Welcome to the home of BSCC on the web

Bernard Sunley Cricket Club are a friendly, social cricket club. We were founded in 2000 by a group of friends who met in Bernard Sunley hall of residence in South Kensington whilst studying at Imperial College London.

We are based in London and are always on the lookout for new fixtures. We primarily play on Saturdays but are also available for midweek fixtures.

So if you are a London based team or a team from further afield (we are always searching for excuses to arrange new tours) looking for friendly but competitive fixtures then please contact us via the contacts page.

Hope you enjoy the site.

Jonathan Lee

hits since 2nd June 2005

The History of Bernard Sunley Cricket Club

The Bernard Sunley Charitable Foundation is dedicated to helping the frail, infirm and elderly within our communities. This remit could have been written specifically to describe most of our players. And yet, Bernard Sunley Cricket Club (BSCC) is not in fact supported in any way by that noble organisation. There is a link, however, and that link can be traced back to the autumn of 1997, when a group of fresh-faced undergraduates arrived in London, eager to broaden their minds, not to mention sexual repertoire, in a hall of residence known as Bernard Sunley House. It was in this row of four terraced houses in a leafy corner of Kensington that the first seeds of a now great institution were sown.

Throughout the early years, football dominated our sporting horizons and so cricketing activities were largely limited to watching England collapses (vs WI, vs SL, vs Aus, vs NZ etc.) and the subsequent drunken naming of our current World XI and the Best Ever England XI.

Fast forward three years to a small house on Garden Walk, Cambridge. A friend’s birthday party had deteriorated (inevitably) into two sub-parties. In the lounge, most people were having fun. They told jokes, exchanged witty anecdotes, and played amusing parlour games.

In the kitchen, the founding fathers of Bernard Sunley Cricket Club were hard at work, drunkenly naming our current World XI and the Best Ever England XI. However, unlike on previous similar occasions, something special was in the air.

The stimuli for what was about to happen were twofold. Firstly, I was fresh from a fantastically enjoyable, if statistically unimpressive, summer playing for my local team back home (Redcar CC, 3rd XI). Secondly, and much more relevantly, a few of us had recently read Rain Men by Marcus Berkmann (cheers Dean!). If you have not read this book yet, you really ought to. It is quite simply the best cricket book ever written, bar none (and you don’t have to take my word for it: see IDon’tLikeCricket.com).

As the evening wore on, and the games became increasingly tedious (have there even been eleven left-handed orphans born in second-class counties who went on to play test cricket, with a runner?) I proposed something so outlandish that it was, at first, not taken seriously.

“Why don’t we start our own team?”

“What, just the five† of us?”

Over the following winter we recruited. Friends. Friends of friends. Friends of random blokes met in the Spring Bok bar. I even got the e-mail address of a guy who tried chatting up Tom’s girlfriend (and soon to be wife). Our resourcefulness was limitless and uncompromising.

The following spring we practised most Saturdays in the outdoor nets at Battersea Park. Our squad had swelled to 11 and we were eager to see what we could do out in the middle.

And so, on 15th July 2001, Bernard Sunley Cricket Club played their inaugural cricket match. Although we lost by 200 runs, we were not disheartened. Since that day we have played friendly matches every summer, and have managed to fashion the occasional victory along the way, including a win against Markus Berkmann’s Rain Men! With a squad of around 20 players, including one or two who can actually play, the future of BSCC looks bright.

Ian Watson
Captain

† Ian Watson, Dean Checkley, Jonathan Lee, Thomas Hull, Nicholas Croom