...all their NCU peers should set aside club loyalties and support them!
Winning the Irish Senior Cup may have slipped down the pecking order of NCU clubs a few years ago, but the top teams now set it as a priority if they are to be rated a genuine premier team. Sadly, the NCU clubs have performed abominably for over a decade, and we have to go back to 2001 to find our last finalist in Cliftonville, and to 1995 to acknowledge our last winner in North Down. That’s a dreadful record for a union that dominated the competition for the first decade, and that has produced a string of outstanding representative players since, but shown no Irish Senior Cup success.
Waringstown’s win over the Hills in the quarter-finals highlighted their home-grown talent over the multi-cultures of the some clubs in the modern era, but this is a side issue when it comes to playing the game on the field. There are some people who lose the plot every time a team achieves success because of professionalism or nationality, but they need to set aside their hobbyhorse and move on. Unfortunately a small number of so-called cricket ‘experts’ in the Dublin area have gotten themselves into a ‘stu’ over cricket in the north, and their petty barbs and insults deserve nothing more than to be ignored, as they have no credence and show a distinct lack of integrity and respect. We may have a “northern plonker” or two in our society, but they don’t grace our cricket fields, and if that needs to be said then it is a sad reflection on the scribe who penned the insult. What we certainly need to do as a union is to let our cricket do the talking, and to rally round the Waringstown club as our last representative, and give them the support they deserve in the semi-final, and hopefully in the final.
In the last two years North-West champions Donemana reached two Irish Senior Cup finals and were beaten both times by better Leinster clubs on the day. But what Donemana inadvertently did on each occasion was unite the North-West cricket family as one in their quest for glory. That in itself was quite an achievement for a region where passions run high, and differences go back generations. Many North-West neutrals attended both games, and there were even some NCU cricketers supporting the northern interest.
Cricket is still only a game, and there’s nothing wrong with supporting your own, but in much the same way that club bias in football is set aside for the national interest, the same applies to the European Champions League when a national representative is still in the frame in the final stages. Waringstown are the NCU’s provincial representatives, and a great advertisement for home-grown talent and cricket excellence.
Let’s get behind them against Merrion, and bring back some credibility to our club scene.
Clarence Hiles
Editor
