Old Beach Cricket Club faces dropping a grade or leaving its home ground after Brighton Council said its insurers will not cover first-grade cricket at Cloak Oval.
The club, formed in 1896, won promotion to the Southern Cricket Association’s first-grade competition after last season. President Tony Allanby said the club was told two or three weeks before the season that it could not play the top grade at Cloak Oval. With the first ball due next weekend, he said the club was “currently in limbo”.
Brighton Mayor Leigh Grey said the oval sits close to a playground and houses, and balls leaving the ground could injure someone or damage property. Council said it had already worked with the club on netting and on limiting the types of games played there. The latest netting near the playground cost about $30,000. Stepping up a grade, council said, lifted the risk to a level its insurers had advised was “not acceptable”.
“Council is a strong supporter of community sport, but we don’t want to see anyone hurt,” Grey said.
Council has offered to host the club at another ground, with some rostering changes. Allanby said that was not workable. The club relies on home-game revenue, and losing its first-grade home fixtures would leave it about $8,000 to $9,000 out of pocket enough, he said, to “just about put us out of business”.
He said the club had already lost about $5,000 when council stopped T20 matches at the oval because of its size. The clubrooms are also a social outlet for older residents, and Old Beach is the last established cricket club in the Brighton municipality.
“We get the impression that the council’s certainly not supportive of the Old Beach Cricket Club and they don’t really want us playing on Cloak Oval, so we sort of fear this might be the beginning of trying to push us out,” Allanby said.
He expected little from a meeting with council on Thursday, and asked the council to be “a bit more supportive in the risk assessment”. He said the club had been in talks for some time, but nothing had been clear until the decision landed with the season about to start.
“Which leaves us very little time to do anything other than potentially drop back a grade.”
Grey said the council would keep working with the club on a resolution.
