30/08/2026
🏏 AND SO, DEAR LISTENER… THAT IS THAT FOR 2026
Well now.
The final Saturday has been and gone... or, more accurately in this case, rained upon and gone, and somewhere in the Garw Valley another cricket season has quietly drawn to a close.
The covers can come off for the last time.
The boundary rope can be gathered in.
The sandwich trays, having performed sterling service throughout another summer, can be washed, stacked and returned to whichever mysterious cupboard they inhabit between September and April.
And twenty two sets of cricket whites, hopefully washed, although experience suggests we shouldn't be too optimistic, will be folded and placed lovingly at the back of chest-of-drawers across the valley...
There they shall remain... Forgotten.
Until approximately 10.47pm on the Friday before the first Saturday in May 2027, when somebody will suddenly remember they need them.
"Have you seen my cricket trousers?" And summer will begin again.
The bats will be sanded and oiled. The kit bags will be put away. The scorebook will close. The scorer's pencils, having somehow survived another season without suspension, disciplinary hearing or formal warning, can finally be laid down...
For now.
Because while the cricketers disappear into their winter hibernation, there is one group who most certainly do not.
The grounds team.
Oh, the grounds team.
While everyone else wanders off congratulating themselves on another season completed, these magnificent and largely unsung custodians of Darren Park will continue for weeks.
There will be scarifying.
There will be seeding.
There will be loam.
Good heavens, there will be loam.
There will be topsoil and machinery and conversations about grass that the rest of us couldn't possibly hope to understand.
All so that, come next May, twenty-two men can walk onto it, inspect the surface thoughtfully for several seconds and announce:
"Bit soft, is it?"
What a season it has been.
There have been glorious highs and a few fairly spectacular lows.
There have been victories, defeats, wickets, boundaries, catches, dropped catches that we shall diplomatically pretend never happened, and LBW appeals which could probably still be heard echoing around the valley several days later.
And there has been sunshine 😎
Extraordinary sunshine.☀️
For a considerable portion of the summer, Darren Park ceased to resemble a cricket ground in South Wales and began looking suspiciously like somewhere on the outskirts of Benidorm.
The beautiful green outfield turned a magnificent shade of burnt straw.
The ground cracked.
The players roasted.
And Welsh cricketers, having spent generations complaining about rain, discovered that they were equally capable of complaining about sunshine.
Remarkably, though, only two matches were lost entirely to the weather, with just one further game abandoned because of rain. Not bad at all for South Wales.
And amid all this madness, some rather splendid cricket was played.
Andy accumulated 453 runs across the campaign, including that wonderful 78 not out at Ponthir, carrying his bat for 40 overs while wickets disappeared around him. One can imagine him standing there at the end, surveying the wreckage like the last deckchair remaining upright after a particularly violent afternoon on Barry Island.
Then there was Dist.
Goodness me.
163 against Usk 3rds.
One hundred and sixty-three. An innings during which the rest of us gradually stopped wondering whether he might make a hundred and started wondering whether Usk had considered simply going home. And because apparently that wasn't quite enough, Dist also produced the bowling performance of the season:
4 wickets for 8 runs.
Against Usk again.
I suspect they're rather looking forward to not seeing him for a few months.
There was also the magnificent 135-run partnership between Lloyd and Andy against Friends Union — two men settling in, accumulating runs and causing increasingly concerned conversations amongst the opposition.
With the ball, Jimmy finished with 25 wickets, our leading wicket-taker for the season.
And Jimmy apparently decided taking wickets while bowling wasn't sufficient involvement, because he also finished with 14 fielding dismissals. Fourteen! Not to mention a glorious knock of 127!
Behind the stumps, Andy added another 8 wicketkeeping dismissals, completing a season in which he seems to have spent an unreasonable amount of time involved in absolutely everything.
But cricket, of course, is about rather more than numbers.
A scorebook can tell you who made the runs.
It can tell you who took the wickets.
It cannot tell you who drove halfway across South Wales because we were one short.
It cannot record the Thursday-night messages.
The last-minute availability.
The borrowed kit.
The aching knees.
The bruised and dislocated fingers.
Or the heroic individual who agreed to field at fine leg because absolutely nobody else wanted to.
And so we salute the 22 who represented Blaengarw & Coedely in 2026:
Flo.
Will.
Jeff.
Luca.
Dylan.
Mike.
Jack.
Nick.
Nik.
JBow.
Ed.
Luffy.
Hocking.
Gilly.
Dist.
Chris.
Shaun.
Andy.
Greg.
Jimmy.
Lloyd.
Elliot.
Some played many.
Some played a few.
Some scored runs.
Some took wickets.
Some will look back at their statistics and decide that perhaps their contribution was more spiritual.
But every one answered the call.
And without them, there simply isn't a cricket club.
The same must be said — perhaps even more loudly — for those wonderful people whose names never appear on Play-Cricket in the form of stats.
🌱 THE GROUND CREW
They arrive before the players.
They leave after them.
They cut, roll, mark, seed, scarify, repair, water and worry.
They somehow turn a patch of ground in a South Wales valley into somewhere we are privileged to play cricket every Saturday.
Even now, when we've finished, they haven't.
For weeks yet they'll be working on Darren Park, repairing the scars of another summer and preparing it for a season still eight months away.
Then there are our tea volunteers 🍽
The makers of sandwiches. 🥪
The cutters of cake. 🍰
The boilers of kettles. ☕️
The people who somehow look at a room containing twenty-two hungry cricketers and think:
"Yes. I can feed this."
Cricket likes to think it's a game built upon centuries of tradition... But anybody who has spent time around village cricket knows civilisation would collapse completely if someone forgot the tea.
So to every person who prepared the ground, made a sandwich, washed a plate, scored a book, put out a boundary rope, carried equipment, opened up, locked up, supported from the side or simply turned up:
THANK YOU!
Because eventually the scorecards disappear down the Play-Cricket archive.
The league table becomes last season's table.
The statistics become numbers.
But the stories remain.
The 163.
The 4 for 8.
The 453 runs.
The 25 wickets.
The partnership of 135.
The glorious victories.
The dreadful collapses.
The blazing sunshine.
The rain.
And all those Saturdays spent together.
So now Darren Park falls quiet.
The square can breathe.
The grass can recover.
The sandwich trays are safely away.
The whites are disappearing into drawers.
And somewhere, one last scorer's pencil rolls gently across a table... and comes to rest.
That's stumps on 2026.
Thank you, everyone.
Have a wonderful winter.
We'll see you all again on the first Saturday in May 2027.
When somebody will inevitably arrive at Darren Park at 12.15 and say:
"What time was meet?"
💙🩵🏏
