Sheffield Cricket Lovers' Year Book 2014

32 I can tell you exactly where I was when Cricket Yorkshire was born. My wife and I were walking up the steep incline on Dallam Road in Shipley, a stone’s throw away from the Leeds Liverpool Canal and the welcome waft of freshly baked bread at Hughes on Hirst Lane. The notion of running my own cricket-related business, so often dismissed, suddenly became exciting, challenging, slightly terrifying but crucially of all, possible, when simply asked by my better half: Why Not? Cricket journalism is in my blood; something I’ve been doing for twenty years; writing about clubs, leagues and professionals across six counties. Once you decide to forge your own path, it’s amazing where momentum can take you. The format came first; it was going to be a cricket magazine distributed to clubhouses all around Yorkshire on a Saturday afternoon so cricketers could read in their whites while waiting to go into bat. Logistics, distribution costs and the sheer scale of Yorkshire put paid to that for now. Creating a cricket website instead was the logical alternative as a platform and being a technology geek with a background of setting up websites and a career in both publishing and digital worlds seemed to tick all the boxes. Carving a niche in cricket journalism remains at the heart of everything I try to do. The internet is awash with blogs, websites and writers all vying for your attention and time. I wanted Cricket Yorkshire to be distinctive in some way so the decision to combine professional and amateur coverage in the county was a natural move. But that wasn’t enough. There are some superb cricket writers, newspapers and websites covering the game in Yorkshire and competing directly with them made little sense. Instead, Cricket Yorkshire’s focus is all on interviews, opinion and debate; no news, results or statistics. If there’s one thing we can all be certain of, it’s that there will never be a shortage of stories, colourful characters and tales from the boundary across Yorkshire cricket. Perhaps the greatest conundrum is picking what to concentrate on given the astonishing volume of cricket played each and every season. It has been a whirlwind three or so years; beginning with interviews with Dickie Bird about his Foundation and sitting down with Ryan Sidebottom in the Indoor Cricket Centre, soon after he’d re-joined the county. Since then, interviews with most of the Yorkshire first eleven squad, hundreds of clubs and a diverse range of personalities have whistled by, quicker than a Moin Ashraf bouncer. Sir Michael Parkinson, Harry Gration, Steve Kirby…all with their own intelligent perspective of the game. In the past year, highlights have included talking to Matt Wood about his Yorkshire career and role with the Professional Cricketers Association and discussing medium pace with author Harry Pearson. From the Bradford University student who signed for Delhi Daredevils to why a yorker is a yorker or Andrew Hodd’s superstitions, there are entertaining stories at every turn. Running a cricket website, there is always the risk that you could spend your life staring at a screen, communicating by email and operating in a world defined by pixels and PDFs. With that in mind, the summer of 2013 represented the chance to pack up the digital camera, clamber on a train and venture out on a tour of Yorkshire cricket clubs. The Journey of CricketYorkshire… By JOHN FULLER twitter: @scloverssociety