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

161 played in the event of inclement weather. Montrose in fact had played on an artificial wicket a great deal earlier than this – until their groundsman cut it to shreds with the gang-mowers! 1999 was a strange season at the level above the Strathmore Union. At long last some sort of agreement had been reached about a proper National League. In year 2000 there was going to be a Premier League, First Division and Second Division. This was welcome, and the argument was put that if Scotland was to take itself seriously as a cricketing country, there would have to be a national League and Scottish champions every year, even though it might mean a great deal of travelling. To determine who would be in which division in 2000, there would be three “Conferences” made up from teams in the Scottish Counties, the East of Scotland League and the Western Union. The top teams of each “Conference” would be in next year’s Premier League, the middle ones in the First Division and the bottom ones in the Second Division. All this meant that there would be no play-offs for the Strathmore Union teams to get a chance to join the Scottish National Cricket League at least for the foreseeable future, but what was even worse than that was the decision that the Scottish Cup would now be confined to SNCL clubs. This provoked the Strathmore Union into paroxysms of outrage saying that the SCU (Scottish Cricket Union) “forgets its duty to the wider caucus of Scottish Cricket”. One sympathises, but the Strathmore Union itself fought back. The inclusion of teams like Huntly and Inverurie in the north and the decision in 1999 to include St Modan’s of Bannockburn means that, geographically, at the turn of the century the Strathmore Union was now far removed from what it had been conceived of 70 years ago when men like Sievwright of Arbroath and Laing of Brechin and Melville of Strathmore introduced the competition for teams in the valley of Strathmore. There had even been a reluctance of teams like Strathmore, Arbroath, Brechin, Montrose, Meigle and Blairgowrie to countenance the admission of teams from Dundee, let alone Aberdeen! But tempora mutantur et nos mutamur cum illis. (Times change and we change with them). The expansion of the Union was surely a good and necessary thing, and the Union continued to provide a valid competition for an awful lot of cricketers in what was now a very wide and disparate geographical area. In 1999, for the first time there was a Premier Division