Welcome! To the home of the very famous Marsh Gibbon Cricket Club – where the stars come to play! Yes which other local club can lay claim to an incident such as that remembered in the popular book Penguins ‘Rain Stopped Play’ by Harry Thompson:
“Hislop (Ian Hislop, editor of private eye and veteran of Have I got News for You) was a violently aggressive, indiscriminate slogger, who for ever endeared himself to the team one day at the bizarrely named village of Marsh Gibbon. He vaulted a fence to retrieve a six-hit, only to discover that the dried mud surface on to which he had jumped was in fact a thin crust covering a deep pool of liquid cowshit.”
Ok, so it isn’t all like that but the Cricket club has a fine history dating back to the mid 19th Century (at least), when the results and scorecards of 4 innings games were published in the Oxfordshire press of the time. Many familiar village names appear in the cuttings from that time!
The club is situated at the Recreation Ground, in the Summertown area of the village and has been here since all recollection. The recreation field was given to the Parish in ages past and both football and cricket clubs share the ground and keep it maintained to one of the highest standards for village sport.
“The Originals” is the name of the Saturday league side who play in Division Five of The Cherwell Cricket League. The format is 90 over cricket, with either win/lose or win/lose/draw formats.
A midweek team play in the Bucks Midweek League on Wednesday evenings (May to August), where the format is T20 (minus the pyjamas!) T20 might be a recent international addition to the cricket agenda, but it has run in Bucks for much longer, when Marsh won the league in 2013 it followed our previous success of 1935!
Marsh are also happy to host Touring sides and with irregularity can be found touring the South coast of England – even Barbados: When in 2001 a party of 45 villagers went to conquer the island. Well, we won one out of 3 games and that’s a decent return considering the amount of rum that was drunk!
Further information on the Club, the Officers and other goings-on can be found on this website and if you need to know more simply reply to the contact email and we will be glad to help.