ECB City Cup: Leeds and Bradford
This summer, Leeds and Bradford teams have a battled it out in the ECB City cup and what a summer it has been.
The ECB City Cup is a talent identification programme and is an alternative way for players who might not have been spotted to play at a profession level and the competition allows individuals to showcase the skills they have. The competition also gives participants a taste of what playing professional sport is like.
After a series of trials in both Leeds and Bradford, back in May, each city chose a squad of 15 to participate in the competition and hosted training sessions and warm up fixtures in preparation.
Pictured above: Bradford City Cup team
The competition was structured as follows:
Area finals:
Teams: Bradford, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle
Location: The area finals were hosted at Bradford Park Avenue (Newcastle v Bradford) and Bowling Old Lane (Manchester v Leeds).
Winners: Leeds and Bradford
Regional finals
Teams: Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Wolverhampton
Location: Derbyshire
Winners: Wolverhampton, Bradford
National finals
Location: The ECB elite performance grounds at Loughborough University
Teams: Wolverhampton and Bradford, South London, East London
Pictured above: Leeds City Cup Team
Following the competition, two players from the Leeds team (Waseem Qureshi and Shamsullah Dost) and four players from the Bradford team (Saqif Ali, Jacob Philips, Seif Hussain, Mohammed Waheb) were selected to attend development days at Loughborough Cricket centre, with elite coaches. On the first day, players were put through their paces in a fielding session and the second day saw them play a 50 overs game, with the third day concluding in a T20 format game. The purpose of this was to give players the opportunity to experience what playing professional cricket is like.
Each year the ECB Cup evolves and expands to give players opportunities, but also to challenge them to perform to their best standard.
To find out more about the ECB City Cup, please see below contacts. To find out more about our participation work, please visit the Our Work section of the Yorkshire Cricket Foundation website.
Sohail.Raz@yorkshirecricketfoundation.com (Leeds)
Nasa.Hussain@yorkshirecricketfoundation.com (Bradford)