Mike Ashton – Wisden Cricketer Club Stalwart No. 15

It began in 1970. A group of friends in South Wales, students mostly, thought it would be fun to get up their own cricket team – Barry Wanderers. They arranged three fixtures, though only one was played: a Wednesday evening game against Barry NALGO. A second was rained off. And the third? Founder member Mike Ashton smiles. “Suffice to say, it was the day after my 21st birthday.”

“When I started playing, I was useless,” he says, but the flame was lit. The next year there were eight fixtures, then twelve, and he relished the adventure, even when he was teaching 150 miles away in East London. “I was always looking for nice places to go: good grounds and good teas.” When the early members began to drift away, “I was determined to keep it going. I was secretary, treasurer, everything.”

The breakthrough came when they persuaded Sully Hospital to let them create a cricket field out of its disused vegetable garden. For 18 months they laboured, and in May 1985 they were wanderers no more. They became one of the strongest non-league sides in South Wales, with a second and sometimes third side and a thriving junior section. “I played 64 games one year,” Ashton says, by then groundsman as well. “One lad played 66, but his wife divorced him at the end of the season.”

The peaceful tree-lined field sits beside the Bristol Channel, with a view across the sparkling water to Minehead and Weston. When the old hospital social club burnt down, they raised funds to erect a traditional wooden pavilion.

A happy family, the first team is now full of young men who started in the Under-11s, some of them sons of former players. They play league cricket – “That changed the whole ethos of the club” – and they no longer relish the travel. “Our season used to start at Worcester Norton Taverners. It was a long drive, but I knew some nice pubs on the route. Now, if I said we’re going to Bristol next Sunday, they’d all start complaining.”

Mike Ashton is the last of the founder members still playing, soon to bring up his 1,500th appearance. In the 1990s he took over 1,000 wickets with his slow bowling – “off-spinners when they turn” – but his pride is in the club’s development: how that one Wednesday evening match turned into such a fulfilling part of so many people’s lives. “I can’t imagine we ever thought it would be that permanent.”