61-club Yorkshire Cricket Southern Premier League to launch in 2021 as merger is sealed

LOCAL cricket is set for a fresh start in 2021 after two leagues agreed to joined forces.

Clubs in the Yorkshire South Premier League (YSPL) and the South Yorkshire Senior Cricket League (SYSCL) have voted overwhelmingly to merge their two leagues into a new Yorkshire Cricket Southern Premier League (YCSPL).

The YCSPL will comprise 61 clubs, fielding a total of 124 teams in Saturday league cricket, mainly across South Yorkshire, but reaching also to South Kirkby and Wakefield in West Yorkshire, Cleethorpes and Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire, and Coal Aston in Derbyshire.

The new league will have two sections:

• the Premier Section will be two divisions, the Premier Division and the Championship Division, which will be formed from the existing YSPL and the SYSCL Championship respectively.

• the Senior Section will have eight divisions, currently SYSCL divisions one to eight.

The management of the League will be in the hands of an Executive Board which will be responsible for the overall governance and for common functions such as finance, participation and safeguarding, while the two sections will have separate Cricket Committees to be responsible for day-to-day administration.

The membership of the Executive Board and the Cricket Committees will be formalised over the next few weeks and the new league will come into existence from December 1 in order that it can be fully operational in time for the 2021 season.

YSPL interim chairman Matt Summerhill said: “We believe that a single league, as part of the Yorkshire Cricket Pyramid, will put cricket in the South Yorkshire area in the strongest possible position for the future.

“The merger will enable us to have unified decision-making and communication processes and to make economies of scale, and will put us on the same footing as most of the country’s other Premier Leagues, which include feeder leagues as part of their structure."

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