The England cricketers have a number underneath the badge on their test shirts. This number is unique to each player. James Anderson’s number is 613 and this represents that when he made his debut in 2003, he was the 613th player to represent England in test matches. The latest player to add his name to the pantheon of England test cricketers is Zak Crawley who made his debut in 2019 and was therefore given the player number 695.

Why should a scheme such as this be only for the national team? At Chenies we are therefore launching our own version:

A player will be given the next available sequential number once they have represented the club in 10 1st XI Saturday league matches. If 2 players reach 10 appearances in the same match then the numbers will be allocated alphabetically by surname.

We have 79 players who have qualified for a player number by representing the club in 1st XI Saturday league cricket 10 or more times. The first was the 1992 captain, Malcolm Davies, and the latest to qualify are Mattie Brown and Alex Walker who both played their 10th match in the last game of the 2020 season, and therefore are allocated numbers 78 and 79 respectively.

Other than issuing the numbers, at this stage no decision has been made regrading what we can do with them, but watch this space.

The numbers are: