was 9 years old. I may not be Kevin Pieterson or Andrew Flintoff, but I’m loyal, hard working and I’ll never give up in a game. If we can just get a handful of this team to come through with that attitude, they’ll find themselves improving very quickly and leading us on into the future.