Strathmore Cricket Union: the first 90 years a history 1928-2018

152 foreign language in Scottish schools. It failed lamentably. It was also the summer in which Scotland did reasonably well (but still failed) in the football European Championship in Sweden. Cricket in the Strathmore Union continued, and once again the honours were passed around with this year Mannofield winning the First Division Championship beating Dundee High School FP into second place with Brechinmaking an agreeable revival and coming in 3rd. Arbroath 2nd XI had a good season winning the Championship and also the Two Counties Cup, while the Aberdeen Cricket Association lifted the Three Counties Cup. Perthshire and Arbroath shared the Under 18 trophy. Dundee High School FP did well in the individual awards with Bruce Dyer winning the Batting Average award and Lindsay Ancell the Bowling. The weather was not quite as good as it had been the past few years, and two important decisions were taken. One was the admission of Inverurie who would be an asset to the Union in years to come, and the other was the decision to try, for the first time, neutral Umpires in at least some games. Previously it had traditionally been club Umpires, but the 1993 yearbook carried an advertisement for neutral Umpires at the rate of £10 per game plus 10p per mile travelling expenses. The innovation wasn’t universally welcomed. There was still a feeling, particularly in the lower echelons where the batting side tended to supply both umpires for their own innings that this at least guaranteed “fair cheating all-round” as one well-known skipper liked to put it! 1992 was also the season in which Strathmore County (as they called themselves) reached the final of the Scottish Cup, but sadly the final against Grange could not be played because of bad weather. They were declared joint champions, although many people felt that a final could have been played at the start of the following season. Or even that a bowl-out might have been tried. 1993 did indeed show that neutral Umpires were a great success, although the problem was that there weren’t very many of them with only Fergie Reid, Gus Thomson and Bill Barclay doing the job on a regular basis. It would be almost another 20 years before a full rota of umpires could be deployed regularly for top Division matches. 1993 also proved to be an exciting season with the destiny of the championship going all the way to the wire. Dundee HSFP held off a determined challenge from Brechin who needed to win the game at Brechin on the last day of the season, but