“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old but building the new.”
Socrates
I’ve just finished a marvellous book called The Shepherd’s Life – A Tale of the Lake District by James Rebanks. Switch off now if your preference is E L James or Jackie Collins.
Rebanks is a shepherd whose family have farmed in the Lake District for six hundred years. This is an honest account of a working life far removed from that many endure.
Most of us negotiate life barely moving far from where we grew up; they say over 50% of Americans, for instance, do not have a passport. If anything, despite the advent of mass transportation we remain, in most cases, rooted.
We stay close to those we love and that which we know best…or confuses us the least. And yet life changes at a pace that can baffle young and old; today’s world is certainly not the one I grew up in in for better or for worse.
Rebanks argues passionately about the value of maintaining and respecting traditions honoured over centuries as the pace of modern day life threatens to suggest these as almost irrelevant and valueless. And how right is he is.
In much the same way, I feel the same about what I see happening to my “natural landscape”, that of recreational sport and, in particular, grass roots cricket.
Several years ago I wrote a chapter in my book Fifty Not Out – a far less worthy effort than Rebank’s – predicting the slow death of club cricket. Little has changed since to alter my view.
Each spring the lambing season signals renewed hope for farmers like Rebanks as it does for junior cricket coaches up and down the land.
And yet another junior season comes to an abrupt halt very soon, just as the sun appears from hiding and with football pausing only for a few weeks. What chance do we have with our young flocks?
Having spent several months working to promote the game through the English Cricket Board’s Chance To Shine scheme – a worthy if far from perfect attempt at reintroducing the game to state schools – there is little to suggest the game is in rude health.
The paucity of physical literacy, far from cricket’s issue alone, and the lack of aspiration-led, competitive sport in our state schools relegates sport in most kid’s eyes to how we used to view RE lessons. In other words, utterly pointless.
As with sheep, kids need purpose and direction.
At senior levels, local leagues are seeing the pace of change – predicted here several years ago – start to gather serious momentum.
The daddy of them all – The Bradford League – has sold itself to the ECB Premier League concept which is fine for the minority of clubs that have the financial muscle to survive here but offers a very uncertain future for those less able.
Players – at least those not benefiting from back-pocket payments – are less keen to play extended format games which may also involve serious travel time.
And as clubs struggle to attract players, never more did the term “talent money” appear so mis-placed.
Local leagues seem obsessed with peripheral issues like online scoring and fielding discs without actually pondering why the average age of players continues to escalate, the weekend game unable to retain bar a negligible percentage of the juniors we work so hard to produce.
The brutal truth is that, as coaches, we cannot equip the vast majority of kids quickly enough with the skills to survive in senior cricket. Nobody I know has yet worked the trick of turning water into wine.
Basic skills take longer to establish and by age fifteen most parents are convinced they have an Einstein and that only ten A* passes at GCSE will do.
Had I been locked in my bedroom chasing inflated grades at that age I would have shinned down the drainpipe and slept in the scorehut with my bat.
Back to sheep! Some are from fine breeding stock and from an early age this very small percentage are ear-marked for greater things.
As far as the rest are concerned the best they can hope for is a few years grazing in the outfield before the knacker’s yard.
If we coaches were judged along the same lines as Rebanks and his contemporaries we would have been out of business many years ago.
So “building the new” means a radical look at the game we have now – clearly lacking appeal to a future consumer base as it sits – and shaping this so it at least has a fighting chance.
Shorter games, more inclusive formats, less travelling and even shorter seasons all need serious consideration. How to rid the cancer of “talent” money in the lower leagues though is far from easy.
Rebanks ends by asserting his belief that farming is enjoying a renaissance as people start to reassess the ignorant arrogance of modern life against values such as the management of our rural areas, food provenance and traditions we should not lose.
Maybe the same may yet apply to those same time honoured pursuits local sports clubs have embodied and that many communities have been founded on?
It will be a poorer way of life if these are lost.
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