State school cricket is in crisis – only government leadership can save it

Greater initiatives are needed if we are to unearth more players who do not enjoy a public school education, otherwise ‘elitism’ in the game will be set to increase

Last week the Sutton Trust, a charity that normally concerns itself with the pursuit of equality rather than cricket, published with the Social Mobility Commission a report entitled “Elitist Britain 2019”, which showed (to no one’s surprise) that the better a start in life one had, the better one tended to do. This, according to the report, is just as true in sport as in, say, high finance, the media or politics.

The Trust and the SMC looked at three team sports – cricket, football and rugby union – and found that a private education (enjoyed by around seven per cent of school pupils) conferred a huge advantage on would-be sportsmen. Of those three sports, cricket and rugby have traditionally drawn a significant proportion of players at the highest level from those with public school backgrounds, but now it is starting to become disproportionate. Although only seven per cent attend a private school, 43 per cent who have played cricket for England in the past year had that privilege. Only in men’s and women’s football were the privately educated underrepresented.

It is not ideologues, but those who wish cricket to thrive and flourish as a sport both for participants and spectators who should be alarmed by this report. That 43 per cent figure means England cricketers are six times as likely to have attended a private school than others.

Of the England World Cup squad, 40 per cent went to private

schools and 47 per cent to comprehensives. In women’s cricket, 35 per cent went to private schools, 50 per cent to comprehensives and 15 per cent to selective schools.

The one consolation I took from the statistics was that the figure for products of comprehensive schools was as high as it was. It means some of the work done by clubs, counties and MCC’S charitable arm to ensure children from schools without a cricketing tradition get a chance to play the game has had some effect. But with local clubs diminishing, and the continuance of the game at that level relying more on a shrinking pool of volunteers, the number of ex-public school pupils playing at the highest level is likely to increase, bringing further complaints about the worst sort of elitism.

Worse, one will be left to ponder how many James Andersons, Joe Roots and Jonny Bairstows are going undiscovered because they never get a chance to play cricket, and their significant natural talent remains unexploited. Beyond that, the natural clientele for the game – the spectators whose ticket money and cash spent at the bar helps pay players’ wages – will shrink if growing numbers are either kept at a distance from cricket or never introduced to it.

The problem is with state schools, so the initiative to deal with the problem must come from the Government, and the education department. Oddly