The last ball of the 2026 season has now been bowled and, as always, it seems slightly ridiculous that we’re already here. It doesn’t seem five minutes ago that we were getting everything ready for April.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit over the last few days about how you actually measure whether a cricket club has had a successful year.

The league tables are obviously part of it. They matter and we want to win cricket matches.

But they’re not the only measure.

Last year I spoke a lot about rebuilding foundations. In truth, when we started this two years ago I saw that first year almost as a salvation job. The club needed stabilising and it needed doing fairly quickly.

We managed that much faster than I expected.

Coming into this year, being realistic, I thought if we could get to September and see the beginnings of some genuine forward momentum then we’d have had another successful year.

We’ve done considerably more than that.

The momentum hasn’t really stopped all summer and in some areas the club has moved forward far quicker than I imagined it would.

That’s probably the biggest thing I take from 2026.

We’re not there. Nowhere near it.

But we’re moving.

And there is an awful lot happening at this cricket club to be positive about.

On the field

Let’s deal with the obvious bit first.

Our senior league results have been underwhelming this year.

The 1st XI finished 5th in Division One with nine wins from 18 league games, the 2nd XI finished 7th in Division Six and unfortunately both our 3rd and 4th XIs will drop down a division.

We’d have liked better and there’s no point pretending otherwise.

We want all four teams competing further up their respective divisions and that’s something we’ll be working hard on.

There are some challenges around the current age profile of our senior cricket. We have a really important group of experienced players and a large group of youngsters coming through underneath them, but there’s a pretty obvious gap between the two, particularly around that 18–25 age group.

That’s going to take time to work through.

Of course we’d like to add some new adult players over the winter, but recruitment for the sake of recruitment isn’t the answer either.

The best recruitment we can do is continue making SOSEMTCC a club that good people and good cricketers want to be part of.

If we keep improving the cricket, the atmosphere around the club, the facilities and the pathway underneath it, people will notice. I think they already are.

That kind of growth doesn’t necessarily happen overnight, and that’s fine. We’d rather continue building properly and sustainably, with people who want to be part of the club rather than simply play for one of its teams.

Youth cricket

There is loads to be positive about here.

Our U11s completed ten matches and won seven of them and the U13s won five of their eight completed games.

The U15 results were obviously much tougher, but the numbers don’t really tell the story of their season.

We simply haven’t had enough qualifying U15 players this year, which has meant a number of our U13s stepping up week after week and playing against older, bigger and more experienced players.

They could quite easily have moaned about that or found it intimidating.

They didn’t.

They just got on with it and performed admirably every time they were asked. I think they’ll be much better cricketers for those experiences as they get older as well.

We’ve also started seeing more and more of our youngsters getting opportunities in adult cricket and making genuine contributions when they do.

That’s exactly what we want.

We’ve built a really healthy base at the younger end of the club. The challenge now is keeping that connected all the way through. U11s becoming U13s, U13s becoming U15s and eventually those youngsters becoming adult cricketers at SOSEMTCC.

Another big highlight was hosting our U11 and U13 six-a-side tournaments at Southchurch Park again for the second year running.

Both were brilliant days. Loads of cricket, visiting clubs, parents and families around the ground, BBQ going, clubhouse busy. They’re quickly becoming proper dates in our youth calendar and exactly the sort of thing we want happening here.

None of this happens by itself.

Jodie Blackman, managing the U11s, and Paul Elton, managing the U13s, have both put an enormous amount into their teams throughout the year.

Likewise Conor Enderby, Sugadhev Sriramajegan, Santosh and Waino have put countless hours into coaching and developing our youngsters, alongside plenty of other people who have helped at different times.

Thank you to all of them.

The youngsters are ultimately everything to the long-term future of this club and I know I bang on about them.

But we’re not only trying to teach them cricket.

We’re also showing them what being part of a cricket club looks like.

Hopefully when it’s their turn to look after this place one day, we’ve left them a decent blueprint to work from.

