St Annes Cricket Club
Captain: Andy Kellett, Professional: Toby Bulcock, Last Season finished 11th
St Annes go into the 2013 campaign looking to improve on a dissapointing 2012 season where they finished 11th in the league.
The team from Vernon Road have made alot of changes, most notably the recruitment of Lukman Vahaluwala from Preston, as well as the signing of Toby Bulcock as Club Professional.
Bringing in Vahaluwala and Bulcock may prove invaluable, especially after the departures of both Atiq Uz Zaman and Dinuka Hettiarachchi.
Other additions include Ben Dowling,Jordan Hughes,Jordan Relph and Kevin Reid.
The club have lost the services of Duncan Whalley who as retired and Peter Cummings.
St Annes open their campaign with a home game against Netherfield.
Captains View
"After a number of years excellent service we decided to change our Professional and Coach for 2013.
Dinuk and Atiq were fantastic servants to the club but we are really pleased that we have been able to replace them with the quality of Toby and Lukman.
Toby is a fine player and will give us freshness and enthusiasm that we were missing at times last year and Lukman is a proven quality player.
Importantly for us, both Toby and Lukman are all-rounders and this was important to us when seeking replacements for Dinuk and Atiq.
We have also lost Duncan Whalley who will be impossible to replace. Dunc has been the best batting wicket-keeper in the league for a number of years now and it's a real shame he has decided to retire.
Callum Jones who played in the 1st team as a batsman last year will replace Dunc, Callum is young but is a talented keeper who has experience of keeping in the Bradford League. This is an excellent opportunity for Callum and I'm sure he will have a great year.
We have added to our squad with the signings of Ben Dowling, Jordan Hughes, Jordan Relph and Kevin Reid.
We are hoping that these new signings will give us extra depth and create competition for places in the 1st and 2nd teams.
Nathan Armstrong who missed the whole of 2012 with a knee injury is also now fit and is a key player for us.
Last year was a very poor year and we were all very disappointed with the way things went.
We are looking for significant improvement this year. We are looking for our new players to make an impact but it's also a big year for our existing young players.
Players such as Matt Grindley, Nathan Bolus, Nanthesh Kiruparan, Jake Sunderland and Ben Willis have done pretty well so far but we are looking for them to have big years this year as they now have the experience along with their talent to do this.
Younger players such as Matt Taaffe and Mitch Bolus also gained valuable experience last year and will be hoping to kick on this year.
We start training on 5th March and have 3 pre season games against Ramsbottom, Fleetwood and Rawdon arranged and we're all looking forward to the season."
