In
May 1912 Sir Neville Cardus arrived at Shrewsbury School and he
described the cricket grounds thus: the richness of the open
air of England and the murmur of summer on the most beautiful of
playing fields which spread and imperceptibly mingled with the pastoral
land of Shropshire.
For five summers a young Sir Neville toiled on this pastoral
land of Shropshire as the schools assistant cricket
coach. He wrote of his labours, When the field lay empty I
would gather the stumps from a dozen pitches and carry them in sheaves
in my arms, a solitary reaper in the evening sunshine. He
certainly sounds like a man happy with his duties, which mainly
involved bowling at the young gentlemen in the nets.
What would he make of the shinning, £2.2 million, purpose
built cricket centre and its row of equally shinny BOLA bowling
machines?
The Cardus Cricket Centre contains four lanes of floodlit Supergrasse
(the same surface that is used at Lords indoor school and
the ECB Academy at Loughborough) and classrooms complete with the
latest video coaching software.
The four new BOLA machines were supplied on BOLA stands which are
designed for ease of use and drastically reduce set-up time.
The schools cricket professional is Paul Pridgeon, the ex-Worcestershire
seam bowler, who is also a keen advocate of the machine uses BOLA
HiViz balls to acclimatise his better players against short pitched
bowling.
Shrewsbury school also owns two older machines that are still providing
Cardus like services in the four artificial and 24 grass
outdoor nets.
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