24 – AND NOW THE END IS NEAR
“After all the cheers have died down…after the headlines have been written, and after you are back in the quiet of your room and the championship ring has been placed on the dresser…after all the pomp and fanfare have faded, the enduring thing that is left is the dedication to doing with our lives the very best we can to make the world a better place in which to live.”
Vince Lombardi
Closer to sixty than I care to think about, soon it will be time to call it a day. I wrote most of this chapter as part of my first book – A Critics’ Corner – over ten years ago.
You may have detected throughout this book that I am not hopeful about the future of grassroots sport, especially cricket. I thought it would be interesting to revisit those opinions.
Participation
Cricket clubs up and down the country – even in Yorkshire – are struggling with falling numbers, dwindling incomes and ever rising costs. Few sports differ, even football is struggling; I just have more first-hand experience of cricket.
This is tricky for the English Cricket Board (ECB), the games governing body, in part due to the way central funding is distributed for most sports. Those that show declining numbers can be hit financially albeit television money now dwarfs public.
But how can a sport like cricket, non-existent in state schools, its soul sold to Sky Sports and with clubs struggling for survival, make its pitch? From experience, there is a lot of massaging the figures; but ticking boxes to try demonstrate participation is denial.
The best barometer is the club game; each summer clubs dwindle either by extinction or a reduction in the numbers of teams they put out. This is hard to deny whatever spin you put on it.
Change is a rolling stone and cricket has to fight for its place in life like any number of other sports.
Kids
Here’s a simple truth – the majority of kids these days are devoid of the basic skills previous generations took almost as a birth-right: to catch, to throw, to run and simple hand-eye coordination. Most are devoid of the desire to master these.
Cricket suffers more because it is a complex, tough game to learn requiring technical skills, hard hours of repetitive (boring/frustrating) practice and specialist kit too. Games take time to play out; in an age of instant gratification cricket struggles for attention.
The only access most kids have to learn the game will be at a local club. They do not develop the passion or skills at school nor hone them on the streets anymore.
Start with fifteen kids at ten years of age and getting two into senior cricket is a major success. If one is playing beyond the age of twenty-five you have hit the jackpot; teams are getting older each and every year.
Some youngsters are pressed into senior teams before they are good enough, which damages their confidence, development and appetite for the game. But we have to get eleven each week.
Drop Outs
Some ten years ago, I canvassed several youngsters I had coached as teenagers (now in their early twenties) who no longer play; why? The common threads were that senior games were too long and that opportunities to participate were limited when they made the step up. They had better things to do.
They enjoyed the game but were not prepared to commit a whole day especially when they may not have had much of a role other than as a fielder. I’d argue further that sport was not as embedded in them as it was with us, usually through passionate teachers.
Since then leagues have made some attempts to counter this with bowling restrictions but, as ever with administrators, it is tinkering when a major overhaul is needed.
Unbelievably, for the better kids, the ECB Fast Bowling directives actually strangle the development of talent. These restrict the overs a kid can bowl; there are no directives for the geriatric, you can drop dead at your pleasure!
Talent is stifled by a rule designed to protect the same kids the administrators wrap in cotton wool. It is madness but shows how out of touch they are with the grassroots.
Many youngsters view the transition from junior cricket – broadly a two hour game – to the senior format across a whole day as too long and so we lose them despite years spent coaching. Brutally, many will never be good enough anyway.
Leagues resist change to shorter formats with spurious arguments like lost bar income but with drink driving and the demands of the family how relevant is this? Only the old farts from the committee want the bar open all night and they spend sod all.
Ideas From Back Then
I’ve left most untouched with comments in italics.
The grass roots game needs to react and quickly, though it is not easy. Second Team cricket has to be a shorter format (forty overs) so that a game would be over by late teatime. This would bridge the transition into the longer format of the game. Some leagues now mix first and second teams but this is not insurmountable. Start times still mean we waste most of Saturdays waiting to start a game.
The more ambitious kids would have the longer format via First Teams to aim for. The old lags playing for the “Stiffs” would appreciate ten less overs. Post match, the more imaginative clubs could make far more income with family friendly early evenings via barbeques or similar functions. We don’t gather at the bars any longer…times have changed old boy! The demographic of many teams now works against the notion or a thriving bar.
I would harmonise junior cricket with Under 16s (not 15s as presently) as the upper age group to bridge the gap from junior to senior formats scrapping Sunday fixtures for seniors. Leagues try to cram too much cricket into a short summer. The senior Sundays are now restricted to the cups which makes sense…maybe someone is reading? But we continue to lose kids barely past their fifteenth birthday.
Increasingly, Under 17 cricket is also valueless as the pressure around exam time means many parents simply do not allow children to play this largely mid-week evening format and so I would scrap it. The Bradford League have post a survey that found 70%+ of players were U15s anyway.
Time!
There are too many leagues to expect a cohesive response. In Bradford alone there are clubs competing in at least seven different leagues and little evidence they communicate. For decades leagues have acted like little empires but all empires crumble.
Money continues to talk too. Clubs have just received Government money to tide them over through Covid-19; how much of this will find its way into back pockets of average players?
The more prosperous clubs will survive a bit longer but the game and its soul will be unrecognisable without radical changes. We are the fattest nation in Europe and cricket administrators still hark back to golden times of a shift down the pit on the morning of a game.
Decades of denying kids sporting opportunity through schools has dried up the numbers of youngsters. Well before I first wrote this, our overseas “pro” made the observation after a few weeks here that there were too many cricket clubs. He was bang on.
I have loved playing sport and could not put a price on what it has given me. But it is not for me to tell you and your kids what to do with your lives.
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