Who Do You Love?

Cricket starts at the weekend and for all of us as City United players, there has never been a more important summer. Much has been said within our ranks and undoubtedly across the cricket community in Tamworth about the players we’ve lost, especially in First Grade and some have even used the word embarrassment in connection with what lies ahead. The problem here is a lack longsight, ignorance of cricket history and those who take recent developments so deeply personal.

City United hasn’t been strong for some time. In an effort to change that, Life Member Tony Higgins, supported by the entrepreneurial Dan Mitchell started a program last year where targeted sponsorships bought quality players to City United around which we could structure a team with some experienced players and our own quality local juniors. This was/is a good program but it would only ever attend to the quality of the on field play. Unfortunately, it’s weakness would always be that it doesn’t engender loyalty and in the last month, we have seen the result of that.

City is at a crossroads but thinking the solution lies on the field or that we live and die by what first grade do, is a clear and obvious mistake to someone who has played, administered and loved the game for more than forty years. Yes, I was a club official at the Miranda Magpies when I was 12! Winning games will be nice but it won’t build spirit – it won’t move your heart. Adversity will. It’s when things are tough that the quality of men is shown and in Australia we have a rich tradition which proves that point from our early stockmen, through the Anzacs, those ragged Chocos who slowed the Japanese across the Owen Stanley and our many glorious moments of fighting back to back with mates in sport.

At our last Presentation Night, there were strong signs of that sort of ticker – Tony Higgins acceptance speech for one.

It will start will each of you forgetting about what is in it for you this weekend. Cricket is a team game. It’s about mates and it’s about partnership. You all need to start playing for your mates. If you get a start with the bat and get out, it should hurt but it should hurt because you let your mates down. Same with a dropped catch. If you can learn to play for your mates, amazing things can happen. Let me stress however, that the mates I am talking about are not just the other ten blokes with you at your ground. Your mates are every bloke who plays for City in every game. As such, when your game finishes, get yourself to another ground to support your mates, especially Firsts, who will be gritting their teeth for City every week.

This is a long term thing. Winning Saturdays this season will be welcome but we all have to set ourselves a five year goal of building this club from the ground up, based on a strong personal commitment to each other. I’d like the negative mentality to be banished because one thing I’ve learned in sport is that losers are losers because that’s the way they think. If you think like a winner, then long term, each individual result doesn’t matter. Let’s have the guts to change and the commitment to make it stick. Play for each other, not yourself and every Saturday night, cherish the good which has happened and don’t flog yourself with the bad.

I have recently celebrated the sixtieth birthday of a club which no longer exists. I met heroes who I had only seen in record books and players who won premierships in the early 1950’s. Yet no one talked of statistics or mulled over won or lost premierships. In that room full of forty old men, all that was talked about was mateship, character, acts of bravery and the joy that each had sharing our corner of the game with each other. If you want that for your old age, you’ll have to start to change now. Things haven’t changed that much in the game that a sense of family isn’t still the most important aspect of a champion club. Look at successful clubs in Tamworth and despite your prejudices, you have to admit, they are mostly the “all for one and one for all” type.

These are simple things, new habits if you like. Do you have guts to change and in the process build indelible memories?