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Gloucestershire's cricketers trek through the Beacons

The Brecon Beacons in Wales are as bleak and lonely a landscape as Britain has, where the Royal Marines test their physical endurance and where the SAS trek 40 gruelling miles to whittle out the weaklings in their infamous Long Drag

Will Luke
Will Luke
25-Feb-2013




The Brecon Beacons in Wales are as bleak and lonely a landscape as Britain has, where the Royal Marines test their physical endurance and where the SAS trek 40 gruelling miles to whittle out the weaklings in their infamous Long Drag. Not a place for cricketers, then - or is it? Tom Davies and a group of Gloucestershire's academy players have been spotted up there with guttering pipe, bamboo and rope:
The first station was quite simple to find, the piece of equipment was a piece of guttering pipe. Then all of the other stations were hard but a good challenge of your map reading skills. We ended up on the top of Sugarloaf Mountain with a piece of guttering pipe, piece of rope, big bottle of water and 2 pieces of bamboo canes.
In my eyes this was a very good challenge as it showed how we could work as a team i.e. following maps, listening to what the team members have to say. Even though my team came last I thought that we worked well together but we failed to read instructions properly as did other teams which cost us a couple of time penalties.
We then were given a challenge at the top of the mountain. In our teams we had to try and get a table tennis ball out from a pipe and place it in a small circle within the big circle however there were a few ground rules, there was the big circle I would say it was about three meters to the middle all the way round, we were not allowed to step inside this circle, the tube was situated in the middle of the circle. We had to think things through as a team. Our plan was to rest the piece of guttering pipe on the tube and run the water down into the tube so the table tennis ball would float up to the top. Unfortunately we ran out of water so we had to send two team members for some more supplies, luckily I found three orange juice cartons in my bag and we used those however it was still not enough. Eventually they returned and we got the ball to the top of the tube. Our task then was to get the ball without touching the ground into the small circle. Our plan was to get it in the guttering pipe and then control it into the small circle unfortunately this did not happen and we failed the task.
Find out how they got on at Gloucestershire's website.

Will Luke is assistant editor of ESPNcricinfo