Do not blame Sky TV if your child isn’t into cricket — look closer to home
IF yoUr child supports a football team, it is probably your football team. Dad’s team, mum’s team. there are not too many families where dad loves Arsenal, mum’s Chelsea and junior is Bolton Wanderers.
the reason Michael Apted’s brilliant documentary following people through each stage of life began as Seven Up! was because of a Jesuit maxim: ‘Give me the child until he is seven, and I’ll show you the man.’
Children are impressionable. Children can be moulded and influenced. Charles Dickens wrote
Oliver Twist because he saw how easily children were nefariously used and recruited as criminals.
So, it isn’t Sky tV’s fault that your son or daughter isn’t playing cricket this weekend. And it isn’t the fault of the ECB or the ICC for selling their product to the highest bidder, either. Even if cricket were primetime and your brood besotted, it would still need an adult — and probably a parent — to play their part.
As for Sky, their money funds a great deal of coaching, youth development and improved facilities. the increased revenue has allowed women’s cricket to have a professional set-up at international level. And two World Cups — men’s and women’s — have now been won because the ECB have support staff in place who are second to none. Does the BBC want to help fund that structure? Does it want to get within a ball park of Sky’s recent £1.1billion investment? It does not.
Meaning we must excuse broadcasters from the responsibility of nurturing your child’s aptitude for sport. Ultimately, if you want to produce a junior cricketer, it’s down to you, or a committed friend or relative, or the school. this is what fires enthusiasm for the majority. the influence of
grown-ups. A 10-year- old child inspired by the free-to-air showing of England’s World Cup victory has still got to find a club, locate some rather expensive equipment and then stick with what is a very testing, time- consuming, technical sport, often full of crashing disappointment and occasional painful blows.
No child hangs in there on the cricket field without adult support. Anyway, if terrestrial television alone was capable of mobilising the children of Britain, olympic sports would maintain the upsurges in interest that occur every four years. they do not because hockey sticks are expensive, training schedules are inconvenient and junior athletes often require massive commitment from the adults in their lives.
Just about every sportsperson of any standing thanks a parent or teacher for their sacrifice. And some haven’t the time and some haven’t the inclination.
Far easier then to blame Sky or the ECB and fondly imagine that putting the Ashes on the BBC would somehow spirit your child into the Under 11s at the local cricket club if you were still in bed when the match started at nine o’clock each Sunday morning.
Schools don’t want cricket, either. Health and safety, expense, maintenance. Football can take place on any old rutted rubbish but cricket with a hard ball needs a flat, reliable surface or it is dangerous. And at a time when state schools barely have money for books, the paraphernalia required to kit out a cricket team is prohibitively costly, too.
A lot has been written and said since Sunday but the legacy of a Cricket World Cup win is not easily achieved.
MoSt of the talk is glib, as if it is the tiniest step from watching a game to playing it. Four kids, one ball, you’ve got football; two kids in trainers, you’ve got athletics. But cricket, proper cricket? that’s a large-scale project.
Michael Gove was understandably criticised when, as Education Secretary, he cut the £162million budget for the School Sport Partnership Programme by 69 per cent in 2010. this was a fine
scheme setting up networks of schools and PE teachers and was showing good results in getting children active.
Indeed, in a country that wasn’t going skint it could have carried on working very well. It was, however, the age of austerity. So the School Sport Partnership Programme was reduced, with predictably negative results.
Yet clubs and schools can still have very successful partnership programmes without government supervision.
When Alan Watkinson, a PE teacher at Feltham community School, took the 11- year- old Mohamed Farah to hounslow Athletics club because he had a passion for the sport and saw a young man who was clearly an exceptional runner, and in need of direction, that was a partnership programme. now apply it to cricket. Schools have wickets that need maintaining and equipment stores largely empty.
But they do have something that clubs need desperately: human resources — impressionable kids, who are not by nature lazy because if you ever watch them at playtime they run everywhere, even when there is no need. Schools don’t have to tell kids to stop walking in the corridor, or stop walking down the stairs. Running. That’s their thing — so start from there.
The clubs have something the schools want and the schools have something the clubs want. This is a symbiotic relationship that does not require the Education Secretary’s involvement. The club lends the school its groundsman for an afternoon and as much spare equipment as it can muster, and in turn the school entrusts the club to help produce a cricket team.
The school team becomes the club’s team, too, building on that camaraderie.
It doesn’t need government endorsement or free-to-air broadcasts, or even a brainstorming session at the EcB. Just enough adults — club coaches, club members, teachers, parents — to recognise some very straightforward possibilities. It can be done.
The next step is working out how to keep them interested when they’re 15 and batting at no 10 for the 3rd XI, because a dressing room of useless blokes won’t make way and put them up the order. now that’s harder.