By Malcolm Page
This summer Lindfield Cricket Club will be celebrating its 275th anniversary. The club will be holding events throughout the season to mark the occasion, including its annual cricket week at the beginning of August when matches will be played against Acton, Kenya Kongonis as well as the inaugural Slam Trophy 20/20 match with the Lindfield Swans versus the Lindfield Trumpeters on 5th August.
In addition, Lindfield members are delighted to have been awarded a prestige match against the Sydney Australia Classics over 50s/60s on Sunday 21st August. This will bring back many happy memories from Lindfield’s Australia tour in 1997 when the club celebrated its 250th anniversary. With the season fast approaching, preparations are full steam ahead on the ground and in the pavilion to ensure a warm welcome to players and spectators. The pavilion lounge is undergoing improvements with new bench seating, tables and chairs as well as complementary signage throughout the pavilion thanks to an English Cricket Board grant. The club will again be running four Saturday sides, a Sunday XI and Midweek XIs as well as the ladies Lindfield ‘Pens’ playing their first softball season in the league.
Together with the Lindfield Academy participating in leagues from under 9-16 and the under 8s All Stars event on Friday evenings from 6th May, it’s going to be a busy season! As we celebrate 275 years of cricket at Lindfield, the club’s historians have started reviewing the archives and are discovering previously unseen information that had been found by Lindfield’s legendary scorer John Pollard. With such a long and illustrious history of cricket in Lindfield, there is inevitably still much more for us to discover about the club’s past, and we are now embarking on the long road of writing a book about the history of Lindfield Cricket.
We would love to hear from any residents of the village who might have any interesting stories that would bring to life the history of our club. Perhaps members of your family once played for Lindfield many years ago, or you have old documents that may be relevant to learning how the club was run in past times? If you have any information, photographs etc about the club or would like to join Lindfield as a player, help with the running of the club or become a non-playing member, we would be delighted to hear from you. Please email: LindfieldCChistory@gmail.com or Bobvivienne.hopkins@btopenworld.com.