About
A message from the President
J. J. F. Grant · President, Hampshire Hogs Cricket Club
My love affair with the Hampshire Hogs began on 19th June 1978. I was sixteen years old — a Hogget — and my role that day was to manage the car park for the match against the New Zealand touring side. The day before, they had played at Arundel Castle against Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk’s XI. They were packed with Test stars: Hadlee, Congdon, Wright, Burgess, Cairns. I stood in the sunshine at Warnford, directing cars, and thought: this is the finest place on earth.
Forty-eight years later, I still think so. And I am still fighting for it.
The Hampshire Hogs is not just a cricket club. It is a way of life — one built on declaration cricket played in the right spirit, on one of the most beautiful private grounds in England, by people who understand that what happens at the crease matters less than the handshake at the end of the game. The batsman builds an innings; the bowler takes wickets; and at close of play, opponents part as friends. That is what we are. That is what we have always been.
But great institutions do not sustain themselves. Ten years ago, the Hogs faced an existential moment — dwindling Hoggets, an ageing playing membership, and a committee that met rarely and delivered little. On a Sunday afternoon, I sat down and wrote a business plan. Nick Foot did the same, independently and simultaneously, equally exasperated. We took the best of both, rewrote the rules, and set about rebuilding the Hoggets from a spreadsheet and a handful of family names. We held a round table at the Road Hotel in Winchester. Roger Hunt sat there as President, wearing his Hog blazer as any President should, supporting every step of what we were doing.
For the first six or seven years of that revival, I personally sponsored the club’s administrative support. It was not a loan. It was a gift — because I believed in what the Hogs could be, and because I knew that without proper foundations, the rebuilding would not hold.
That rebuilding gave us what we have today: a thriving Hoggets programme, a women’s side, a fixture list the envy of wandering clubs across the country, and a ground that visitors consistently describe as among the finest they have ever played on. We are, quietly and without boast, in the same company as Arundel and Wormsley. This is the inheritance we are charged to protect.
Now we must build on it. My ambition for the Hampshire Hogs is straightforward: to make Warnford a happy place again — full of kindred spirits, fierce cricket, and the kind of laughter that lasts a lifetime. To inspire a new generation of sixteen-year-olds to stand at this ground and feel what I felt in 1978. To ensure that the Hoggets, the women’s side, and the junior programme give every young cricketer a pathway into something that will shape them for the rest of their lives.
There is much to do. The finances require attention. The events programme must be revived. Girls’ and women’s cricket must be properly embedded. The social fabric of the club — the winter dinners, the tours, the six-a-side, the lunches that used to define a match day — must be renewed. None of this is beyond us.
What drives me is the same thing that drove me in that car park nearly fifty years ago: the certainty that this club, this ground, and this game are worth fighting for. Win, lose or draw, I will always do my best for the Hampshire Hogs. We charge towards our 140th anniversary with plans, with energy, and with the conviction that the best days of this club are still ahead of us.
Welcome to Warnford. Welcome to the Hampshire Hogs.
Jonathan Grant
President, Hampshire Hogs Cricket Club · 2026
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