King Cross Juniors: Meet the thriving cricket club without a home

The story of King Cross Cricket Club in Halifax is both inspiring and concerning. It is a long-term battle for facilities, amid soaring interest that should be celebrated.

Despite numerous hurdles, this is one plucky cricket club where more and more juniors want to play.

Over an hour, a chat with Chairman Mohammed Yousaf teased out their incredible journey, while also sparking the wider question of how we accommodate demand for cricket in our villages, towns and cities.  

First, some background.  

Park Ward, Halifax  

According to Calderdale Council, Park Ward – where King Cross Juniors CC cricketers live – is the smallest ward of Halifax at just under a square mile. The area, to the west of Halifax town centre, is densely populated and 70% of the population identify as Muslim.  

Around a third of the residents are children and half of those kids are from low-income families.   

Mo reckons it is the most under-privileged and under-funded of Calderdale’s 17 wards. Life can doubtless be tough but cricket has become an outlet for many.  

There are ten primary schools in the area too so a young demographic who may enjoy their sport could be struggling to find it.  

The issue is a lack of sports facilities, with green space given over to development:

“What was Thrum Hall Cricket Club now has an Asda on it, Old Crossleyans has been taken over by rugby and King Cross, an old Yorkshire ground, has been taken over and they play rugby. We have no green grass and no cricket grounds.”  

We discuss Mo’s own cricket journey: As a junior, he was at Bradford Grammar School where he’d practice alongside the Yorkshire CCC Academy, under the watchful eye of David Bairstow.

There were subsequent club cricket stints at Bradley Mills and International Caribbean Club before a decade with Bradshaw. He is now Player Liaison Officer for the Halifax Cricket League and a trustee of the Cricket Asylum Foundation.

Starting a new cricket club

All of that is packed in around a full-time job as a NHS Dental Practice Manager but with time on his hands (or a TARDIS at home), Mo formed King Cross Junior Cricket Club in 2022!  

It was a step into the unknown; an open day held on 15 April at King Cross Rugby Club and about a hundred kids showed up. The day was supported by coaches from The Cricket Asylum Foundation who had been involved with Mo, under their HX1 Project initiative, for a few years before.  

So, the demand was there and that led to under-nines and under-elevens junior teams playing league cricket, based at King Cross Rugby Club.  

It was rapid expansion but less than ideal surroundings (a roll-out mat on a bobbly rugby pitch). Without permission to make any ground improvements, it was far from ideal.  

There was also initially no, and then limited, access to the clubhouse and toilets, and Mo tells of racial harassment from the sidelines. Complaining about treatment hardly made it likely to retain their home ground – and so it proved.  

Proposed alternatives fell through but despite these dramas, the cricket club continued to see more junior sign-ups; now with six juniors teams who travelled down to Greetland Cricket Club to play fixtures in year two instead.  

Without a home to properly call their own, a club with 130+ juniors needed some serious logistics. Clubs in the Halifax Cricket League certainly helped but it was a constant merry-go-round of begging for availability and places to play.  

“Every week, I was ringing up and saying, ‘Right, on Monday, we need two grounds. Can we borrow your ground? Then on a Tuesday, I need a ground for training!’ Literally all last year, that’s what I did – and we’re just trying to get as many kids to play cricket.”  

Several times, Calderdale Council appeared to have a solution but it would fall through as with Ling Bob Playing Fields in Pellon, HX2.  

No ground but 191 kids

Having had two seasons of junior cricket development and growth, despite a patched-up fixture list based on goodwill, favours and in all likelihood, a large phone bill, the story reaches March 2024.  

No ground but 191 kids registered on Play-Cricket, two sides at under-nines, under-elevens and under-thirteens age groups and an under-fifteens team too.  

Against the odds, momentum is still building. How on earth is this happening, I’m curious to know?  

“People are ringing me. It’s word of mouth. I’ve heard X, Y or Z’s son playing at your cricket club and he’s really enjoying it.”

With many of these kids having no club to go to locally; in some cases, with parents who don’t drive and can’t afford the subscription fees, match fees, travel and kit, King Cross is a beacon.  

The interview with Mo ends up taking all kinds of twists and turns I’m not expecting. At its heart is a successful cricket club that needs facilities to train and play in an area where there are few obvious options.  

But on the eve of the 2024 season, the merger of Warley and Elland offered a lifeline.

A few miles away, Warley’s ground became available and an agreement in principle was decided where it would be sub-let to King Cross Juniors for two years.  

A solution on the surface but as an outsider looking in, was a club of that size ever going to be accommodated properly at a small cricket ground with minimal parking on tiny country lanes?

I guess you take what you get and make it work. After all, various people had got involved behind the scenes to try to help.

Funding free cricket

With a ground sorted for 2024, King Cross Juniors had to work out how to pay for all of the usual costs that come with having a ground that isn’t council-owned.  

Mo puts the cost at £7,000 a year for a groundsman, utilities and the other costs you’d typically get from trophies to kit to food.  

The big difference being that no-one pays to play cricket at King Cross. That’s always been the guiding principle.

Instead of match fees and membership, Mo has been successful with attracting support from local businesses, plus grants from Sport England, Calderdale Active and others.

Image: Lightcliffe CC (Facebook)

Trophies and coaching

Meanwhile, success came on the field. In the Halifax Junior Cricket League, their under-nines won Division A, under-15s won Division C in their age group and the under 11s sides both reached cup finals.  

The personnel and education required to support this number of children playing cricket has kicked on too: “We’ve got seven or eight coaches, loads of volunteers and at least two coaches got to every game. We have seven games a week!”  

At the centre of this tale of a cricket club doing so well, despite being repeatedly let down with grounds, is Mo’s drive and determination, allied with obvious goodwill from across the cricket community.  

Thirty or so kids from King Cross Junior CC were invited by the Yorkshire Cricket Board to a game at Yorkshire County Cricket Club. Tickets were arranged by Al-Murad Group who partner with Yorkshire to support provision of free kit for County Age group teams.

Meanwhile, the season just gone was a rollercoaster.

So many kids enjoying the game but arguments between Mo and those in the village of Warley over parking and the inevitable impact of 150 kids arriving en masse in a space not designed to support that.  

Ironically, King Cross Junior CC were chosen to host one of the ECB’s Taste of Cricket events at Warley.

While everyone saw a successful event celebrating diversity in the game, Mo was being quizzed over parking permits (which he had) and confronted by a local resident on the day.

Tempers flared and things were said.

It is completely unacceptable that Mo has suffered racial abuse in this rewarding yet maddening journey to build and sustain a grassroots club.  

Alongside that is the theme of capacity. It’s not as if Mo was going to ever turn down kids once word spread and the demand snowballed.

When I talked to Mo back in August, he had just received some very tough, if predictable, news – that King Cross Juniors were basically homeless – again. They were not welcome back at Warley for 2025.  

To me, this speaks to the real challenge we have here in Yorkshire and across the country. A strategic vision to deliver more cricket and not enough facilities in which to do that.  

We ought to acknowledge that many cricket clubs have been supported with funding to improve their facilities through the ECB, Sport England and many other channels.  

But upgrading an existing site is a lot easier than finding one to begin with.  

There are plans, that I hope to share in due course, around cricket facilities and what the thinking is across Yorkshire – but it is complex, nuanced and without an overnight solution.  

How does a cricket club, offering the game for free to hundreds of children who wouldn’t otherwise play, find a place to call home?