The Bush beat New Farnley by five wickets at Wormsley on 13 September, the first Middlesex club to win the national cup since Teddington in 1991.

Shepherds Bush Cricket Club has won the biggest prize in English club cricket for the first time in 144 years.

The Bush beat New Farnley of Leeds by five wickets in the national final at Wormsley Cricket Ground in Buckinghamshire on Sunday 13 September. Middlesex Cricket, the county board, confirmed it as the first Middlesex club to lift the trophy since Teddington in 1991.

The competition is the ECB National Club Championship, run under the sponsor name the Rothesay National Club Championship. It is the national knockout for club sides, and the Bush have never won their own league. The club was one of the 16 founding members of the Middlesex County Cricket League in the 1970s and has not won it since.

One thing worth being clear about, because the club’s name says otherwise. Shepherds Bush CC has not played in Shepherd’s Bush for a very long time. Its ground is at Bromyard Avenue in Acton, in the London Borough of Ealing, about a mile and a half north west of Shepherd’s Bush Green. Before that it spent 120 years at East Acton Lane. The name is where the club started in 1882.

How the final was won

Rain shaped the whole day. Middlesex Cricket’s account of the match is the fullest first-hand record published, and it sets out the sequence.

  • Shepherds Bush won the toss and chose to field.
  • Rain stopped play in the seventh over. The wait was 48 minutes.
  • Alex Blofield took three wickets. Two came in consecutive balls in the 22nd over, one a caught and bowled, the next a juggling catch behind by Fin Trenouth.
  • Rain returned with New Farnley on 162 for 5 and the umpires called an early lunch.
  • The match restarted as a 15-over innings with a Duckworth Lewis Stern target of 106.
  • Idris Otto Mian hit 14 off the first over and went on to make 34.
  • Adam Chislett came in and hit 21 off his first eight balls.
  • Four runs were needed off the final over. Chislett hit them, with three balls to spare.

Chislett had already hit the winning runs against East Molesey and against Teddington earlier in the same run.

Panel of figures from the final: New Farnley 162 for 5 from 36 overs, rain-revised target of 106 from 15 overs, Shepherds Bush won by five wickets with three balls to spare
The 2026 national club final at Wormsley, from Middlesex Cricket's match report.
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The council’s own account of the day differs slightly on two numbers. It puts the revised target at 105 and has the Bush finishing on 108 for 5 with four deliveries left. We have used the county board’s figures above and flag the difference rather than pick a side.

The road there

The club came through a group and four knockout rounds.

  • Group 11: beat Finchley, Banbury and East Molesey.
  • National first round: beat Bath, the 2021 champions, with a five-wicket haul from Chinmay Mullapudi and an unbeaten 110 from wicketkeeper Fin Trenouth.
  • Quarter-final: beat Teddington by four wickets. Teddington were bowled out for 199, Ramon Bailey taking 4 for 36 and Mullapudi 3 for 25. Marcus Howard made a fifty.
  • Semi-final, 23 August: won away.
  • Final, 13 September: beat New Farnley by five wickets.

Club president Alf Langley said the first team had “achieved something no previous generation in our 144-year history had managed”. Langley is not a bystander in that history. The club’s own record has him captaining the Bush on and off for 17 years and leading the side that won the Middlesex knockout cup in 1981.

The captain for most of the season, Alistair Easton, was ruled out by injury for the last two rounds. His deputy Fin Trenouth led the side at Wormsley.

A club that nearly lost its ground

The Bush almost did not survive to have this season.

The club’s own history records that in 1998 its landlords since 1882, the Goldsmiths’ Company, sold the East Acton Lane ground with five days’ notice to a fitness club operator. By 2000 the club had agreed a phased departure from a ground it had used for 120 years. The bowls section closed.

Virgin Active, developing its own site nearby, offered land to the south of the old ground. A new square was laid in 2003 and the Bush started playing there in 2004, with portacabins for a pavilion. A committee then raised £300,000 from Ealing Council, the England and Wales Cricket Board, the London Marathon Charitable Trust, John Lyon’s Charity and the Foundation for Sport and the Arts. The modular pavilion was built in Hull, delivered on eight lorries and put up as a shell in six hours one wet March Monday in 2006.

The club says its research makes that the first brand new cricket ground laid in a London borough since the Second World War. That is the club’s claim rather than an independent finding, but the sequence of events behind it is set out in full on its own site.

What it means for you

  • The club is recruiting, and paying. Middlesex Cricket is advertising a head of women’s and girls’ cricket at the Bush, £7,500 a year as a self employed contractor, roughly ten hours a week in season and three to four out of it. Minimum one year, available immediately.
  • The female section is already large. The advert puts it at more than 80 girls across five age groups, and over 30 women across a softball team and two hardball teams in the Derick Morgan League and the Sheila Hill League.
  • Do not use the old club web address. The domain shepherdsbushcc.co.uk now redirects to an unrelated gambling site. The club’s live site is on the England and Wales Cricket Board’s own platform at shepherdsbush.play-cricket.com.
  • Getting there. Bromyard Avenue runs north off Uxbridge Road in Acton. It is outside this borough, so the council’s parking rules do not apply there. Ours are on our parking in Fulham page.

For more to do locally, see our things to do in Fulham page.

Sources