Graffiti earns 'unique' Birstall award

Birstall Village CC has won The Wisden Cricketer's Gray Nicolls Club of the Year Award for 2007 for their success in both deterring vandals from defacing their clubhouse and in building their youth section.

The Leicestershire club won the Club of the Month award for September after the magazine was alerted to their unique 'graffiti' approach to keeping vandals at bay. Club officials were at their wits end when five days after the 2007 NatWest Cricketforce weekend, their freshly painted pavilion was scrawled over by vandals wielding spray canisters.

It was not the first time the graffiti vandals had struck. Each time it happened before, Andy Corbett, the Leicestershire Club’s junior coordinator captured the damage on his digital camera and took the pictures to the local police who went into schools and matched the pictures with classroom drawings to find the culprits.

This time, they decided to pay local graffiti artist Dave Ward to paint a series of murals, featuring WG Grace, Andrew Flintoff, Ricky Ponting and Paul Nixon on the exterior walls of the clubhouse. Since May, there has been no trouble at the Club.

As a result, it has gone from strength to strength and by the end of the summer, around 130 colts were turning up for regular training and matches involving five youth sides and the Under 11s had been crowned Leicestershire county champions.

“We’ve got John Maunders and Darren Maddy helping with our winter training and have been able to appoint a coach from October to April doing two one-hour slots every week with the colts," Andy told judges at TWC who decided that Birstall was the most deserving winner of all the monthly winners in 2007.

Birstall won a selection of Gray-Nicolls kit including bats, pads, gloves and wicketkeeping equipment.