BREEDING GROUNDS
HOTBEDS
No.6 TYNE & WEAR
Next in our series on the club game’s most fertile regions, Scott Oliver takes a trip to the north-east
At the heart of club cricket
SCOTT OLIVER
Freelance sportswriter and stalwart club cricketer @reverse_ sweeper
In the era before five-Test Ashes tours were squashed into six hectic weeks, a regular highlight of the itinerary for international touring teams was a trip to Tyneside and a game against the Minor Counties XI at Jesmond, where the hammerings weren’t always confined to the pitch.
With no top-class cricket in the region until Durham’s belated accession to the first-class ranks in 1992, passionate crickionados from hundreds of clubs belonging to a thick patchwork of leagues – the Tyneside Senior League straddling the river, the Northumberland County League to its north, the Durham Senior League (not to mention Durham County, Durham Coast and North East Durham leagues) to its south – came out in their droves. So much so that, in the early 1980s, two entrepreneurial travel-agent brothers also brought the Callers Pegasus Festival games to Jesmond, a combined Durham and Northumberland XI taking on a who’s who of global stars, topped off with a gala dinner.