Girls and women’s cricket

This is probably the part of the club that has surprised me most this year.

Not because I didn’t think it could work, but because of how quickly it has grown.

We’ve had more than 30 girls training at times on Friday evenings this summer and there are now 17 people in our women’s cricket group.

The Sirens have started playing matches and won one of their three recorded games this year, and our first Ladies’ Day at Southchurch Park was another massive step forward.

A couple of years ago none of that existed in anything like the form it does now.

Now you can stand outside the clubhouse on a Friday evening and see girls training, women training, youth cricket going on, parents around the clubhouse and kids everywhere.

It’s probably one of the clearest examples of how much the club has changed in a relatively short period of time.

Scott Elliott deserves a particular thank you here for the huge amount of time and energy he’s put into helping this whole section grow, alongside everyone else who has coached, organised, found fixtures, helped on Fridays or encouraged people to get involved.

Again, we’re only getting started.

The next step is getting our girls and women playing more regular competitive cricket while continuing to grow the numbers underneath them.

But considering where we were not very long ago, this has been a fantastic year for that whole section of the club.

More cricket and more life around the club

Across all of our teams we’ve played well over 100 recorded matches this year.

Four Saturday sides, Sunday cricket, midweek cricket, youth cricket, girls and women, Cricket Week and everything else we’ve managed to squeeze into the summer.

I’m particularly pleased that Sunday cricket has started finding a place again.

Not every game has to be about league points.

There’s still a huge amount of value in younger and older players sharing a side, playing against touring or social teams, families around the ground and everybody ending up back at the clubhouse afterwards.

Cricket Week was another huge positive and showed the club at its best at various points. Old faces coming back, current players, youngsters, families, Chairman’s Day, our first Ladies’ Day and plenty happening around the clubhouse throughout the week.

Those things matter.

In fact, one of the biggest changes over the last couple of years is probably that the club simply feels more alive.

Friday nights have become particularly busy. We’ve had more events, more families around, more former members coming back and generally more people spending time at Southchurch Park.

The bar figures tell some of that story as well.

Last year our bar turnover was around £19,000.

This year we’ve gone past £30,000.

That’s a huge increase in twelve months and obviously makes an enormous difference to the financial health of the club and what we’re eventually able to put back into it.

A huge amount of credit for that goes to Shri Shah, in his first year taking control of the bar, and the wonderful Maddy, who has become such a regular and popular face behind it this year.

But the number itself isn’t really the bit that excites me most.

It’s what sits behind it.

People are using the clubhouse more.

Parents are having a drink while their children train. Events are busier. Friday nights have become a genuine club night and there is simply more life around the place.

That’s the stuff that creates a cricket club rather than simply a collection of cricket teams.

Saturday evenings are probably one area where we can still do a little better.

I completely understand that cricket already takes up most of people’s Saturday and everyone has families and lives outside the club. The days where absolutely everybody automatically stayed until closing time probably aren’t coming back.

Nor do they need to.

But when you can, have that extra drink. Stay around for a little while after the game. Come back after an away match occasionally. Watch the end of another team’s game.

Those couple of hours are often where different teams get to know each other and younger players get to know the older ones.

It doesn’t need to be every week.

Just when you can.

What kind of club are we trying to build?

I’ve used the word culture plenty over the last couple of years and I’m sure I’ll continue to.

Because ultimately that’s probably the biggest thing we’re trying to change.

For a long time there was perhaps a bit of a feeling that you paid your membership, the club provided your cricket and somebody somewhere dealt with everything else.

I don’t think that’s how the best cricket clubs work.

The members are the club.

And I think we’re slowly beginning to see more of that.

People helping with coaching. Someone jumping on the BBQ because it’s busy. Parents helping set things up. Senior players watching some youth cricket. Former members coming back. Different sections of the club mixing more than they used to.

None of those things sound particularly dramatic on their own.

