Dream A Little Dream
Idealistic old dreamer that I remain, during the last few weeks, I have been coaching cricket in a primary schools trying to promote the old game to today’s bright eyed young things. Although I have done this for several years now, even squeezing in sessions during my “lunch breaks” whilst working, this year I decided I would go see how someone who does this full time operated. It soon became clear that our issues were shared ones.
For instance, a scheduled two hour session can often see the first group not actually appear for 20 minutes, burping, farting and wiping away custard from their uniforms. By the time you have established some sort of order, the time allotted for “coaching” an admittedly complex game is down to half an hour at best; that’s if you can get them to move and exclude the breaks in sessions to advise various irritants that they are probable future Borstal inmates.
The kids at Ben’s sessions were just like those I would be encountering soon, in other words, largely devoid of the ability to co-ordinate any part of the body other than their fingers and thumbs whilst making more noise than a bunch of hyenas; I had to assume they had been surgically detached from their Nintendos. Of course, in any group of thirty kids you will get those that can, those that can’t, those that won’t and those that are dedicated to making you want to bash them over the head with a big mallet to at least stop them breeding and perpetuating society’s inevitable decline. It means that the limited few that really want to learn something are as frustrated and as disappointed as you are.
At one school I observed that the kids on the screen in reception looked rather angelic and asked, with some irony, which school they belonged to! Rising to the bait the lady on reception claimed her school’s kids were wonderful and very well behaved meaning the sixty I had been introduced to the previous week must have been gorging on coca-cola and Prozac all morning. It did strike me that she could say these things sat safely behind her protective glass but I suppose asking if there was any tear gas for crowd control was not the most sensitive thing to say.
The teacher of the second group at one school had warned me that they had a few “behavioural issues” which I found incredulous as the first lot must have been to a terror training camp on that basis. I can’t blame the teachers – who mostly look miserable – as we all know you can’t lift a finger to a kid these days without the European Court of Human Rights coming down on you. And yet my old teachers did not rely on physical violence they just had the ability to scare you witless with one psychopathic look and, if need be, could affect a quick slap without any visible bruising.
Dear old Plug at my secondary school could bounce a blackboard rubber of your skull, numbing you instantly, simultaneously causing selective amnesia and all without interrupting the learning process, quite often enhancing it for the wider good. In France, they apparently focus on social skills and basic manners from nursery school level; I can only conclude in Britain the same kids are watching Jeremy Kyle.
This is not really coaching rather it is tantamount to crowd control and, to be perfectly frank, cricket is just not cool with the majority of the young of today. It’s technically demanding (no more so than a Nintendo is to me by the way), requires concentration longer than that required to blow up a rogue state on the X-Box and demands that you have to spend long hours of practice to perfect the skills required. You can’t just wipe out the game and start again if you are not winning like on a DS.
Kids simply don’t see cricket on television – what a great job the ECB did there in selling out to Sky – so they have few heroes to align to and as they haven’t done sport at all in schools for the best part of the last thirty years, demanding games like cricket are now second best to Dodgeball. Despite the unstinting and genuine enthusiasm of one PE teacher, with posters promoting the game and our club, cricket came a poor second to something I had never heard of.
Noting that my cricket after school club had less than a quarter of those attending this rival activity, I decided to observe. Basically it involves running around screaming and throwing soft balls at each other and is a game either designed to wear out the kids before they get home or to prepare them for riot duty in future years when the country finally goes tits up and they realise all the money has gone. Of course the after school clubs are not really promoting sport and are much more cheap baby-sitting.
These days the schools also don’t really have sports fields; they have the odd bit of grass but my old primary’s football pitch looks as if they should plant potatoes there instead. As we start cricket coaching in the chill winds of April, imagine the joy factor spreading from the majority mourning the separation from the warmth of the classroom. We corral them into MUGAs (Multi Use Games Areas), ringed by fencing which, given its attractiveness to some, really should be electrified.
Of course many of the kids seem to have a natural inclination to climb the fencing, a bit like I did when my mum and dad took us to Butlins, Skegness. I wondered whether I should pop around the other side and start feeding them a few bananas to placate them. Rather naively, I structured the sessions around catching, throwing and retrieving a ball fearing that introducing bats would only promote GBH. Carnage ensued as I tried manfully to keep that fake smile splattered on my face, musing on a game now solely reliant on the private school sector until posh boys realise that they can earn more in a month in the City than as a professional cricketer.
The Government recently announced that it will spend some £150m a year on school sport over the next two years which sounds a lot of money but equates to 2 days a week for a full time PE teacher in each primary school. The money will be a bonanza for the numerous commercial entities proclaiming to be sports and fitness oriented towards schools who feast on the dearth of high quality PE teachers and schools with no idea about sport. As I began a cricket session with Yr 5, the Yr 6 were with one of these organisations on the school field so I asked what they were doing; they were learning…the Haka!
What good is teaching kids who can barely grunt in plain English the words and actions of an ancient Maori dance designed to scare the shit out of opposition rugby teams. Imagine the little horrors rushing home to scare mums into an early heart attack with what they learned at school today. Having experienced the same kids the previous year it’s not as if this lot needed any more encouragement to scare anybody nor start rolling their eyes about and sticking their tongues out. And a rugby ball in sight…not a chance…a complete waste of money.
A sum of money as large as £150m a year may sound a lot but its only half what my old employer got fined for attempting to fix rates of interest; it will take a lot more than £150m to resurrect rates of interest in sport with the young. You may say there are too many counter attractions – there probably are – but more telling is that we now have generation of parents that never experienced school sport so are equally as useless as their offspring. Only when you truly get competitive, disciplined and inspirational school sport – with teams to fight to get into – will kids really turn on to sport again. Jumping about in a field to the Haka is not sport.
Gas man says
Willy you have only to look at the men in charge and cast your mind back to your school days, they were probably the one’s in the duffle coats buttoned up to the chin with hoods up during summer holding out a note from mum asking to be excused PE because they have got a pimpel on there arses.
Steve says
Gas you have nailed it – we were the lucky ones rolling about in the shit infested Council mud on a Sunday morning, hoping the hangover would clear before having to head another ball skywards! The kids are not all right…they are stuffed and will never know what we had…at least there’s no chance of being mugged as they cant run!