With back-to-back defeats and the resignation of club captain Sean Gibson, it has proved a difficult week both on and off the cricket pitch for Radcliffe.

The Homer Street men only managed to post 88 in their 182-run loss against local rivals Unsworth on Saturday and crashed to a five-wicket defeat at bottom side Ashton on Sunday.

With Gibson departing, new captain Chris Berry believes the club must now rebuild after losing one of its better players.

“Sean has resigned as captain of Radcliffe and no longer plays for the team.

“He feels that he can’t carry on in his position.

“Unfortunately we’ve lost a really good player in Sean but we now have to move on.”

Despite being without main bowler Jimmy Dixon, opening batsman Anis Patel and wicketkeeper Richard Farnworth, Berry was still disappointed with the defeats to both Unsworth and Ashton.

“A number of things went wrong for us,” he said. “We had Unsworth at 121-6 at one stage but, having dropped Alex Blake on 10, he came back to put on a good partnership with Abid Fazil.

“Their professional Chris Williams bowled well and got myself and our pro Nadeem Ashraf out with two really good balls. After that we suffered a bit of a batting collapse before the lower order got us to 88 runs.

“The Ashton result on Sunday was really disappointing.

“We hoped we could post at least 150-170 runs before bowling them out convincingly but we only managed to total 75.”

Berry is now looking to turn Radcliffe’s season around, starting with victory against Middleton on Saturday.

“It should be an interesting tie as we are pretty evenly matched sides and although they’ve got a decent professional if we get him early enough then we should have a chance.

“We definitely fancy getting a win.”