Irvine Cricket Club brought down the curtain on a season like no other as the coronavirus pandemic played havoc with their schedule.

For a large part of the year it looked like no cricket would be possible at all after the sport’s governing body, Cricket Scotland, cancelled the domestic league and cup season in May due to the pandemic.

However, by June outdoor training had resumed along with interclub games before August saw the return of competitive fixtures against other teams in the area as part of a secure bubble with strict safety measures in place.

The club’s junior convenor, Derek Neill, said players were just glad to get back playing.

He said: “It is a completely different experience playing with restrictions but going from potentially having no cricket at all to around eight weeks of games was good for all of us.

“It was a bit of pain that everyone had to travel themselves especially for the guys who stayed in Glasgow and the surrounding areas and we could not use changing facilities. The rules were strict, but they allowed us to play cricket. You had to sanitise before and after and even during the game and the ball needed sanitised every 20 minutes.

“From a financial perspective we lost our club dinner which is roughly 75 per cent of our fundraising and we had signed a deal for an overseas player to join us for five years who would also have trained the kids and went into schools but that’s been put on hold until next year.”

He added: “It was good to get some cricket in as for the first two or three months of the season there was no hope of us playing but we got off lightly because it was an outdoor sport and we were the first sport to get back at the sport’s club but it was a very curtailed season and it doesn’t look like it will get any easier next season.”