Falmouth Cricket Club have had a stalled start to this season, with bad weather meaning their first two fixtures have not been played.

 

The wet spring weather has led to terrible ground conditions across Cornwall. As a result of this, the Cornish Cricket League (CCL) rescheduled the entire first set of Cornish Premier League fixtures to the August bank-holiday Monday.

 

To make matters worse, Falmouth’s following game against Werrington was rained off, meaning they are yet to play a game.

 

Falmouth haven’t had chance to fire up the scoreboard at their ground, the Hine Downing Oval.

 

Falmouth Cricket Captain, Jamie Stephens, said: “It’s not been the best preparation because everyone’s been itching to go. But in a way it gives us a bit more time to get together as a group in training, before we start to iron out any problems the team may have.”

 

“It is frustrating yeah, I think everyone just wants to play now. Everyone wants to get going and just play a bit of cricket, so yeah it is frustrating in that way.”

 

However, Stephens was understanding of the decision, and said it was definitely the right decision. He said: “Our ground is completely waterlogged. We haven’t been able to get any machinery onto the ground or the square. It’s definitely the right decision. “

 

At a glance the pitch looks fine, but the pitch conditions are more akin to winter time than late spring

 

Media officer for the Cornwall Cricket league, Mike Weeks, said: “the league decided to do a survey of all the clubs to see what their opinion was, and it showed around 70% of the clubs thought it was a good idea. They were all struggling to get their grounds ready.”

 

“There’s a league rule that says games can’t be rescheduled in the Premier League, so taking that into consideration, the only fair way would be to move the whole block rather than having the individual games being moved.”

 

However, the weather postponements aren’t the only issues that the league has faced. Hayle and Helston were forced to withdraw from the league after the league attempted to expand to 12 teams from 10.

 

Stephens said: “For me the expansion shouldn’t have happened. From my point of view there aren’t enough proper Premier League players, of good enough quality, to justify 12 teams across Cornwall being in the Premier Division.”

 

“The thing is, now with the three teams coming up, we do have more opportunities to probably play teams weaker than us, so from our point of view we’re expecting to finish a little bit higher than we did last year.”

 

Falmouth’s next game is Grampound away.