It did not end well for Lancashire, but their latest trip to Blackpool was a fine occasion while it lasted. Through county relegations and club struggles, Blackpool cricket endures. From Harold Larwood to Afghan refugees, Blackpool continues to show the value and the charm of English cricket's outgrounds.
Shared History
What do Harold Larwood, Rohan Kanhai, Richie Richardson and Mushtaq Mohammad have in common? All laced their cricket boots as pros at Blackpool CC, Lancashire's outground by the sea, watched over by the famous tower – a steel Mona Lisa in a kiss-me-quick hat.
Last week, the ground hosted Lancashire's men in what has been re-established as an annual Championship match, four days of picnics and fun. At least, it was supposed to be four days – but Kent completed a 140-run win on the third evening, a third morale-sapping defeat for Lancashire, who have also gone down badly to Middlesex and Durham.
Lancashire's Woes
Where the top of Division One is currently a close-run thing between three teams that don't host Tests – Essex, Sussex and Somerset – Lancashire are growing wearily familiar with the second tier, after being relegated at the end of 2024. They started last season as warm favourites for promotion, only to suffer a torrid first couple of months before the captain, Keaton Jennings, and the coach, Dale Benkenstein, resigned.
The subsequent renaissance was too late for them to hop up a division, but helped to re-establish them as promotion favourites in 2026. Again, though, the summer has lurched downwards after two early wins – and with half the season gone they lie fifth in Division Two, looking enviously upwards, albeit gutted by injury. To add to the bleak mood, the men's team are also bottom of the Blast north group, with their defeats including a balloon-popping implosion against Glamorgan at Blackpool, while the women are seventh out of nine.
Off the pitch the club has been embroiled in a civil war with some sections of the membership, special general meetings springing up like weeds, and including a vote of no confidence. Daniel Gidney, who has been chief executive for 14 years, has announced that he will step down at the end of year, amid a general feeling that Old Trafford has become a (successful) events company with bit of unloved cricket on the side. Lancashire last won the Championship in 2011, with a mostly homegrown team who no one fancied but who scrapped with gumption. That memory is drifting into the past.
Outground Value
But what Lancashire – and Yorkshire – still do very well is use their outgrounds for Championship cricket, in contrast to those counties who now remain static in their headquarters. These are the grounds where members love to meet friends and watch in the (occasional) sunshine at Southport, Scarborough, York and Blackpool, though there are some worries that Lancashire's spanking new facility at landlocked Farington, due to open later this summer, might threaten future trips to the north-west coast.
The walk from Blackpool North station to Stanley Park takes only 20 minutes and passes a huge Salvation Army building, a Citizen's Advice bureau, a good range of takeaways and, once upon a time, Jeanette's Sewing Alterations and Haberdashery, though that is now up for sale. The ground, Blackpool CC, is walled off from the main park, which has a beautiful art deco cafe and where, I'm told, you can buy very good poached eggs on toast.
The many suspirating trees that overhang the perimeter add to the restful air, though the wind can be brutal when it picks up off the Irish Sea. Like Hampshire's Rose Bowl, the ground is largely an amphitheatre and the concrete seats have been touched up by the club recently – a local company donated planks of wood and the ground improvement team (one groundsman, four volunteers) sanded, painted and attached them. For the Kent match there was a pizza and coffee van and a pop-up bar, while in the pavilion you could buy a barm cake and a packet of crisps for £4.
Volunteer Power
Blackpool, like most clubs, is powered by volunteer energy, and the chair Dave Cresswell has been in post for 15 years at his boyhood club. He retired at 55 and it turned into a full-time job. The club is able to put up under-10s, under-11s, under-13s, under-15s, under-17s, women's softball and women's 11-a-side teams, as well as four men's teams on a Saturday – but it is a struggle to attract and retain players.
"We're very high in deprivation terms, with a low-wage economy, and attracting even junior players to the club is a real effort at the moment," says Cresswell. "We do run All-Stars [a nationwide initiative for 5-8-year-olds] and have loads down on a Friday, but we don't have any [feeder] private schools and local [state] schools do not play cricket any more. We host Kwik cricket games here for the primary schools and it's fantastic to see, but getting secondary schools in particular to even signpost people who are interested in cricket to come here is very, very difficult. There's no town team any more. There's no inter-school competitions any more. Unless you're from an elite group of players, you don't really know that it is even available."
Hope and Future
But there is hope. The club has been boosted by Afghan refugees pointed in their direction by the council, and players from different backgrounds play together largely without, in Cresswell's words, "the social cohesion issues" of some local areas. "Though larger companies have disappeared from Blackpool – British Nuclear Fuels, ICI and some civil service jobs," says Cresswell, "the council, through their regeneration process, are starting to attract more people to the town centre. Higher-value jobs are on the way but it's taken a long time for those to become available. There's an MOD office near the railway station, which will be employing probably a thousand people, and a multiversity, which sometimes become a feeder into local sports clubs. We hope to tap into them."
Also on Cresswell's wishlist is for a reorganisation of the league, so that players do not have to travel as far as Carlisle for a game, as well as finding a London England and Wales Cricket Board contact to connect with. More recently than Larwood and Richardson, Stanley Park has been the nursery for global T20 suitcase packer Richard Gleeson, and for Steven Croft, the current Lancashire men's head coach. It also currently has three under-13s playing for Lancashire. Cresswell is evangelical about the benefits of cricket for young kids, for individuals and society. "Kids learn respect when they're playing cricket. And when you see our young players grown up, they've got respect for things. It definitely improves their journey to adulthood. I think that's very important."
