A long-held dream of the Stratford cricket community is now reality.
The Stratford Festival Cricket Team announced a permanent cricket pitch has been installed in Lower Queen’s Park.
Team captain Emilio Vieira says it feels incredible getting the pitch installed.
“It’s been in the hoping and planning and thinking stages for many years,” said Vieira.
“Captains before my time, dating as far (back) as the 80s, have always dreamed of having a proper pitch to play on, but in Canada that doesn’t always mean playing on proper grass because it’s a lot harder to maintain.”
He says this new pitch is a mix of what the team wanted for many years and a sports facility that would benefit the city.
Before the pitch, Vieira and the rest of the team would face challenges while playing cricket in Stratford like geese and swans eating grass and digging up holes.
This made it unsafe to play with a hard leather ball, according to Vieira.
“One of the things you have to have with a proper leather ball is a nice flat ground, and people won’t play if there are pock marks in the ground.
“When we wanted to have warm-up matches, meet other teams and improve our skills, we would have to leave town.”
Vieira says the idea of the pitch came to be in 2018 when the Inverhaugh cricket ground, a gathering place for cricket teams, near Guelph, was being sold.
This led to the team speaking with Stratford city council, who Vieira said at the time “weren’t particularly keen on the idea of this piece of ground being used for cricket,” with debates on how popular cricket was in the city.
After the pandemic, Vieira decided to go about this project a different way by trying to find as much cricket history in Stratford as possible.
“That led us to some archival material we found at Inverhaugh, and we found that the history of the sport in Stratford dates back to the 1870s,” said Vieira.
“Stratford had a team. St.Marys had a team. There were frequent bouts between local teams, there was the Western Ontario League and a women’s team.”
He put together a presentation showing all of that history and the history of the Festival Team to city council and the city’s parks board.
The board approved the project in December 2023, which led to a fundraising campaign.
After over a year of fundraising, which included sponsorships from local businesses and donations from the community, they were able to install the pitch in June.
The team calls it the Butch Blake Memorial Cricket Ground, named after renowned Festival actor and cricket lover Mervyn ‘Butch’ Blake, who performed for 42 seasons in a row.
“He was so dedicated to fostering the sport and encouraging people in the region to play cricket,” said Vieira.
“In the rise of baseball following the Second World War, cricket moved away from popularity into obscurity in Stratford and Butch is credited for bringing some of that back. There was a doctor team, a police team, and actors team that all played one another.”
They hope the pitch honours the legacy of Butch and the foundation of the sport for future generations.
The first official game will see Stratford and Shaw Festival teams squaring off on Aug. 25 at noon.
