Thomas Luke, Owen Mason and Jack Barker-Humphreys represented the MCC Newcastle city hub. The MCC city hubs are designed to give state school children who are not representing their county sides the chance to play representative cricket. Ashington CC coach Michael Thewlis, said: “It is so nice to see these guys called up for representative cricket because of how hard they have worked on their games in the past couple of years.” For coach Thewlis, the future looks bright at the club. He said: “We went through a bit of a dip in the number of kids coming to the club, but that has been reversed in the past couple of years. We now have loads of boys and girl at under 11s, 13s and 15s making great progress and in the last two weeks, we have seen our kids getting selected for representative cricket, which is enormously rewarding.” He continued: “Although it is great for all the coaches at the club who give of their time to help young cricketers see these guys progressing, we all know that they have got there through their own hard work. On any day of the week, you can guarantee that these kids and some of our other juniors are down at the ground and in the nets practicing for hours at a time among themselves. Their achievements are all down to their hard work.”

(article written by Michael Thewlis)