Whither English cricket? (1 May 1999)

1 May 1999

Whither English cricket?

Michael Henderson

With the World Cup fast approaching, the Telegraph's new cricket correspondent tests the health of the nation's summer game and finds some green shoots among the grass roots.

One morning last week I stood at the corner of Kennington Park Road, a six-hit away from the Oval, where Surrey have played cricket for a century and a half, and asked a dozen people - black, white, male, female, young and otherwise - to name the captain of the England cricket team. Four people supplied the right answer.

It was not an entirely scientific investigation. No doubt Messrs Mori and Gallup would regard such a device as crude, but in its own limited way it served a purpose. On the eve of a World Cup, which everybody connected with the game hopes will regenerate interest in the sport most readily associated with summer, the England captain is not even widely known in his own back yard.

Had the same people been challenged to name the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the director of the Royal National Theatre, two members of the great and good who also work in the same parish, the degree of ignorance would probably have been greater. But people do not, on the whole, get worked up about matters of church or stage. They are, however, supposed to be interested in sport. Yet, as England prepare for the opening match of the tournament, against Sri Lanka at Lord's on May 14, Stewart may as well be Kaiser Bill's batman.

Surrey, where Stewart has played man and boy, like his father before him, are aware of this indifference. Two years ago, they conducted a survey to find out what the Oval meant to Londoners, and discovered that most people thought it was a station on the Northern Line. The ground where Hobbs batted and Laker bowled is part of the social history of the capital, yet to thousands of commuters the Oval is simply the stop before Stockwell.

That is how marginal to many lives the game has become, and why the World Cup, the first in this country for 16 years, offers the people who run it such an opportunity. Let's be honest, English cricket turns few wheels; it bakes little bread. Nor is it regarded highly beyond these shores, however many foreigners come here to play and coach. Like Italian pop music, and Spanish beer, its appeal is strictly domestic. Those involved with the game would do well to start from that premise as they approach such an important season.

It isn't hard to see why the game is in a mess, because it doesn't really know what it wants to be. The counties want a busy domestic programme, in which they hold most of the cards. The England and Wales Cricket Board favour the cosmetic attraction of a strong national side. Most state schools regard the game, if they regard it at all, as being too expensive and time-consuming. Club cricket is an imperfect nursery for the professional game, and those youngsters who do come through swiftly become enmeshed in a structure that cultivates tenured mediocrity.

Furthermore, the game's image has diminished, to the point of invisibility in many urban areas, where football often appears to be the only form of human life. Granted, 'image' is a horrible thing, weighted heavily towards the brazen second-rater, but in an age of instant gratification it has its uses for those who have something they want others to know about.

What does English cricket offer? No great players, that's for sure. Begging Graham Gooch's pardon, there hasn't been a player to empty the bars since the golden years of Ian Botham and David Gower. According to a spokesman for Talk Radio, who recently bought the rights to broadcast this winter's international cricket from South Africa, it is a game loved by "the old and pompous". Well, here's looking at you, kid!

When David Lloyd, the England coach, went into the BBC Radio studio this week, ostensibly to talk up the World Cup, he was patronised by that preening ninny, Nicky Campbell, and obliged to sit through several minutes of waffle about race relations before he was permitted to field four telephone calls, none of which had anything to do with forthcoming events. Had he been a football manager they would have dressed him in ermine and stuck him on a throne.

But the fact is, Talk Radio considered it worth their while to trump the BBC, just as Channel 4 did last year when they acquired the rights for domestic Test cricket amid a fanfare of trumpets. And if you look at the current list of best-selling books, you will find Wisden and the Playfair annual topping the hardback and paperback reference sections. Then there is the extraordinary business of Dickie Bird's autobiography, which, as its subject will tell you, is the biggest-selling sports book in history. Somewhere out there, evidently, there are still some odd folk who care about this much-kicked-about game. In fact, if you talk to some of those involved in it, a different story begins to emerge.

Sitting in his office at the Oval, where he has been Surrey's cricket development officer since 1990, Mike Edwards is astonished to hear that youngsters are not playing cricket. They are, he says, but not in the way that they once did. "I used to teach in Brixton, and every Saturday morning you would see six or seven coaches lining up to take children off to play matches. That has gone now, but it doesn't mean that young people are not playing.

"The perceived wisdom of the press is that the game is dying. The actual situation is that more children are playing now than ever. It is just that they are not necessarily playing in schools, although there are parts of the country where there is as much activity as there ever was. In Surrey we have 150 clubs with colts sections, which can involve anything from 30 to 300 kids.

"If you look at the way the England under-17 and under-19 sides have performed in the last few years, they have been unbeaten in several series, which indicates that the game is flourishing. I think the problem lies in the first-class game. We have more than 400 professionals in this country, and 250 of them are never going to make the grade properly. County cricket is too comfortable. We have a situation where we are paying 27-year-olds to play second-team cricket."

