Yet another village cricket team finds itself on an impossibly sticky wicket

Once – and we shall return to the theme – every half-hearted hamlet seemed to have its own yeoman cricket team, drawn chiefly from around the doors.

Now clubs and leagues collapse like tail-end Charlies on a treacle track. Times change. Only last night, Seaham Harbour – bigger fish, 150 years old, North East Premier League – were holding a sink-or-swim extraordinary general meeting.

“We’ve tried and we’ve better tried, says Lands chairman Carroll Simpson, who first played for the club 61 years ago and kept wicket when he was 66.

“It’s not for want of money, of facilities or equipment. It’s about getting people, especially young uns, to play cricket.”

Until two years ago, Lands fielded two teams. Last summer the remaining side finished third in the Darlington and District League top division and won the Egglestone Cup. Come next month, they’d simply have been unable to muster 11 players.

“Simon Sowerby, our secretary, put something out – is it Facebook you call it? – asking who’d be prepared to commit for the season,” says Carroll.

“I think he got six or seven. We might have just about managed with nine, picked up a couple of stragglers on a Saturday morning, but not seven. It’s desperately, desperately disappointing.”

So first we pitch up at the hillside ground near Cockfield Fell – Carroll, Donny Metcalfe who played for Lands when most of them just walked down that single street to get there, Tony Elliott from whom the ground is held on a 999-year lease.

Just a hunch, understand, but Tony may be the only landlord who substantially sponsors his tenants.

The pavilion’s humble but well maintained – “make someone a lovely holiday home,” says Carroll – mid-March and still snow on the boundary.

In the pavilion window a sign warns potential thieves that they use smart water – goodness knows there’s enough of the dullard, diluvian sort about – while on the wall hang plaques acknowledging support from the Banks Group and the National Lottery.

Carroll starts up the tractor while he’s there – just to keep it ticking over, he says – the trio pose for a photograph, leaning over the gate. Appropriately, there seems something of Last of the Summer Wine about it.

“Folk have been very good to us and I feel like I’m letting them down,” says Carroll. “I’ve lost sleep about it, I can’t stop thinking about it. We’re letting down the players, the people who pay £20 to sponsor the match ball, the two or three who come to watch us. Here’s so much history here.”

It was the cricket club of the Littles and the Wardles, the Dowsons, the Armstrongs and the Elliotts, of stalwart men like Gilbert Denham, after whom a league trophy is still named, of Bob Tookey who won football honours with Evenwood Town and Alan Simpson who’d tirelessly reel off 23 successive overs and whose ashes are buried beneath his run-up.

England footballer David Thomas played cricket for Lands, so did future Durham captain Neil Riddell and Essex man Gordon Barker, when he had a milk round in West Auckland.

Now it looks like the final over has been called. “Aye,” says Donny Metcalfe, “us an how many more?”

Then up to Carroll’s place, at Butterknowle a couple of miles away, where a morning fire bright blazes and Joan Simpson has sumptuously been baking.

They day previously they’d hosted a Lent lunch for Lynesack church: Lent may not be quite so frugal around Lynesack.

Carroll produces a splendid photograph of the Lands cup winning team of 1914 – “the dress code may not have been so strict in those days” – and a copy of the South West Durham Cricket League handbook from 1927.

Lands were joined in the 12-member league by village teams like Binchester and Fir Tree, Wolsingham, West Auckland and Wham. Wham, barely a mile from Lands, may barely have been home to 11 able-bodied adults but still they turned out a team.

“The rules don’t seem to have changed much in all those years,” muses Carroll. “Only the fines have got bigger.”

Annual subscription was £1, an additional half guinea levied as a guarantee against not paying fines – five shillings and two points deducted for breaking the major rules, half-a-crown for lesser offences.

Players who’d appeared in “senior” leagues had first to gain permission before appearing in the South West Durham. “Senior” leagues included the North-West Durham and the Mid-Durham, each with two divisions. They’re long gone, too.

Usually with connotations of hope and glory – or to attend harvest festival at the little Methodist chapel, now also closed – the column has been up to Lands quite a bit over the years.

In January 2013 we’d yomped through the snow to the cricket club’s annual meeting, a dozen or so huddled around two overworked village hall heaters, observed in passing that it was a good night not to be a sheep.

Report of the last season? “Minging,” said John Little, the skipper.

Back then they still had two teams, a bit worried about the seconds but never fearing for the firsts. The bank statement revealed a balance of £4,011.22p which – since the national economy seemed as parlous as the state of village cricket – had amassed annual interest of 23p.

So what’s to blame? Too early a start, too late a finish – “We’ve had lads just go home at half past five” – alcohol, women, Sky TV, greener pastures, overlapping football, working wives (“someone has to stop at home and look after the kids”), too much else to do.

“Last time Durham hosted a Test match we had six players went and watched it on the Saturday,” Carroll recalls. “Why couldn’t they have gone on the Sunday? Where’s the commitment?

“We’ve had people say they’ll play for us if we could guarantee 11 men, but how can you do that if people won’t commit?” Carroll, 78, is also groundsman – “we’ve ten wickets, which is good” – vows meticulously to maintain field and facilities for the coming summer.

“You have to keep on trying, to keep on hoping. Who knows who might turn up to help us but we know there are plenty of others in a similar boat. Right now it’s not looking very hopeful, is it?”