Challengers Win the LPL Fair Play Award 2026

A first season gives a club plenty to be proud of and not much to put on a shelf. Ours ended with both. Challengers Cricket Club has been awarded the London Premier League Fair Play Award 2026 for T30 Division 2, presented at the League's Division 2 presentation ceremony.

The award comes with a trophy and a $200 prize. Printed along the bottom of the cheque are the League's own three words for what it is meant to stand for: sportsmanship, respect and integrity. We did not know the award existed when the season started, which is probably the right way to win it.

Why this one means something to a first-year club

Results take time. A new club cannot decide to be good in its first year — it has to find players, learn the grounds, work out who bowls when, and lose a few games figuring it out. Conduct is the one thing that is available from day one. How you treat an umpire on a call that goes against you, how you talk to an opposition batter having a bad morning, whether you turn up on time and with eleven players — none of that requires experience. It only requires deciding to.

So of everything the club could have been given at the end of a debut season, this is the one that says the most about the group. It was not won by our best players. It was won by all of them, in every fixture, including the ones we lost.

The season behind it

In the London Premier League we finished the Division 2 league stage inside the top four and reached the semi-final in our very first season. In the London Cricket League we finished sixth in the T30 Premier Division — a competitive placing in a division we had never played in before, against clubs with years of history in it.

Twenty-six T30 fixtures across the two leagues, early starts at Silverwoods, long afternoons at Northridge and NLAF, and a squad that kept showing up for each other from May to September.

Thank you

To the London Premier League for the award, and for making room for a brand-new club in its first year. To the umpires who stood through the whole summer, and to every opposition side we played — an award like this is only ever earned in front of other people, and it is their season as much as ours.

And to our players. You are the reason the club has this. Thank you.

Registration for 2027 is open. If you want to play for a club that plays it this way, have a look at the 2027 season.