Put hundreds of them together over a season and suddenly the place feels different.

That’s culture.

It’s changing slowly and naturally and, most importantly, it still feels like us.

There is still plenty we can do better and one of the slightly strange problems we’ve created is that some parts of the club are now beginning to grow faster than the number of people we have helping to run them.

That’s a fantastic problem to have.

I’d much rather be wondering how we find enough people to coach 30 girls than wondering how we persuade five girls to turn up.

But it does mean we’re going to need more help.

My ideal for this has always been very simple:

A small amount done by many means a large amount doesn’t need to be done by the few.

Nobody needs to give their life to the cricket club.

An hour coaching occasionally. Scoring a game. Helping at an event. Umpiring. Doing a bit on the BBQ. Taking responsibility for one small job.

It all counts.

And as we grow, there will be more opportunities for people to take ownership of little bits of the club and make them their own.

That’s how I think we increase our capacity without losing what we’re building.

Southchurch Park and what comes next

One area I want to be a little more open about is facilities, because there’s quite a lot happening behind the scenes that most members probably haven’t heard much about yet.

We’ve been looking seriously at what Southchurch Park needs if the club continues growing in the way it has been.

There are two projects in particular.

The first is the area at the front of the pavilion, where we want to infill underneath the veranda to create proper storage bays.

We’ve had what I’d describe as a soft yes from the council to the principle of what we’re trying to do.

It’s turned out to be slightly more complicated than we’d originally hoped because it needs to go through the proper planning process, with the associated costs, but importantly the idea itself hasn’t been knocked back.

So we’re going to keep pushing that forward and working through the process.

The much bigger project is permanent static nets at Southchurch Park.

I want to be very clear about where we are with that because I don’t want anyone thinking we’ve suddenly got permission and they’ll be appearing this winter.

We’re still relatively early in the process.

We’ve started the conversations with the council, we’ve been working on putting a proper proposal together and we’re now getting close to being able to submit that. We’ve also gained the backing of our local MP Bayo Alaba, which is another useful step in demonstrating the wider community benefit of what we’re trying to achieve.

If we can get the necessary permissions though, that’s really only the beginning.

Proper permanent nets will be a major project and a significant cost to the club. Probably bigger than anything we’ve attempted for a long time.

And if we’re going to make it happen, this genuinely will need to become a club-wide effort.

We’ll obviously need to raise a substantial amount of money and hopefully our members will support that where they’re able to.

But money isn’t the only thing we’re going to need.

There will almost certainly be people within the club who have professional skills or experience that could help us.

Maybe you’ve dealt with grant applications before. Maybe you have fundraising experience. Perhaps your work gives you knowledge that could be useful. Maybe you know a local business owner who might want to support what we’re doing, an employer with a community fund, or somebody else who might want to invest in the vision.

We don’t know where all those opportunities are.

That’s why we need everybody involved.

It will take time, money, contacts, ideas, professional knowledge and probably a fair bit of persistence.

It won’t be easy.

But imagine what it would mean.

Proper training facilities being used by our senior players, our youngsters, our girls and women and eventually generations of SOSEMTCC players who aren’t even members yet.

That’s exactly the sort of thing I think a cricket club should be trying to create.

And if we eventually pull it off, I want it to be something we can all look at and know that the club made it happen together.

There will be much more about this as things develop, but I wanted everybody to understand where we actually are rather than suddenly hearing about it much further down the line.

Where are we now?

When I look back at the last two years, we’re comfortably ahead of where I thought we’d be.

Year one was really about stabilising the club and rebuilding the foundations.

This year I hoped we’d begin to see some momentum.

Instead we’ve pretty much spent the entire year building it.

We’ve had underwhelming senior results and we absolutely want to improve those.

