30 – Kingdom of Days
The Times They Are a Changing the purpose of this chapter would have been plain for all to see so forgive me if this is an admittedly self-indulgent and reflective theme in my very own kingdom of days.If I rake over a few topics already touched upon I make no apology; sadly, in my humble opinion, the game as we know and love is under threat at all levels and no more so than at club level despite whatever statistics the ECB come up with.
Look around the leagues and witness the declining number of teams, the undeniable slide in standards and the weekly struggles to get teams of a full complement. If you see a game in rude health you must be watching somewhere else.
For all the national initiatives like the ECB’s flagship Chance to Shine scheme, we have become a nation of watchers rather than participants and cricket is not alone in suffering the consequences.
Only recently, inactivity was deemed to be as bigger killer as alcohol and tobacco nationally; cricket cannot escape such a shift on social trends.
Chance To Shine? Please!
The great and the good recently celebrated five years of Chance to Shine at Lords with one million kids claimed to have been beneficiaries from some 3,000 state schools.
Whilst this is a start there are an estimated 27,000 state schools so inevitably, it’s a huge game of catch up here and once again the ECB have created an elitist scheme.
To participate you have to be an ECB Focus Club but a club can only be considered for this if it has attained Clubmark.
Clubs with excellent junior set ups are simply excluded because they don’t have an army of administrators. Removing this requirement would be a major step forward.
I accept that society has changed massively in the years since I first strolled through the gates at the Villas and as sport is an essential part of the fabric of that society then change is inevitable.
Most of the issues facing cricket are not unique and other sports are also suffering especially those games that require more complex technical skills coaching into the very young on a regular basis.
The Fattest Nation In Europe
A key issue for junior sport these days and a regular feature of debate, is the state of the nation’s kids, which is indisputably appalling as for most kids, school sport is non existent.
It started and continues with the notion that competitiveness is not good and that everybody should get a medal and a pat on the back.
Well get real because life is just not like that and there are winners and losers so being able to handle both outcomes is every bit as important; somebody has to come last that’s life.
Whatever happened to the school PE teacher of old, someone you respected and taught so much more than could ever be gained in the classroom?
When we were younger the PE teacher did much unpaid, voluntary work but over the years that goodwill on the part of teachers has vanished starting way back in the 1980s with increasing militancy. As teaching unions have spent decades fighting successive governments the only losers have been the children.
The solution is obvious in that specialist PE teachers need to be an essential part of all primary and secondary schools. The cost is not an issue because in the longer term the savings to the likes of the NHS would far outweigh the investment in young children’s health and fitness. It is not rocket science but politicians never look further than the next election.
The Curse of Political Correctness
The new government has also made soundings about cutting through the forest of political correctness that has strangled so much of modern day life never more in evidence than with sport.
Somehow, the politically correct parasites have spread like wildfire creating an enormous industry that is seemingly unstoppable these days and doubtless employing layers of invisible, unaccountable, unproductive and overpaid morons.
It will be interesting to see if the government are true to their promises. Sacking most of this lot would surely put a dent in the national deficit if we could only find them because every new announcement never has a face or a name to it just some phantom “thou shall obey” decree.
The growth in the child welfare “industry” has been simply staggering to behold. You would have to be a complete lunatic to volunteer to run a junior team at any sport simply with a view to abusing little kids, in fact in most cases the kids abuse the coach.
Watch Out The Boogie Man Is Behind You
They have created the notion that the Boogie Man is around every corner and it’s a cynical abuse of volunteers up and down the country simply trying to keep the game they love alive and to give something back to sport.
The amount of bureaucracy and useless, mind-numbing courses you now have to endure is slowly killing off volunteers. When the working week is increasingly demanding who needs this at the weekend especially as the idiots that generally roll out these courses would not make third-rate teachers.
I cite a recent course I had to attend – the title escapes me as it is content and theme were almost identical to two courses I had just completed – but I knew when I saw the three hour duration this was not going to be the best three hours of my life.
It was run by a retired police officer who probably could not believe his luck in landing a job in addition to his pension to recreate the pantomime villain – “look out he’s behind you” went the theme.
I’ve Started So I Will Finish… However Long It Takes Me!
It started with a doubtless expensively created ECB board game where you had to match extracts of the numerous pieces of legislation that are in place relating to child welfare – it was called the Learning Tree. What the point of this was who knows but it was not enhancing my understanding of the leg break delivery.
However, it got worse as PC Plod started to read out a series of newspaper cuttings designed to make us believe that around every corner the Boogie Man was lurking waiting to spirit away some of our junior players – after the season we had just had he could take the lot I mused.
It was unbelievable and after about forty-five minutes I slowly raised my hand, suggested he had made his point, most of us had had a long day at work – honest I had – and could we please go home, Boogie Man or not?
