Guernsey Cricket Board nominate Johnson as next chairman

Fifteen years on from captaining Guernsey to a historic Siam Cup victory in Jersey, Johnson, who plays for Wanderers and whose sons are keen cricketers, has been proposed by the Guernsey Cricket Board as their next chairman to fill the vacancy left by David Nussbaumer’s decision to not stand for re-election after nearly eight years at the helm.

In releasing notice of their annual meeting yesterday, the GCB revealed that, at present, Johnson would stand unopposed although there is still time for other nominations to be submitted, with the deadline being 14 days prior to the AGM on Monday 7 December.

The election of a new chairman and the ratification of Philippa Stahelin as the board’s first female member will be the biggest issues of business that evening.

On the playing side of things, GCB chief executive Mark Latter reported yesterday that there may have been a silver lining to the Covid-hit 2020 season.

‘It did not hurt in terms of participation numbers, with some people getting back into cricket as they wanted to do something while the restrictions were in place,’ he said.

‘We recently had a meeting with the clubs to look at what is going to happen next year and the introduction to that meeting was basically us saying to them, “do not think that availability of players might continue”, otherwise there was a danger of clubs entering too many teams then not being able to fulfil fixtures if and when people can get off-island again.

‘But we are expecting perhaps a couple of new teams in the Bowl, one in the Weekend Championship and possibly one or two in the Evening League.’