After narrowly missing out on promotion on a couple of occasions, Western Stars will be hoping that Sunday marks the date that they finally return to cricket’s top division.Stars, one of the Island’s top cricket teams up until a few years ago, have been struggling to get in the Premier Division since being relegated along with Flatts at the end of the 2007 season. They will get another opportunity to do so this weekend at Sea Breeze Oval after finishing second in the First Division, when they meet Cleveland County in the crucial promotion/relegation match to decide which teams plays in the Premier Division next season.Cleveland finished second-from-bottom in the top division and are battling to avoid taking the drop with Devonshire Rec. They will go into the match as favourites but Stars will give it their best effort, even though they will be without top young batsman Tre Manders who is attending a sports academy in England. And with the new football kicking into full swing this weekend, both clubs could be missing key players as Treadwell Gibbons, a goalkeeper for Dandy Town, and Allan Douglas (who played for St. George’s Colts in midweek) face the choice of playing for Cleveland or turning out for their football clubs on Sunday. Stars expect their young wicketkeeper Tamiko Wilson, who is a striker for Dandy Town, to choose cricket over football.“It’s not impacting our team as much, we only have one person who may be affected which is the wicketkeeper Tamiko Wilson who scored a century down in St. George’s the other day and he will be playing cricket,” said club treasurer Gershon Gibbons who is involved in both the football and cricket programmes at the club.“It’s important that we put in a good effort to try and get promoted, it’s something that has been our objective for the last couple of seasons with the amount of youngsters that we have. We are depleted with Tre Manders going away to school as well as his father, Andre Manders, our coach who has gone to England with him.“We’re looking to put out our best available team, we still had a few guys train yesterday and we will be looking to McLaren Lowe, one of our main run scorers this season, to make a contribution, and Tamiko Wilson, Nyon Steede, Seth Campbell and Brian Hall who are the core of our team.”Manders, Campbell and Hall were all included in the initial training squad, an indication that Stars have some young players who are on the fringe of the national team. Gibbons, a former player himself with the team, believes promotion to the Premier Division will be good for their young players as the club tries to return to its glory days when they won all the honours.“We’ve been on the cusp of getting promotion just about every season, when we lost out to PHC once by run rate and last year we came second and only one team went up and the year before we lost out by one point to Social Club,” said Gibbons.“With the youngsters that we have it has given them time to develop and we have some very good youngsters, like Tre Manders who played Cup Match this year, Brian Hall and Seth Campbell who are in the training squad. That’s been one of our objectives, to have players from the club represent the country and play in Cup Match.”With their football team the Premier Division champions, and having never been relegated since being promoted to the top division, the cricketers are inspired to try to match their achievements and make the club the strongest club in football and cricket.“At one stage we lost a lot of players at one time so we had to start from scratch,” said Gibbons who played alongside the likes of Albert Steede, Hasan Durham, Jermaine Postlethwaite and Dwayne Leverock. Those players came along after the Manders, Richardson and Brangman brothers all left the game.“It is important for the central community to have a strong team, because the Central Counties had the strongest clubs on the Island at one point. We won the Central Counties this year and it is a natural progression to see exactly where we stand and what else do we need to do to be one of the stronger clubs again.”Added Gibbons: “In the mid-90s Dandy Town and Western Stars were challenging in both cricket and football and that is our goal, to be challenging in both sports. That’s what we are working towards.”It is no coincidence that league champions Bailey’s Bay and Somerset have two of the best youth cricket programmes on the Island. Stars are determined to show they are on the right track too.