The seeds of Roving Reporters Cricket Club were sown in June of 1973 when a team from Roving Reporters Football Club were challenged to play a one-off game against Arkley for whom two prominent members of the football club played cricket.
With more than a little help from an Arkley player they "borrowed" for the match, RRs gained a surprisingly comfortable win, and went on to play a handful of other games that summer, mainly against Old Elizabethans.
That winter the club was officially formed and a full fixture list was drawn up for 1974. We drew heavily on members of the football club which had been formed in 1965 by three local journalists, one of whom was BBC soccer commentator John Motson (who has actually never played for the cricket team).
At the end of the first full season, it was getting difficult to turn out 11 players week in week out, and had it not been for the recruitment of two or three new members for 1975, the club might even have folded almost as soon as it had begun.
But 1975 was a turning point and by the following year (when we moved from Barnet Playing Fields to a new home ground at Oak Hill Park, East Barnet) not only were we playing twice a weekend much of the time, but we also embarked on our first tour - a week based in Weymouth, Dorset, during that phenomenally hot summer of 1976.
The club has gone on tour every year bar two since then. After more than decade in Weymouth, we switched to Gloucestershire, then later had several years based in Montgomery, mid Wales, and since 2003 we have annually invaded Reepham for a week's tour in Norfolk at the beginning of August.
We continued to play twice most weekends with our base at Oak Hill Park through the rest of the 70s and much of the 80s by which time, with more new members from clubs such as Manor Drive, Northmet and North Finchley who had folded, we had become a force to be reckoned with.
At the end of 1980s, drainage work at Oak Hill Park mean we had to move to a temporary home at Mill Hill Park. But the pitch was unsatisfactory and, with the co-operation of the clubs we played against, we took the decision to become a "wandering" side - one without a home ground. And so it has remained ever since.
As some of the stalwart members got older and the availability of others began to wain, the club eventually reverted to playing just once a weekend, usually Sundays. But we have stuck by our original decision not to play league cricket, and we pride ourselves on still playing the game the "right" way as the standard of behaviour in club cricket generally has deteriorated.
Written By Club President Roger Jones