Birkenhead Park’s fate will finally be decided tonight at a special meeting of Love Lane Liverpool Competition clubs.

The SGM was called by Park in an attempt to halve their 80-point penalty for fielding an ineligible player in the summer.

The sanction – imposed in the run-up to their final game of the season, away at 2021 champions Northern – left Tom Foster’s side in the relegation places. They had been fifth in the table before their breach of the rules was revealed.

Tonight’s motion, if carried by a two-thirds majority of clubs present and voting, will see Park stay up at the expense of New Brighton.

The club’s case

The player in question, Australian seamer Bailey Jones, stepped up a level to Park’s 1st XI when their overseas pro, Pakistani all-rounder Safi Abdullah, was absent.

Jones had only been registered to play 2nd and 3rd XI cricket at the start of the season, so his appearances in the 1st XI without permission were a breach of the Comp’s regulations.

But the club insists Jones did not improve the 1st XI measurably. In contrast to Safi, he is strictly an amateur, playing for the love of the game.

In Safi’s 13 league games, he took 41 wickets at an average of 19 and hit more sixes than all but one batter in the Premier Division. Jones played eight games, in which he took six wickets at 45 each. Without any disrespect to Jones, the only thing the two have in common is their overseas status.

Safi left mid-season to join the Muzaffarabad Tigers squad in the Kashmiri Premier League T20 competition; however, he did not play a game for the franchise and returned to the Park side for their season closer at Moor Park. Cricket Archive’s exhaustive database doesn’t have him playing a single game for another side during his time on Park’s books.

The club accepts the rules were inadvertently broken; however, they believe the sanction – calculated as 20 points per victory with Jones in the side – was too severe. 

They feel aggrieved at the way in which their penalty was revealed in the last week of the season, given Jones first played for the 1st XI back in May, and say they weren’t given a realistic chance of survival.

In a letter to all Comp clubs calling for support, the club added: “Relegating the fifth best team in the Premier Division would be seriously damaging for the integrity and standard of such a widely respected league.”

The league’s case

The league says the sanction has already been mitigated. A strict application of the regulations would have cost Park 461 points and had implications for the whole table; instead, the penalty was reduced substantially.

The league’s committee accepts there was no deceit on the club’s part. But it insists the rules regarding registration are there for a reason.

Two Premier Division clubs moved an overseas player between XIs over the course of the season – Southport & Birkdale’s Bajan all-rounder Romario Brathwaite and New Brighton’s Australian wicketkeeper-batter Luke Terry. Neither club fielded another overseas player all season – the league granted them permission on this basis.

S&B hedged their bets over the quality of Brathwaite, who is in the UK on a student visa – he played one game for the 2nd XI in April but was confirmed as a 1st XI player mid-season, and didn’t step back down. 

Terry moved up a level when New Brighton’s overseas pro didn’t arrive in time due to a visa backlog at the Home Office. The same issue delayed Formby’s Ankit Kalsi – the Cricket Path side withdrew a request to promote Aussie bowler Tom Stacy to the 1st XI when the league told them this would mean Kalsi couldn’t be registered.

So Park were the only club in the Premier Division to field more than one overseas player over the course of the season. 

Had they made a request for Jones to fill in when Safi left, the league would likely have turned it down – if a request had been made and accepted, Safi would have not been allowed to return. 

The meeting

But Safi is not the reason Park were sanctioned. The issue before the 35 full member clubs tonight is whether their breach of the regulations in promoting Jones to the 1st XI has been fairly punished.

None of this is ideal. Clubs in the Second Division, untouched by all the drama, might reasonably ask what it has to do with them; similarly, it will be hard for some to overlook their own interests.

Park will be boosted next year by the return of Satyajeet Bachhav, the Indian spinner who took 87 league wickets at 8.66 each during their promotion season of 2021. First Division clubs could be forgiven for thinking it’s time for him to test himself in the Prem in 2023, and voting accordingly.

But the SGM is means to an end. For Park, it’s the only way they can avoid an ignominious end to a hugely successful season, in which they’ve won a lot of admirers as well as a lot of matches; for the league, whose hands are somewhat tied by the regulations, it’s a chance for the various competing interests to scrap it out between themselves.

And from a neutral perspective, the saga which has overshadowed the end of the season – alongside that of Newton-le-Willows, who accepted their relegation after initially trying to fight a similar deduction – will finally be over.