I WOULD like to thank local cricket top man Ray Eccleshare for declaring in Tuesday's Bolton Evening News that the town's grass roots game will disappear in five years.

Ray was following a theme that I raised here a couple of years ago that something had to be done to put some interest back into Bolton's two leagues, the League and the Association.

Now while I was speaking as an outsider looking in, Ray is a man who really knows the scene, having been involved at the sharp end of the local game for 30 years, first as a player and, then for the last few years, as team manager of the League's top club Tonge.

Kids are not interested, he says. Apparently they prefer playing their computer games or going out drinking with their mates.

Also, playing between 2pm and 8pm every Saturday and Sunday for half the year, is turning people off as they decide they have other things to do.

Hence a lot of teams are even struggling just to get a team out.

It's good that Ray has said how it is because if the status quo is allowed to go on it can only be bad news for the League - and the Association which has been going for more than a hundred years.

Where Ray and myself coincide with our previously stated arguments is that the League and Association must merge and create two divisions to inject some much-needed competition into the game.

It is radical but it needs something radical or local cricket will go the same way as the Bolton Combination and Horwich Sunday League has done in local football circles and disappear.

Cricket is not the same as football, of course. But the threat of relegation and the promise of promotion creates interest in any sport and has to be better than the situation we have now where many clubs in both leagues have little or nothing to play for all season.