26th June 2009, affiliation deadline day at the Gauteng Cricket Board for the 2009/10 season, a little less than two years after the reconstitution of Crescents Cricket Club, I meet Uncle Solly at one of many family gatherings and tell him that I think we may need to shut the doors on Crescents Cricket once again. A dark day indeed…

Player apathy, the threat of a mass exodus, and just a general sense of ‘going nowhere slowly’ had washed over the club. The plush fairways of Goldfields Country Club and an encyclopaedia’s-worth of fishermen’s tales became opponents too fierce to compete with. A hard decision had to be made and the few remaining members faced the eventuality of finding a new club to call ‘home’ or giving up on the game that we so love.

To be perfectly honest, we weren’t a club. We were a team; or rather a grouping of individuals clutching onto the past, trying to breathe life into something on life support, so reliant on the movement of a few, that just a handful of ‘retirements’ would mean the collapsing of a former institution.

That evening, we took a leap of faith, with no idea of where this club would land up just four years later.

A bane of our youth, especially growing up in a cricket-mad family, was that we were constantly told of a time gone by. We were forced to reminisce about an era that we cannot even fathom. There are some stories we can relay verbatim without having actually been there. That’s how I learnt about my Crescents Cricket Club. Growing up in the shadow of these giants of men, we learnt to love something we aspired to be a part of. So the challenge presented itself when we embarked on this journey to rebuild the club.

We sat back and thought deeply on a few pertinent questions - How do we rebuild this brotherhood that once upon a time stood so strong? How do we get the club to the highest echelons of club cricket in this province? How do we become an administrative power-house that breeds competent and passionate leaders? And most importantly, how do we produce the next Sam Bulbulia, Tiffie Barnes or Moosa Mangera?

This is our story

In the 2007/8 season, the club was reconstituted with one ‘social’ Saturday league team, languishing in the basement of amateur cricket. To say that this league was a stroll in the park would be doing an injustice to strolling as some amount of effort is required. We knew that we were too good to be playing down there but we brought that label onto ourselves. We went on to win the league unbeaten that year, but it never felt quite right.

Talented cricketers, who had been playing competitive Sunday and even representative cricket just a few years before, now didn’t have the time to dedicate to it, and were making a mockery of the league. Many felt that it was a mistake to make a ‘comeback’ into cricket and that playing at this level was a waste of their time. This challenged us as a club, and with no administrative structure and cohesiveness, folding was inevitable.

The next season, 2008/9, we struggled to put together a playing eleven week in and week out. Players begged their wives to take them shopping and some even feigned dental appointments, weddings and funerals on a Saturday afternoon just to avoid making themselves available. Unsurprisingly, we finished in the bottom half of the table and spirits were at an all-time low.

Which brings me back to 26th June 2009. After coming so close to declaring our second innings, or rather our feeble attempt at a second innings, I thought long and hard about how we could turn this ship around. Having just completed a postgraduate business course, I considered myself to be a fairly bright fellow back then. Why then, could I not see the answer?
And then, just as an unexpected beamer to the ribs, it struck me… if we wanted to succeed as a cricket club; we had to treat it like a business!

As in any good business, the first thing we needed to do was to develop a
strategy – the fabled means to an end. As any Strategy 101 book will tell you, it begins by developing the organisation’s Vision, Mission and Objectives. Once we had done that, all of a sudden, it became less muddy. We knew what we wanted – to rebuild the Crescents brand, to play competitive cricket, to uplift the community through cricket, to develop a youth structure that could one day get the club back to the top, and importantly, to develop a strong set of administrators to take the club forward rather than relying on a few. I report on these goals later in this article.

Taking a leaf out of the Marketing 101 text book, the next step for us was to identify our target market. How and where do we attract players to this club? To answer that required no more effort than looking in the mirror. I fitted the target profile perfectly. A young professional (often newly married), who still has a passion for the game and wants to play structured, competitive cricket, while not being restrained by the level of commitment required to play higher league Sunday cricket. The other ‘segment’ of the market was cricketers at Universities, who played higher level, school or representative cricket, but now could no longer afford to give the commitment of a full Sunday and 2 – 3 days of training a week.

It was then a matter of packaging our ‘product’ and approaching our target market. And it worked fantastically. Within one season, 2009/10, we had built a squad of 20–strong members. We gradually began building momentum and comfortably won the division we played in unbeaten. Word started spreading through Mxit and Facebook chats that there existed an avenue for like-minded individuals to play structured cricket.

By the next season, 2010/11, our player numbers had grown to 35. We affiliated a second team which would operate as a ‘closed team’. We relied heavily on our only remaining member of the Crescents of yesteryear, Solly Mangera, to instil the values and culture of the club. Players started buying into the concept of the cricketing family and about playing for each other. The first signs of rejuvenation emerged and in that season the first-team triumphed, once again unbeaten. The newly formed second team finished second and signs were apparent that the club was on the up.

The 2011/12 was the most successful campaign for this new crop of Crescents cricketers. A third team was formed and the membership grew to over 50. Growth and consolidation became a delicate balancing act. Talented players, who no longer had the time to invest in Sunday league cricket found the club to be exactly what they wanted. Both the SA5 and SA6 teams won their respective leagues that season and the SA8 team finished a close second.

By this past season, 2012/13, the club had reached the end of its first five year plan. The club administrators were flooded with requests from players wanting to join. A decision was made to affiliate a fourth team into the Saturday structures. It was here that the most important decision for the future of the club was made. We had for the first time under this new structure affiliated a junior team, and more importantly, a junior team in Sunday league cricket. So while the various Saturday teams of the club are needed to supply the structure and develop the brand, the junior team are the undoubtedly the future.

Many of these youngsters had never held a bat in a competitive environment before, but through hard work and dedication, managed to rise to the occasion. These youngsters finished third in their league, and while we have continuously communicated to them that at this stage of their development it is not so much about winning but rather about going through the processes and learning, we have to accept that these are Crescents cricketers and competitiveness comes naturally. All of the Crescents teams fared exceptionally well with three of the teams finishing second and one finishing third.

Looking back at our five year plan, we have achieved almost everything we wanted to with great measure of success. We have even managed to get one youngster into the Gauteng U19 structure. It is now on to the next five years for this remarkable club.

And so we come to the present day and having totally overshot all deadlines given to me by the design team of this brochure, I complete this article. The club has just held its Annual General Meeting and I am overwhelmed by the amazing show of loyalty and commitment from the members. 82 out of a possible 105 members turned up for the meeting.

The 2013/14 season sees the club affiliate seven teams, five to Saturday and two to Sunday, including another junior team. The election of office bearers was an event in itself. A total of 16 accepted nominations for a total of 6 contested positions reflects the depth of administrative capacity that the club has developed. All positions, besides that of the chairman, are held by individuals between the ages of 25 and 32.

If you want to know the future of our cricket… well here we are!
ALUTA CONTINUA (or translated into Crescents speak – Let’s show them how we eat the takari)