Northern Meeting Park will see 160-year tenants Northern Counties Cricket Club return for 2025 season after year away due to refurbishments
Northern Counties Cricket Club say they expect no issues as they prepare to return to their home of 160 years.
The oldest cricket club in the Highland capital were in an unusual position last summer, as their home ground of Northern Meeting Park was closed for a multi-million pound refurbishment.
Instead, they had to groundshare with city rivals Highland at Fraser Park for a year, with the intention of returning home for the 2025 season.
With the development works well under way and new events already in the works for the new-look Meeting Park later this year, the club’s cricketers are looking forward to getting back to familiar, if upgraded, surroundings.
Club president Matthew Latimer has been on site visits to see how the development has been coming along, and says the improvements are long overdue.
“Obviously the facilities have needed updated for some time, so I think people are looking forward to seeing what they are like,” Latimer explained.
“Hopefully that will help to continue develop the club and bring some extra interest, and will also help us get some more things happening at the park which would be great.
“We might not be back in for the very start of the season, but after maybe the first month of the season we should be back in the ground.
“What will happen is still to be confirmed, but the proposition we’re going with is to play away for the first three or four weeks. We might not even need to do that, but that’s what we’re preparing for at the moment.
“It looks like it’s going to be a really nice facility when it’s finished. There won’t be any change to the actual cricket field, but we’ll have some nice updated training facilities and changing rooms, so it should be good.
“Where the old kiosk was, there’s now a pavilion that has been put in. We still intend to use the old changing rooms, but there will be a changing room and a kitchen in there that we can use too. That’s probably the only major difference from an aesthetic point of view that people will notice.”
The year away from Northern Meeting Park did not seem to affect Northern Counties’ fortunes on the pitch last summer.
They still lifted the North of Scotland Senior League and Senior Cup titles, while also making it to the final of the T20 Cup where they were defeated by Highland.
However, Latimer says that success does not detract from the buzz that will come with getting back to the Meeting Park this year.
“It was strange not being at the Meeting Park,” he reasoned.
“There were a few challenges in terms of training, which had to move to different nights because Highland train on the same nights as we used to.
“We also happened to lose a few people who had been playing regularly at the same time as we were moving ground, just from people who were taking a break or who had moved jobs.
“It wasn’t the best year for us to also not have the ground, but overall I think the club coped pretty well. On the pitch it was still pretty successful, but I think we’re all looking forward to going back.”