When we travel around Essex playing cricket we see all kinds of standards of pitches and some of them are pretty poor. But in our local area in Basildon the standard of the pitches is pretty good and at our local ground to us at Langdon Hills they do an amazing job. But recently they've done an incredible job on one of the lesser known grounds in the area.
I played on this pitch a couple of years ago and the pitch was okay as I remembered the outfield was dead rough with massive undulations that were tricky to negotiate if you're running whilst looking up in the sky. The actual wicket was average, but nothing to write home about. The whole set up at this pitch 'Holy Cross' was a bit dowdy and downbeat with a team that only played on Sundays, but for some reason, the council has decided that it's going to be used more and our youth games seem to be increasingly played at this venue. It may be that it means they're able to manage the two main pitches at Mopsies and 'The Rec' at Langdon Hills more easily and to improve those by having less games played on them.
So with the sudden increase in games at Holy Cross, they've turned their attention to the wicket there and our U15's played there for the 2nd time this week. What met us when we arrived was an amazing job on the wicket. Check out the images below...
The wicket played well with the seamers getting a nice 'Carry' with good bounce and the spinners got some turn off the wicket as well if they were spinning the ball and again with some nice bounce. An exceptionally good job I thought and so did most of the other that were there that played cricket at a higher standard than I do. So, well done Basildon Councils Ground staff who prepared this for the boys an excellent job!
