You will have to go some way to find a club side in England, let alone Yorkshire, who have had a better summer than North Yorkshire’s Richmondshire Cricket Club.
That they were Yorkshire Premier League champions, beating Bradford’s New Farnley in a tense play-off final at Castleford last month, just scratches the surface on a stunning season for the North Yorkshire South Durham League outfit.
First-team captain and opening batter Rob Carr explains: “It’s an important point to make that it’s not just been success at first-team level.
“The firsts won the NYSD League title, the YPL play-offs and one of our 100-ball competitions.
“But we have five senior teams – four in the NYSD and the other in a local Darlington and District League.
“The third team play on a Sunday, and that’s mainly for juniors from 14-17 with a couple of seniors. They won their league, which was fantastic.
Picture by Ray Spencer. Richmondshire captain Rob Carr lifts the YPL champions trophy at Castleford last month.
“The second team were relegated last year from Division One but have gone straight back up as champions. They’re in the division below the firsts, and there are only two second teams in that, which shows the strength of the club.
“And the Under 17s. We’ve always had a really strong junior set-up, the catchment area is good, and we’re right up there in terms of numbers for All Stars and things like that.
“The Under 17s won every single cup and league competition they were in – five trophies.
“That’s pretty promising, isn’t it!”
Promising indeed – as is the number of youngsters who played representative cricket in either Yorkshire or Durham in 2024.
“That was at least 20-odd,” said Carr.
That number includes a couple of girls on Durham’s books.
Picture by DLTen Media. Richmondshire CC’s Hurgill Road home.
“We’ve had a women’s team for a while now,” continued Carr. “I think that’s coming in as a requirement for Premier Division clubs, but we’re really well set up for that already.”
Richmondshire CC are based in the picturesque town of Richmond, on the Yorkshire and Durham border – hence why both counties snap up their best junior players.
Make no mistake, their first team are quite some force, and long have been.
Not only are they serial winners in their own league, they regularly challenge at national level too. In 2018, they won the ECB’s National Club Championship.
“This year was a really good year,” beamed one club man Carr.
“The only comparable year we’ve had as a first team was 2018 when we won the National Club Championship down at Bristol, beating Stanmore. That’s always been a good competition for us. We’ve had some good runs – semi-finals last year, for example.
“But we hadn’t won the NYSD title for the last two years having won three on the bounce from 2019-2021.
Picture by DLTen Media. Richmondshire’s first team celebrates winning this summer NYSD League Premier Division title.
“Heading into this summer, we had a really good winter of training and then had a big team meeting.
“It’s the first time we’ve had one, and I had to dust off PowerPoints and stuff from my job, which I do all the time (pre-match football trading at SkyBet in Leeds).
“I thought it was a good way to set out some specific targets, and number one was winning the league. I knew at the start of the season it was the strongest and most well-balanced side we’ve had for a while.
“We had three really good professionals, and the rest of the lads are homegrown, Richmond talent.
“The key from there was going into the YPL play-offs, which we’d never won before. And no team from the NYSD had ever won it.
“In fact, Chris West, the league president, has been banging on at us each year we’ve won the league, saying, ‘You need to win this competition’. I think he gets it in the neck from the other presidents, who take the mick out of him and say, ‘Your league’s never won it’.”
Richmondshire fielded two English pros in former Yorkshire wicketkeeper-batter Dan Hodgson and ex-Durham batter Gary Pratt, he of Ashes 2005 fame when he ran Ricky Ponting out whilst sub-fielding at Trent Bridge.
Picture by DLTen Media. Garry Pratt (l) with Richmondshire’s Afghanistan overseas star Shafiqullah Ghafari.
This summer was Hodgson’s second with the club having joined from New Farnley, while Pratt has been with them for more than a decade.
Their overseas player was young leg-spinning all-rounder Shafiqullah Ghafari from Afghanistan, who claimed 103 wickets in all cricket with nine hauls of five wickets or more. He also hit 600 plus runs with one hundred.
“Shaf actually finished the season opening the batting,” said Carr.
“I missed the YPL semi-final against Clifton Alliance, and we had a couple of others missing. He’s a very aggressive batter and had been itching to have a go up there. So we did. He got a ton in his last league game and 94 in the semi-final.
“It showed what an unbelievable cricketer he is.
“I don’t think you’ll find a better overseas pro in the country, but I am a bit biased.”
Richmondshire won the league title by a landslide 93 points from second-placed Stockton (25 points per win).
Picture by Alex Whitehead/SWpix.com. Former Yorkshire wicketkeeper-batter Dan Hodgson been with Richmondshire for the last two seasons.
“To do it that way was really special,” the skipper reflected.
“We had loads of lads contributing, young and local lads. That every player could point to at least three or four significant contributions to wins was fantastic.
“We had a 16-year-old open the batting all year, Joe White, who is in Yorkshire’s age-groups, and a young left-arm spinner, Caleb Bradford, who did really well.”
Richmondshire beat YPL North champions Clifton Alliance in the semi-final by seven wickets chasing 167 and went on to face Bradford League winners New Farnley in the final.
“We’d actually played them in a pre-season friendly as well, which was organised when Dan Hodgson moved from them to us,” said Carr. “We wanted a friendly against as good a team as we could find.
“The final was probably one of the tensest and most hard-fought games I’ve ever played in.
“It had been a wet week, and Castleford did well to get the game on. The ground looked amazing. But it was a delayed start, reduced 46 overs, and they got a half decent score – 179-9.
Picture by DLTen Media. Richmondshire CC’s Hurgill Road home.
“We then had a bad start. I got a duck, Shaf got out straightaway.
“At drinks, we were 89-6, needing another 90-odd. Gary was still in, and with him in there’s always a chance. But I would have put us a big price to knock it off against their attack.
“Thankfully, he found a willing ally in Sam Wood, who just seems to come up trumps in big games. Those two won it for us. Gary finished with 59 not out and Sam 46.
“There were some good scenes at the end!”
In the two seasons – 2022 and 2023 – that Richmondshire missed out on the NYSD title, they won three separate cup competitions.
Added to the league competition, the NYSD League runs a 40-over cup, a T20 competition and two separate 100-ball events with different rules.
“Actually, if you go a long way in all those cups, it can be quite detrimental to the league,” said Carr. “This season suited us because we got knocked out of the National Cup and the league’s 40-over cup really early. It meant our only focus was the league.”
Picture by DLTen Media. Richmondshire CC’s Hurgill Road home.
Carr, aged 29, has been Richmondshire’s first-team captain for the last five years, taking over from Pratt. He is Leeds-based for work but travels home to train and play.
“Captaining your home club is pretty special,” he said. “I think we can win something big again next year, so we’re all looking forward to that. The National T20 title is the only competition that we could win but haven’t. That would be amazing.”
After the win over New Farnley, Richmondshire put a video of their celebrations on social media, with not just players but families and club staff belting out their team song, James Blunt’s 1973.
It indicated things are going well off the field as well as on it.
“Partly because of the success we’ve had this year, but I’ve never seen the club as healthy as it is now,” added Carr.
“We’re in a really good spot in the middle of town with a great view of the castle and a fantastic beer garden.
“Whenever there’s a sunny day, the club’s busy. We’ll regularly get 100 people on when the first team are at home and more for a big game. We have a function room which keeps things ticking as well. That’s a big part of keeping the club going financially.”
