Don's review
Well then .. where do we start? The day of the Sportsman's Dinner saw some of P&W's finest early doors down at the cricket club sticking up the flags and sorting out the raffle prizes. Winston, Tommy and Billy were our security men for the evening and what a brilliant job they did. Kevin arrived early and spent the first half hour in the VIP lounge signing autographs and having pictures taken. Although our intention was not to have people getting autographs when he was on stage, it went a bit pear shaped but Kev was up for it. There were a couple of knobheads who couldn't take their drink and were determined to spoil other people's enjoyment but they didn't and were soon sorted out. Instead of doing a Q & A session, Kevin did a 40 minute stand up routine and was fantastic. James H Reeve was the compere and was superb. Alistair Mclntosh, Marcelle, Dennis Tueart and Steve Womack completed the top table line up. The staff at the cricket club were fantastic and couldn't do enough for us. Out of the 418 people in the audience, 325 took part in the £10 raffle draw which was fantastic and £3,250 (I think) was made on the draw itself; £1,710 was made on the ticket sales and well over £1,000 was made on the auction bringing the grand total to about £6,000 which was about £1,000 more than our target. Several donations to the Children's Charity were made on the night and City Engineering Ltd donated 2200. A presentation was made to Kevin and Dennis as well as to Marcelle.

Guests in the audience included Tommy Booth, Paddy Fagan, Ian Cheeseman, Chris Bailey, Mark Halsey (the Gillingham ref), Andy Buckley. It was truly a brilliant evening and we certainly hope to repeat the event next year. We are sure that everyone enjoyed themselves. See you all in August.
Don On behalf of the Branch Committee
KEVIN KEEGAN SPORTSMAN'S DINNER
- THE BACKGROUND
Through the CSA, we first muted the idea of inviting Kev to a Sportsman's Evening at the end of last season. The response from the Club (not Kev) was lukewarm. This season we started again in earnest and just before Christmas got a very encouraging letter from Kevin and had to contact him in the New Year. Chris Bird replied to my letter stating that Kevin wouldn't be able to attend.
A few days later I met Kevin and John at a function at Maine Road and took the liberty of asking him personally if he would like to attend. He immediately accepted the invitation and the wheels were set in motion to embark on our biggest fundraising event in our branch's history.
We quickly established the organisations who would benefit from the evening and that is were the hard work began. Fortunately there were many volunteers from the CSA Committee plus the usual people from our branch rallying round to make it a brilliant event. Our mate Geoff Durbin, Commercial Manager at Lancashire County Cricket Club was well pleased that the Club would hold such a prestigious event. The tickets and tables were soon sold and paid for (although one Sales Dept were long overdue in paying up!). David Chell from Maine Road donated a great prize, Shaun Wright Phillips donated his boots and Margaret got us a signed ball and shirt. Although we were raising money for the Youth Academy we were stunned that we had to write three times to Jim Cassell before we got a reply (did someone else open his mail?).
All the branches that were attending donated great prizes and the Portadown branch who weren't attending sent over a signed ball. We had a brilliant programme printed for the night and arranged security through MCFC.

Stop press ..... Jim Cassell personally phoned Don up to thank us for our fundraising efforts and sent us a signed academy shirt. Top bloke. Cheers Jim.

Please visit our PHOTO ALBUM for images from the night