HOTBEDS
No.5 GREATER BRISTOL
Next in our series on the club game’s most fertile regions, Scott Oliver takes a trip to Grace land, where the ACE Programme is regenerating the local club scene
SCOTT OLIVER
Freelance sportswriter and stalwart club cricketer @reverse_ sweeper
First, the nomenclature. ‘Greater Bristol’ encompasses the now defunct county of Avon, stretching from Weston-super-Mare and Bath in its south-westerly and southeasterly corners, up the side of the Severn estuary into Northavon but not quite as far as Stroud, deepest Gloucestershire, where intrepid reporters would occasionally rendezvous with the bucket-hatted former wicketkeeping ringmaster at ‘Brizzle’ before then being driven, blindfolded, chez Jack.
A cricketing hotbed in a rugby town – or, at least, a sizeable city which, unusually, isn’t football-centric – the pinnacle of the club structure there for the last 24 years has been the West of England Premier League, which has its Premier Division fed by two second-tier divisions split along regional lines (Bristol and Somerset; Gloucestershire and Wiltshire), with those geographical sub-divisions split again beneath that. Go back a little over 50 years, however, and, as with most of the south, there was no league structure in the region, with the club game run along traditionally amateur lines: long-established friendly fixture programmes, timed matches and senior players delegating chasing the ball to young’uns.