Brighouse survive Bradford League EGM vote

11:26pm Thursday 13th November 2008

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Brighouse have retained their membership of the JCT600 Bradford League.

The Russell Way club survived a vote at an extraordinary general meeting last night “by a substantial majority”.

The league decided on the egm after several issues were highlighted during an horrendous season for Brighouse in 2008.

But the efforts of Brig-house’s cricket chairman Glyn Owen, who sent letters to all the other clubs in the Bradford League, bore some late fruit.

He addressed the league meeting to explain the circumstances behind their difficult campaign and said: “We have been bitten once and I can assure you that it won’t happen again.

“We haven’t tried to hoodwink the league in any of our dealings but we do feel that we have been naive.

“We inherited debts of £6,000 and we did not have the finances to compete at Bradford League First Div-ision level and we were approached by a local businessman and a an ECB (England and Wales Crick-et Board) coach.

“But we were let down. Our senior committee and junior commitee were run as separate entities and we feel the way forward is for these to merge and that should happen within the next two weeks.

“Our junior committee is 12 strong and eight of those have lads who are playing for our under-17s.

“We are very well respected within the Heavy Woollen Junior League, but I also want Brighouse to become more of a community club.

“Players came from Blackpool to play for us and from the North East but they didn’t care about the club when they left. We want to become more like Lightcliffe.”

Bradford & Bingley representative David Markham wanted some indication as to how successful player recruitment is at Brig-house, and Owen said: “We probably had the worst overseas player in the history of the league but players have been reluctant to join us until they knew what our situation was.

“We have lost one or two players because of this but if the vote goes our way we can put out a side that is going to be competitive.”