Exclusive: Words With Cricket Vice-Pres

In the next installment in a series of exclusive interviews by The Tab Sports Team, Sam Dean spoke to the Vice-President of the Men’s Cricket team, Alastair Mavor, about how administrative mistakes from BUCS cost them promotion last year, their hopes for the upcoming season, including Varsity, and of course,  some of the bizarre rituals from team socials and initiations.

Tab: Hi Alastair, thanks for talking to us. How did last season go for the Cricket Club?

Alastair: No worries. We had a really good season at the club. We have 4 teams and both the 1^st XI and the 3^rd XI got promoted, while both the 2nds and 4ths finished second in their league.

Really annoyingly, because of all the wet weather in April, lots of other University sides weren’t able to reschedule their games in the week before exams so BUCS ended up scrapping all promotion and relegation.

This meant that, despite having a really good season, we ended up with absolutely nothing to show for it. We’re still in exactly the same place as we were this time last year and will have to do it all again.

Pretty gutting then. So are you targeting a repeat performance this year then?

Yeah, we’re aiming to get two or three of the sides promoted – that would be another good result. Also, the game against Trent is always a big thing for the cricket, especially because it’s the last competition of the Varsity series – often it will come down to 7-7 between us and Trent and the cricket decides who wins the whole thing.

Would you say that the season is quite geared towards Varsity then if it can decide the whole thing?

To be honest, if we run the club well and the Easter pre-season goes well along with winter training, then Varsity tends to take care of itself. It’s normally the last game of the summer so at the moment we’re not really thinking about the specifics of it but this year we’re aiming to see if we can get the match at Trent Bridge and play a 20/20 in the evening.  We should be able to get around 3000 Notts students down there so it’ll hopefully be a good atmosphere with lots of beer-drinking and abuse/banter being shouted at the Trent players!

In terms of preparation for the upcoming season, have you got the squads selected and ready?

Well we haven’t trained yet – we’ve just had the Freshers trials, where we culled 150 trialists down to about 40. A number of Freshers came to trials really fancying themselves but ended up being pretty awful, which was obviously very funny for us to watch. Fortunately, there were some decent players who turned up too, so the squads from last year have been strengthened.

Although the season hasn’t officially begun yet, I think a lot of the Notts students will have noticed that the team socials have!

Haha yes, the socials have begun in earnest. We haven’t “welcomed” the freshers officially yet, that takes place later in the year, but this Wednesday was the first social that the freshers were included on and it was a pretty wild one.

We’ve adopted something called the snail: we normally hit a few bars as a club then make our way to Crisis and there are several main roads which need crossing. The other night, we had about 50 lads out and we all got down on our hands and knees doing snail impressions across the road – we must have held up the traffic by about 5 minutes.

Unfortunately my ‘snail tekkers’ had been rather torn apart in the subsequent video analysis, so I have work to do! In terms of ‘initiating’ the new boys, you always hear of some horror stories from these nights but hopefully we avoid all that and end up having a great time as a group: you do end up being a lot closer for it.

Aside from directing human- snail traffic, what’s your role within the Club?

As vice-president I’m quite heavily involved in terms of running the club this year and it really helps that we’ve got a good committee. We’re currently trying to organise a tour to Sri Lanka in the summer – I’m sure there’ll be a lot of stories to tell from that!