Hello Players, Members & Supporters,
I hope you all had an excellent Christmas and New Year period. I wanted to take the opportunity, as the clubs new Chairman, to set out my plan and vision to take Portsmouth Cricket Club into the elite club category in the South of England.
Firstly, I wanted to thank my predecessor, Rick Marston, for his outstanding work and dedication to the Chairmanship in recent years. He had the dream of developing and renovating the pavilion and this was successfully completed over the last two years, a move that has given us a first class facility and the foundation to allow the club to progress to the next level. Rick has worked tirelessly at the club for many years and I am delighted to confirm that he is continuing in the Secretary role, so remains a central figure in the committee and decision making function going forward.
The focus in the short/medium term will now shift towards 3 new pillars, that we as a committee are determined to progress on each front:
- Winning on the field & best in class engagement – create a winning culture and supportive, fun environment across all ages and levels
- Player Development – become a centre of excellence for nurturing talent and offer first class coaching and a clear player development pathway for all
- Continued investment in facilities – offer the best cricket facilities on the South Coast for aspiring players.
In an attempt to keep this short and sweet I wont go into the detail here but please do reach out to me or any of the committee if you have any questions/observations. The 3 points above form a cycle and I will just emphasise point 3 in this note; To achieve progression and constant improvement we require continued investment, so I would like to take this opportunity to reach out to you all and if you or anybody you know would be interested in sponsoring any element of this journey please do just let us know. We have lots of sponsorship opportunities, varying in price and we will always aim to provide value to every individual sponsor.
As an aside, we are also looking for accommodation for this years overseas player Fraser Hay, so if anybody has any free space please just let us know and we can arrange something between us.
Finally, I would like to personally thank all of our current sponsors for their continued support. We will work towards putting on more sponsor events in the New Year as feedback on these in 2022 was positive. This will be the first of regular quarterly updates I will be providing alongside monthly updates From Ben Duggan (See Below) our first team skipper over the course of the Summer Season.
Thanks for reading and see you all soon!
All the Best,
Matt,
Chair Portsmouth Cricket Club
Nuggs from Duggs!
Hello everyone,
Just a quick note from me to say Happy New Year and I hope you are preparing yourselves for a strong 2023 season!
From the First XI point of view we had a good 2022, finishing in the top 4 of the league and having an outside chance of winning it. This year we intend to push on and be in the fight for the title right from the get go and so the pre-season training is already underway with the team formulating our goals and plans early.
What was great to see was the progression of some of the younger players coming through the ranks. Charlie Collins, Joe Smitherman and Billy Eales all did superbly, breaking into the first team last year, and I am hoping they play a key part in the upcoming season; we also have the likes of James Boorah, Lewis Ndhiro and Monty Goodfellow coming through the ranks and they are very much on our radar so the future looks very exciting! It is really important that the players coming into our senior teams fit seamlessly into our team plans & culture so we are working on how to improve this pathway in 2023.
Our performance in the fair play league continues to improve with us now entering the top 50% of clubs in the SPL. This is something we have really focussed on and as a leadership team; we feel this is vitally important as we want to harness a culture of playing hard but fair and offering the utmost respect to our opponents.
Finally, I look forward to seeing you pre-season. Keep up the hard work and the results will come!
Best wishes,
Duggs,
1st XI Captain