College Accepts Award at Lords

26 Nov 2012

Prior Park College1st X1 Vice Captain, Hamish Pearson, accepted the prestigious Forty Club Award on behalf of the team and the College.
The Director of Sport, Mr Steve Capon and the 1st X1 Vice Captain, Hamish Pearson were guests in the Long Room at Lords on Saturday night. They had been invited there to receive the Forty Club Award, a national cricket skills and fair play award that Prior’s 1st X1 had won at the end of last season.
While last year’s captain, Peter Borton, continued his cricketing odyssey through Namibia, Vice Captain Hamish Pearson took to the podium in the Long Room to accept the award and acknowledge how proud the team was to have been selected from a national field.
In a letter addressed to Headmaster, Mr James Murphy-O’Connor, Honorary Secretary for The Forty Club, Mr Barry Aitken commended the College on receiving the national award and also described Hamish Pearson as a “superb ambassador” who gave a speech that was “well-articulated, sensible and mature and which hit all the right buttons.”
With HRH Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh as its patron, the Forty Club is the second largest private cricket Club in the world. It is also a wandering or nomadic Club and thus does not own its own ground. The aim of the Club since 1936 has been ‘to take cricket to the schools’ by offering Schools (both State and Public) and Youth XIs fixtures against experienced cricketers who will encourage the young cricketers to play the game to the highest standards of performance and behaviour and in the best spirit of the game. The Forty Club currently plays some 130 fixtures a season against School and Youth sides throughout England Scotland and Wales.
Prior Park College was judged to have performed best against the Forty Club in the last year. The categories which are considered and reported on by the Forty Club skipper and umpire cover individual and collective skills on the field, and the Spirit of Cricket categories – behaviour on and off the field, captaincy, sportsmanship and general turnout.