Cobo mark anniversary in entrepreneurial style

AS IDEAS go, it is typically Cobo. Publishing your own history book and celebrating 50 years of the club in the biggest possible way sums up probably the island's most entrepreneurial and successful one.

The book, The First 50 Years, will be followed by two big dinners and a match against the Rest of the World. But, as it recalls, they didn't always have such big ideas.

The club was formed in May 1957 after social games of cricket on the common at Vazon. Amazingly, I was doing the same thing a little more than 20 years ago and as I put it to club stalwart, father figure (in more ways than one) and Cobo club chairman Brian Le Prevost, it recalls more innocent times.

'I remember seeing them,' he said. 'Some of them were not in the first flush of youth - there were guys in their thirties playing.'

They moved around as the club formalised, with games at Home Farm and Saumarez Park, lubricated by VB from the Rockmount, and when they joined the leagues, they ended up far from home in the Fort Field.

But it didn't take long for Cobo to enjoy success - in Division One by 1962, where they caused a stir by bringing along raucous fans to the KGV, and became champions in 1967 after just a decade in existence.

And though it has been far from unbroken success ever since, the club have always been around the challenge for trophies.

They have developed youth talent, often from their own geographical patch - though sometimes the drive to wave signing-on forms at the best youngsters has earned them criticism - and the ever-present opportunities for trophies has also been a magnet for the best, whatever their age.

But, almost amazingly, these guys very often fit the Cobo mould.

A multi title-winning side from 2005 line up in one picture in the book. Half the team are home grown, alongside guys like Justin Ferbrache, Mark Renouf, Matt Oliver and Peter Vidamour. They did not grow up with Cobo, but you simply couldn't really imagine them shining in the same way somewhere else.

Equally, other top players have not cut it at Cobo.

Le Prevost himself led a campaign in the late 1970s to get rid of some of the unpopular players who didn't fit in with what he repeatedly calls the Cobo 'ethos'.

I think that ethos can be best described through his son Stuart, fittingly the first -team captain in this 50th year.

A great player - that was obvious from his first days at 13/14 as a team-mate of mine in Cobo B - to me he also sums up Cobo cricket.

It might not always be subtle or mysterious, but it is all about those traditional club virtues of guts, effort, attitude, ability, commitment and the happy knack of doing the right thing at the right time -- mostly virtues Stuart's predecessors on the Vazon common would recognise.

The book itself is a good read, well illustrated, and you can't help but reflect on the fact that no other club have ever produced so many Guernsey Press reporters.

All of them but me contribute and it is a fitting tribute to the club.

Although my limited talent and the riches available to the club meant that my stay at Cobo was just four very happy years before I sought greater opportunity elsewhere, this book helps to remind me and the hundreds of others over 50 years realise we were lucky and privileged to be even the smallest part of its history.