But alongside that we’ve put four Saturday teams out throughout another season, played well over 100 games, seen strong U11 and U13 seasons, watched younger players beginning to move into adult cricket, grown girls’ cricket beyond what we expected, got a women’s team playing matches, brought back more Sunday cricket, held two youth tournaments, had another brilliant Cricket Week, held our first Ladies’ Day, seen the clubhouse getting busier, pushed the bar beyond £30,000 and started having serious conversations about improving the facilities at Southchurch Park.

That’s a pretty positive year.

And we’re allowed to say that.

Plenty of people both inside and outside the club have told us this year that we should be proud of what’s happening here.

They’re right. We should be.

But we’re also only two years into something I think will take the best part of a decade to really achieve.

And if anything, we’re probably more energised about where we can take this next than we’ve been at any point so far.

In a lot of ways the first couple of years were about getting the club itself right. Stabilising things, making us more sustainable financially, getting the membership working better, growing the different sections, improving how we operate and trying to create the sort of culture we want around the place.

None of that work stops.

We can’t allow it to.

But I do think we’re now reaching the point where we can start turning more of our attention back towards the cricket itself.

We want to become more competitive again.

Not just the 1st XI. Across all four Saturday sides.

And that work has already started.

We’re already planning for next season in a number of areas and that will continue throughout the winter. There’ll be a big focus on winter training, player development, retaining the people we’ve already got and, yes, trying to add to the playing group as well.

But recruitment for us can’t just mean finding anyone who happens to be a good cricketer.

Of course we want good players. We’d be lying if we said otherwise.

But they also need to be the right people.

People who want to be part of a cricket club. People who understand what we’re trying to build here, buy into it and hopefully add something to it themselves.

I genuinely believe that if we keep making SOSEMTCC a better place to play cricket, people will notice.

Some already are.

Keep doing that for long enough and the right players will start looking a little closer. One joins, perhaps another does, the youngsters underneath continue developing and gradually the standard rises.

That’s how we want to grow.

Organically and sustainably.

We’re not going to chase success at any cost or sacrifice what we’re building for the sake of moving a couple of places up a league table.

Everybody who pulls on the shirt is part of the same club.

Whether you’re playing in the 1st XI or the 4th XI, a senior who’s been here for thirty years or a youngster just making your way into adult cricket, you’re part of the same thing.

Club first. Always.

That’s not an excuse for lacking ambition either.

Quite the opposite.

We want promotions. We want our teams challenging towards the top of their divisions. We want our youngsters eventually pushing experienced players for places. We want good cricketers wanting to come here. We want all four Saturday sides stronger than they are today.

We just want to achieve it in a way that means when we eventually get there, we’ve still got the cricket club we set out to build.

That’s the next phase.

And above everything, we want SOSEMTCC to be somewhere people are proud to belong.

A club that good people want to join and existing members don’t want to leave.

A place where somebody can arrive at eight years old and still be sitting outside the same clubhouse talking rubbish about cricket forty years later.

That’s the vision really.

Not particularly complicated.

Just not particularly easy either.

Personally, I’m tired after this summer. I think plenty of people who have put a lot into the season probably are.

But I also feel great about where the club is.

And strangely enough, now the cricket has finished I’m probably more energised about what comes next than I’ve been for a while.

In fact, the planning has already started.

For the next few months we don’t have to worry about physically getting another weekend of cricket onto the park, which gives us the chance to properly get our heads into winter training, the playing side, facilities, fundraising, next year’s cricket and everything else we want to move forward.

So there’s certainly no putting our feet up.

We’ve got the Nuclear Challenge coming up, Awards Night on the 19th, the AGM to come and then a winter where there’s plenty for us to get stuck into.

Thank you to the committee who have been dedicated and driven all year, the captains for all their hard work during the week and match days along with selection boys, everybody who has played, coached, volunteered, supported, helped, watched, bought a drink, brought their kids down or contributed to the club in any way this summer.

It’s been a really good year.

We’re ahead of where we thought we’d be.

We’re building something.

And we’re only just getting started.

Chris Maher
Chairman