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

158 to immigration regulations meant that a more structured approach to controlling who played in the Union was overdue. For Season 1997, clubs were to be allowed to register one professional and not more than one ‘Overseas Amateur’ and that OA, as they were designated, had to be under the age of 24 on 31st August in the relevant season. The regulations governing Professionals and Overseas Amateurs went from one paragraph of nine lines of text in the Handbook of 1996 to five Clauses and Sub- Clauses taking up no fewer than forty nine lines (or a page and a half) in the 1997 edition! 1997 saw Stoneywood-Dyce repeat their success of 1996, this time by a far more comfortable margin. Andy Bee was now playing as an Amateur, and Steve Knox was the Professional. They came numbers 1 and 2 in the Union Batting Averages, Bee topping the pile with a phenomenal 97.00. Bob Lamb topped the Bowling Averages with an Average of 11.12. Dundee High School came a distant 2nd but hadmore than ample consolation when they won the 2nd XI Championship and both the Three Counties and the Two Counties Cups. The trophies that year were presented by Bob Taylor, Derbyshire and England’s wicket keeper in the early 1980s, and generally agreed to be one of the best of the lot. This year Stoneywood-Dyce won the play-off, and they left to join the National League with the best wishes of the Strathmore Union. In the play-off they defeated Cupar who had won the East League that year. Cupar then applied to join the Strathmore Union, and were immediately accepted. One wonders why Cupar had not applied to join before, because they were as geographically close to most grounds in the Strathmore Union (Aberdeen ones excepted) as the Edinburgh grounds of the East League which they had joined as far back as 1961. This decision illustrated several things. One was that the Strathmore Union was now nothing other than a feeder League for the National League, and the other was that in the opinion of Cupar at least, the Strathmore Union was a better bet than the East League now that it had been shorn of teams like Grange, Carlton and Heriots. Sadly, things did not work out well in the long term for Cupar and they would eventually go the same way as Kirkcaldy who went to the wall this very year. A landmark was reached in 1997 when Bill Scott (“Scotty”) of Meigle became the first amateur batsmen to reach 10,000 runs in the Strathmore Union. This made him second only to Nigel Hazel, who of course was a