The Club is unusual in that it promotes and sponsors its members to become coaches. It also has access to some very skilled coaches. these include :

• One level 3 coach
• Seven level 2 coaches
• Four level 1 coaches

Some of our coaches coach in English, Urdu and Punjabi.

Over the coming year the coaching section will offer a comprehensive look into how you can improve all areas of your game. Chief coach Mark Lane (former Kenyan Development Manager) will guide you through some of the techniques that are used by professional players today. Even though this will be a valuable resource, Mark recommends that you come to one of our training sessions <training Sessions> to gain the full benefit, as well as practicing with some friendly and experienced players.

GCCC are commited to offering the same high standard of coaching, no matter what your level of experience is likely to be. One thing is guaranteed and that is you will have lots of fun and improve your game at the same time.

Now just to get you into cricket here is a brief history of the game:

A rudimentary form of the sport can be traced back to the 12th century. Written evidence exists for a sport known as creag being played by Prince Edward, the son of Edward I, in England in around 1300. In 1598 there was a reference to the sport of cricket being played by boys at the Royal Grammar School, Guildford. This is generally considered to be the first mention of cricket in the English language. A number of words are thought to be possible sources for the term cricket. The name may derive from a term for the cricket bat: old French criquet (meaning a kind of club) or Flemish krick(e) (meaning a stick) or in old English cricc or cryce (meaning a crutch or staff). Alternatively, the French criquet apparently derives from the Flemish word krickstoel, which is a long low stool on which one kneels in church and which resembles the long low wicket with two stumps used in early cricket.

From the mid-17th to the 18th century, cricket transformed from being a children's game to one played by men for bets. Old Coulsdon hosted the first ever cricket match with three stumps and two bails. The Coulsdon and Caterham Team were a pretty confident bunch, laying out a bullish all-comers challenge in 1731 to beat any 11 men in England. Around 1750, a cricket club was formed in Hambledon, Hampshire. In 1788, the Marylebone Cricket Club framed the first set of rules to govern matches played between English counties.

Cricket entered an epochal era in 1961, when English counties modified the rules to provide a variant match form that produced an expedited result: games with a restricted number of overs per side. This gained widespread popularity and resulted in the birth of one-day international (ODI) matches in 1971. The governing International Cricket Council quickly adopted the new form and held the first ODI Cricket World Cup in 1975. Since then, ODI matches have gained mass spectatorship, at the expense of the longer form of the game and to the consternation of fans who prefer the longer form of the game. As of the early 2000s, however, the longer form of cricket is experiencing a growing resurgence in popularity.

The game of cricket has also spawned a set of matches with modified rules to attract more fans. The 'Twenty20' rule can be an example of cricket rule modification, since this particular modification enforces a 20 overs per inning, which makes the game rather shorter, to maximise the attention of the fans. These matches are not recognised by the ICC as official matches. Other variants of the sport exist and are played in areas as diverse as on sandy beaches or on ice.