Days of work, and an hour of rain

27 Aug 2026

Inteb is the cricket cover sponsor at Old Parkonians in Prenton for the 2026 season. On what the covers protect, and what the sponsorship supports.

Our cricket cover sponsorship at Old Parkonians began this season, and earlier this summer the Inteb team spent the day at the club on Holm Lane in Prenton. It was our team day out, and it doubled as a first proper look at something carrying our name.

Inteb is the cricket cover sponsor at Old Parkonians for the 2026 season. There were other places we could have put our name. We liked this one, and it is worth explaining why.

What the cricket cover sponsorship supports

Old Parkonians is a non-profit. The Association runs cricket and rugby from the same clubhouse on Holm Lane, and anything left at the end of a year goes back into the club rather than out of it.

Sponsorship money is part of what keeps that possible. In practice it means the club can keep offering cricket to players of every age and standard, which at Old Parkonians covers a good deal of ground. A junior cricket programme for children just starting out and the age group sides that bring them through. Women’s softball. Two Saturday league teams in the Cheshire Cricket League. A Sunday development side and a midweek team, both of which exist so that people who are new to the game, or short on time, or simply want to play without the pressure of a league fixture, still have somewhere to turn up.

That range is harder to sustain than a single first team, and it is the part that depends most on the club having funds behind it.

Why cricket cover sponsorship rather than a board by the boundary

As for why our name sits on the covers rather than a board by the boundary, it comes down to what covers do.

A cricket square takes days to prepare properly. Mowing, rolling, watering, marking. At a club like this the person doing it is a volunteer giving up evenings, and the difference between a good wicket and a poor one is almost entirely down to that work.

Rain can undo it in an hour. Not because the shower lasts, but because an exposed square stays unplayable long after the sky clears. Without covers, a wet Saturday morning takes out a game that would have been perfectly playable by two o’clock.

Covers are what stops that happening. They protect the square while the weather passes, and they are the reason a club can look at a forecast and still expect to play. That is why they sit near the top of most clubs’ equipment lists, and it is also why they are expensive enough that a volunteer-run club has to plan carefully to afford them.

The effect runs through the whole season. More fixtures completed. More junior sessions that go ahead as planned, which matters more than it sounds, because children who turn up three weeks running tend to keep coming and children whose sessions keep getting called off quietly drift away.

Put simply, covers turn a fixture list into a season. That felt like the right thing to have our name on.

Why this club

Old Parkonians sits a few minutes from our office in Birkenhead, which mattered to us more than it might sound. There are bigger names to sponsor and louder places to put a logo. The advantage of a club on your doorstep is that you can walk in on a Saturday afternoon and see exactly where the money went.

There is also a rugby section sharing the same ground, with junior teams running from under sevens upwards, so the clubhouse is busy well beyond the cricket season.

It is the sort of place that keeps going because a small number of people put in a lot of unpaid hours. Sponsorship is one of the few ways a local business can make those hours go further.

The team day

We could have taken the team anywhere for the summer day out. Choosing the club we had just started supporting meant an afternoon on a ground we had helped keep playable, which felt considerably better than a generic activity somewhere none of us had any connection to.

It is also worth saying plainly that our people spend most of their weeks apart, on client sites and in buildings scattered across the country. Getting everybody in the same place, outdoors, with no laptops, is not a small thing. It was a good day.

The photograph rather makes the argument for us. Thirty of us stood behind a rain cover, under a sky doing its best to prove why the club wanted one.

“What sold it to us was the range of cricket the club puts on. Junior programmes through to two league sides, women’s softball, midweek and Sunday teams for anybody who wants a game. Keeping that going takes money, and sponsorship is a straightforward way for a local business to help. Putting our name on the covers made sense on top of that, because most of our own work comes down to protecting what a client has already invested.”

Tom Kelly, Managing Director

There is a version of this we recognise from the day job. A great deal of what we do for clients comes down to protecting work that has already been paid for, so that a building performs the way it was intended to rather than quietly losing ground.

The principle is the same at Holm Lane. Somebody does the work. Something needs to protect it.

The sponsorship itself does something rather broader, which is to help a club keep the game open to anyone who fancies turning up, whatever their age or standard.

The picture we like best is the covers sitting at the edge of the ground on a summer evening with a game going on behind them. Covers off, play on. That is the whole point of them.

Good luck to Old Parkonians for the rest of the 2026 season, and here is to a full fixture list.