Cricket must act to stop erosion of its social base

The editor of Cricket Statistician analyses recent events

In his new book Cricket: The Game Of Life, Scyld Berry makes some interesting remarks on where England Test players have come from, and identifying three positive factors.

Family in the game: fathers or elder brothers, where the representation is above expected – 264 of England’s 665 Test players have a close relative who played at least first-class cricket.

Good facilities and coaching – mainly in the educational private sector, which has provided one-third of England’s Test cricketers.

Living in a cricketing hotspot – as in Yorkshire or Lancashire.

The figures suggest the game has never outgrown its origins and that in some ways the old gentlemenplayers split has never gone away, but that ‘players’ are no longer coming through as they used to.

As an example, he quotes the end of the Nottinghamshire coalfields, and the resultant wholesale decrease in clubs and places to play, which stopped Notts being the nursery for English fast bowling.

One thing that this tells us is that there are places in this country – quite substantial areas – where cricket has never really penetrated. The choice has always been from a sub-set of the population.

An ominous feature now is that the proportion of first-class players who are privately educated seems to be increasing, and the sub-set of those to whom cricket matters is shrinking.

The game cannot afford any further narrowing of its social base, especially given that football is now acceptable in middle-class areas where it once would not have been and takes away many who might have made cricketers. A further warning, though, is that, as Derek Pringle suggested recently in this publication, even in the private sector the rush to maximise academic achievement is starting to eat into “cricket time”.

Berry also remarks on how very few cricketers have come from England’s substantial cities (outside London). And this seems particularly to be true where those cities do not have a first-class county. So Wolverhampton has never provided a male Test player at all, though Rachael Heyhoe Flint shows what is possible!

What seems to me to be a further factor is the availability of first-class cricket. Stoke-on-Trent, Ipswich and Norwich happen to be where I have variously spent my adult life, thus torpedoing my children’s chances of playing for England.

Stoke has, or had, what seemed to be a thriving cricket culture. Forty years ago the North Staffordshire League saw Garry Sobers,Wes Hall and others playing every week. Bernard Hollowood’s Cricket On The Brain shows how seriously the game was taken. There was a time when Staffordshire could have become a first-class county.

Good Minor County cricketers generally have a career outside cricket and the wish to make a cricketing career somewhere away from home is not strong: the risks are high and the rewards few.

The one new “hotspot” now is the South Asian community, where cricket remains something that children do. It was for a time true of the AfroCaribbean community as well, but they now seem lost to football as the cricket loving generation ages.

Cricket has been used as a tool in inner-city Los Angeles: perhaps it will be necessary for cricketing missionaries to find their way to Liverpool and Stoke-on-Trent.