Legacy of win should not be wasted
For all the euphoria at the post-final party, questions remain about the game’s future
Ashley Giles is an expert on transformative victories. He stood on the pitch where he scored 59 in England’s historic second innings in the final 2005 Ashes Test and watched today’s World Cup winners being mobbed by schoolchildren. “We’ve got to keep working – and it starts here,” said Giles, who now runs the England men’s game.
The 2005 Ashes series was cricket’s last great breakout drama. It was a rock opera with a colossal post-series bender, the images of which still unfairly overshadow the brilliance of the cricket. Then, as now, a great all-rounder spurned sleep to celebrate. But while Andrew Flintoff swerved his way to Downing Street 14 years ago, Ben Stokes, who carried England over the line against New Zealand on Sunday, was tired but businesslike at the Oval, where Eoin Morgan’s side were joined by hundreds of youngsters.
Was England’s first World Cup win a one-off emotional extravaganza – a test of the nation’s cardiac health – or a rebirth for a game with strong foundations in social history but a less well-defined place on the modern entertainment menu? This question, wearying to some, is unavoidable once the World Cup props are cleared away and the spotlight shifts to the Ashes in English cricket’s planned summer of conquest.
Joe Root is on-script. He said here: “It [the World Cup win] shows it’s a growing game and we’re doing everything we can to widen the reach of it. As a team, we talk of leaving the game in a better place when we finish and taking it forward all the time. I feel like the way we’ve gone about things in this World Cup has hopefully done that and given an opportunity for the next generation to see what we’ve achieved and want to go on and emulate it.
“I was 14 years old when I watched that 2005 Ashes series and it was hugely inspiring for me. Hopefully, we can do something similar for the next
generation now.” Hallelujah. The pattern in modern sports consumption, however, is for top-down inspiration to fade. Four years after the euphoric goldmedal bonanza of the 2012 London Olympics, participation in sport in the UK had actually fallen. Britain was not a nation of heptathletes and long jumpers.
In 2005, Test cricket disappeared from free-to-air television, where it clocked a peak 8.2million viewers for that summer’s Ashes. That high dropped on Sky to 1.92million in 2009 and 1.3million in 2013.
To compensate for the slide in exposure, Giles’s employers at the England and Wales Cricket Board have driven the “South Asian Action Plan” to capitalise on the love for cricket among British Asians, as well as All Stars Cricket for children, which supplied much of the Oval’s Monday-morning audience.
The ECB is understandably defensive about the claim that selling TV rights to Sky increased the wealth of the game while rendering it virtually invisible in mass-audience terms. It also maintains that showing some games in the new Hundred competition on the BBC will reverse some worrying audience trends. Giles says: “We’ve all been surprised at how it’s bubbled up over the last couple of weeks.
“We saw the same thing in 2005. At the time, you’re in that bubble, and it’s only at the end you go – wow, and see how many people are inspired by it. Perhaps the element of it being on free-to-air helped. It was brilliant for Sky as well, because it showed what cricket they produce. And we’d never won the World Cup.
“The investment Sky have put into the game shouldn’t be overlooked. You could easily argue we wouldn’t be here now as world champions if we hadn’t had that investment.”
At the same time, the ECB has conceded that cricket is now played in only 22 per cent of schools and 84 per cent by men. The talk around their Inspire Generations initiative – a five-year plan – has tended to get bogged down in controversy over the Hundred at the expense of deeper issues. Tom Harrison, the chief executive, said at the plan’s launch: “There’s a lot more that we can do to make cricket more open to communities that haven’t felt part of it in the past.”
The Elitist Britain 2019 report produced by the Sutton Trust found that cricket is “one of the top 10 professions for independent school attendance”, behind Cabinet members, military officers and members of the House of Lords. It found that 43 per cent of men and 35 per cent of women playing international cricket for England went to fee-paying schools.
So, a combined Channel 4/Sky peak audience of 7.9million for Sunday’s victory over New Zealand could be viewed more as a promising sign of cricket’s potential than hard evidence that hearts and minds have been reclaimed; especially as the Wimbledon men’s final on the same afternoon peaked at 9.6million. Frankly, Roger Federer was a bigger draw than a mesmerising and painfully narrow England World Cup win – though that will stay in the memory far longer than Novak Djokovic’s win.
A cricket World Cup victory to add to football’s in 1966 and rugby union’s in 2003 certainly deserves to bask in its own glow and has a youthful, likeable group of players to extend its range. As Giles says: “They’re human beings, they’re going to make mistakes occasionally, but how they handle themselves is really important to us.
“It would have been easy to leave the guys in bed this morning. These kids have just loved it, being around these blokes.
“That bit about seeing those guys on the podium yesterday: people will be saying – I want to be Ben Stokes, I want to be Jos Buttler. That’s the difference from 2005. That was sort of our pinnacle. A few of us had injuries and we never all played together again. These guys still have time in their legs.” Root says of the Ashes: “It will be massive, especially off the back of this.”
However that series turns out, building a love for cricket will require a route back into state schools and inch-by-inch building in those sections of society that may switch on for a climactic match but might not hang around for the routine calendar action.
Sports talk about wanting to “look like” the societies in which they operate. A pleasingly diverse crowd at the Oval celebration met that aim. It looked the way London looks.
Hooking people for life is hard. But this was a golden hook.
The sport is now played in only 22 per cent of schools and 84 per cent by men