Firstly, congratulations to both the 1's and the 7's who both currently stand second in their respective divisions (both with games in hand) having both ground out hard earned victories at the weekend.  This really demonstrates the strength we are developing throughout the whole club, and it is very good to see.

However, that does bring me on to my issue this week, and that is availability and selection.  Last week was one of the worst weeks for putting together a teamsheet that I can recall.  The main issue was that we had around 20 players unavailable around the middle of the club, and as you can imagine this did cause quite a few problems.  It wasn't just the initial unavailables that were the issue, but the growing number of cry offs that occured during the week - some of which were cases of players just not advising that they were unavailable in the first place.  I would like to pay great credit to all of the captains who worked very hard last week to try and resolve a situation that threw up fresh challenges each day.  There were times that they thought that they had their side sorted only for another batch of cry offs and call ups to shatter their team and cause them to start again.  I can really share their frustration here and have great sympathy, and we are now working behind the scenes to try and improve here.  There was far too much time wasted on putting teams together last week, and lets face it we all have busy lives and this is definitely something we can do without.  So how can players help.  Well basically by clearly communicating their availability to their respective captains. I have no doubt that some of the absences last week were down to injury, sickness and late work arrangements, but many of them would have been know substantially well in advance.  Like us the SAL has people who work very hard behind the scenes to ensure we have a well run and enjoyable league, and this especially includes the league fixture secretary.  The SAL are not ogres and will always try and help clubs when required - their aim is to ensure the games are played as fairly as possible.  Thus, if we know 3 weeks in advance that half a side is missing, we can talk to the SAL and they will work with us and try to help us as much as they are able.  We cannot however expect them to change a complete set of fixtures at a weeks notice because we can't be bothered to sort out our availability.  So if you are aware that you will not be available at some time in the future, or even that a group of you are on, for example, a stag weekend then please let either your captain or me know asap so we can try and take the appropriate action.  additionally, please ensure every week that on a Saturday you confirm your availability (or otherwise) for the following week.  This will save everyone so much time and we can then concentrate on other things.  Please do not let last week ever happen again.

There is no doubt that as a club we are taking huge strides forward, but we still seem to have episodes and issues like the above that are letting us down and sometimes holding us back.  Let's concentrate on eradicating those, so that we can really push on and enjoy the heights that the 1's and 7's are currently leading us to.

 Steve Martin-Lawrence, Chairman