Amazingly he concluded the night in a flash presumably having intended to keep on with this plethora of good news clippings till we all were far too scared to go home anyway. It is just repetitive, overdone nonsense and it is killing the goodwill of volunteers.
Sport – The Miracle Pill
The combination of the demolition of opportunities for youngsters to play sport and the loss of all the positive attributes to be gained from it such as health, team building and social integration will see us continue the slide towards an unhealthy, reclusive, inward-looking society shorn of it is former fabric.
Until we get a sporting culture as part of the fabric of real life again, accept that there are risks involved with any activity and ditch the ambulance chasing legal parasites, we are all snookered.
We have to get sport back into schools and even if we have to pay the teachers given that in the past this was on the back of a teacher’s goodwill the pay back is enormous and in the long term the savings are immense.
The alternative scenario, given the issues building up around obesity, boredom plus the reality that when Little Johnny finally joins the real world he is in for one hell of a shock; there is no such thing as non-competitiveness out here.
Grass Roots Cricket
So if we as a game cannot change the broader scope of society and, indeed, wait for it to begin to change then we have to find a way to ensure cricket remains a game open to the masses and not the preserve of Giles Clarke and his ECB cronies at Lords.
How do we give it back to the people?
Surely the ECB has to take a more inclusive approach and one way would be to open up Chance to Shine to any club that wished to participate. Switch the funding gobbled up by the administration of all this rubbish and invest this in coaches so we can get cricket back into the schools and fast.
The Great TV Debate
Another hot topic is the lack of cricket on terrestrial television available to boost the profile of cricket to a new generation. As a Sky customer, I have to nail my colours to the mast and admit the coverage afforded to cricket over many years has been fantastic.
Yet there has to be a way to get the nation greater access to cricket even if the BBC seems uninterested and Channel 4 appears unable to afford it.
Recently the ECB Chief Executive, Giles Clarke, was interviewed on radio and contended that without the Sky TV money the club game would disappear, such is his disgraceful lack of understanding of the grass roots game.
This is rubbish, after all how did we survive for the hundred plus years before the Sky deal. As I have said previously the ECB money that does eventually drip down past the professional set up is sparse to say the least – and less than equitably distributed.
Brokering a deal with Sky to return some degree of international cricket to terrestrial television need not be devastating to the ECB coffers. Sky has many free to air channels and they should be sufficiently confident in the excellence of their coverage that they could actually gain subscribers rather than lose out here.
If I could drop football from my Sky package I would do so in a flash, but I would not give up my subscription just because the odd test series was on free to air, nor, I believe, would the genuine cricket fans that still look forward to England’s winter trips. I realise that Sky pay a king’s ransom for cricket but, come on Mr Murdoch, show some faith in the quality of your offering.
Cricket is flagship sports of Sky’s offering so do not believe Clarke when he bleats on about how dependent the game is on the Sky money, which is a very poor business model if this is actually the case. Sadly the politics of self-interest continue to rule cricket and they will slowly destroy it.
Witness now the beginnings of the financial fall out at the top level of cricket as evidenced recently by Yorkshire, as counties have to invest massively to stay on the international fixture list. If the Sky money is so critical where is it all going?
Back in the Dark Ages
Away from the very top of the game the leagues can and should be much more proactive in response to a changing world. I don’t believe that the elite give a jot about grass roots so we have to become progressive from the bottom up in trying to attract and retain the next generations of players and administrators.
In league cricket very little has changed in the almost four decades I have been playing and administrators have to wake up to the fact that we are not attracting nor retaining enough new entrants to the game to keep it alive.
Somehow we have to make the game more attractive to younger people and I am not here advocating the over hyped comic strip Twenty Twenty approach but we have to look at formats, structures and, above all, as older participants be prepared to pass the game on.
Where better for any senior league to experiment that with second team cricket? I have several suggestions to try to do something different with a view to trying to retain the youngsters we all spend years developing but, inescapably, are not staying with the game in enough numbers once they leave the junior structures. My ideas are not rocket science but here goes:
- Reduce the overs in our league from fifty to forty as the leap from twenty over junior cricket is too great for many kids. In addition, truthfully, how many old lags in the Stiffs would not be pleased?
- Limit the bowlers to a maximum of ten and throw out the ridiculous ECB’s Fast Bowling Directives.
- Use the cup to experiment with different formats.
And finally, stop this ridiculous obsession with shelling out money on players that contribute absolutely nothing to the clubs they turn out for. The game is in a dire state at the moment and it needs resources ploughing back into its core fabric than into the pockets of some hired gun whether they be of an overseas or domestic origin.
Lets all start to take some responsibility for the future of the game or suffer the consequences if we don’t.
“Talent” money never ever produces team spirit or a strong club and eventually when the egos that provide it get fed up and disappear the problems this creates can destroy a club.
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