Edwards and his two helpers coach in 400 schools, "trying to give the teachers the confidence they lack". He speaks of Honeywell, a school in Battersea, where there was no cricket 10 years ago and where four girls now play in the teams. Surrey have squads for every age group from nine to 19, as well as representative girls teams.

"If we go into a school," he says, "we do not want it to be a one-off visit. We want them to progress, to enter our tournaments." The grooming of Alec Stewart, Graham Thorpe and Alex Tudor, who have progressed through the ranks to the Test side, is the most obvious example of Surrey's commitment to the development of gifted young players.

Time and land are the biggest problems. Not many teachers - outside the independent sector, that is - are prepared to give up their evenings and weekends, even if they could find a suitable place to play. In Lambeth, for instance, the Oval is the only cricket ground. "We are trying to develop a ground in Kennington Park," says Edwards. "There is a plot of land ideal for senior cricket, where juniors could also play."

In Tudor, the 21-year-old fast bowler, Surrey have a young player who can carry the flag for cricketers all over the country, as a black lad from an inner-city area. Picked for the tour of Australia as a just-in-case selection, he made such a good impression on his Test debut in Perth that it will be disappointing if he does not maintain his progress this summer. Like it or not, he is a standard-bearer.

The Central Lancashire League season began in the time-honoured manner last weekend. It rained. At Milnrow, a club on the outskirts of Rochdale, two miles from the Yorkshire border, the game against Unsworth was swiftly abandoned so that everybody could get to the bar and tell tales of the deeds they would have performed.

If you were seeking an image of what a northern club looks like, it would probably look a lot like this. Milnrow is where town meets country, in the heart of post-industrial Lancashire. Yes, there are cobbled streets and men in cloth caps do nurse foaming pints. But even here things are changing. The chip shops are run by Chinese, the schools use Urdu on their noticeboards and among the working men's clubs there is even a French bistro ("cr?perie, I'll have you know").

The purpose of club cricket, according to the counties, is partly to nourish the professional game. If that is the case then Milnrow have failed miserably. Not since John Abrahams, who joined Lancashire 25 years ago, has one of their men made any sort of mark. In fact the league as a whole has failed. Chris Schofield, the teenage leg-spinner from Littleborough who has started the season in the Lancashire side, is the only member of the county staff to emerge from the CLL.

Leagues like this defend their territory resolutely. Neither the CLL nor the Lancashire League to the north have any plan to amalgamate with teams from other associations to form an all-Lancashire federation, as has happened in other counties. If they are portrayed as stick-in-the-muds, and they are, that is a burden they are happy to carry. Lancashire, like Yorkshire, bears no resemblance to a county like Surrey, where the geography is altogether different.

If Milnrow is a backwater then perhaps the game could do with a few more like it. The club have 12 qualified coaches and, at junior level, field seven teams from a pool of 150 players. Last year they boasted five league champions at different age groups, and a girls team from the local high school won a national indoor competition. Here is further proof that appearances often deceive.

"If you come down here on a Monday night," says Abrahams, in his capacity as the national coach of under-19 cricket, "you can see as many as seven groups of young lads knocking up." Nor does he think today's young players are softer than those of the past. "I think they're more mature now than they used to be. They may not be as street-wise, if you like, as those in Australia or South Africa, but they are more professional than they were."

The problem is translating all that promise into something substantial. When the teenaged Abrahams first went to Old Trafford, a senior player pointed him out to a bystander and said: "If that lad doesn't make a Test player, it'll be our fault." It's an old story; in English cricket, the oldest in the book.

Grace Road last Wednesday didn't look much like the home of champions, yet that is what Leicestershire are. They won the County Championship last season, for the second time in three years, but while they were at it they provided not a single player to the England team, which is what counties are supposed to do.

It is not hard to feel a bit sorry for them. English cricketers are constantly told they are too soft, that players pick up wages for aspiring only to mediocrity, and when Leicestershire supply unanswerable evidence that one club at least are fighting the good fight, they are greeted with public indifference. They love their rugby in Leicester, with good reason, and quite like their football. Cricket they barely tolerate.

To their immense credit Leicestershire remain indifferent to the public's indifference. David Collier, the club's chief executive, maintains it is a hackneyed and incorrect perception. "We have getting on for 6,000 members, and in a county of one million people, that is the highest ratio of any county club."

Be that as it may, Grace Road will never be mistaken for some Elysian field, which makes the efforts of the players, led by James Whitaker, all the more worthy. Their team are a collection of cast-offs from other counties and young lads who have come through their own system, and they play with a common purpose which goes against the grain at clubs with more money and bigger reputations.

Last year they established a scholarship programme with Oakham School and Loughborough University, whereby they would sponsor a player each year. Together with the county board, a separate organisation to the club, they spend UKP 100,000 each year on spreading the game throughout schools in Leicestershire. This is sponsorship from the bottom up, as it needs to be, rather than the top down, and it seems to be working. If it isn't then the game as a whole is in trouble.

These are three views, and only three, but they are linked by a common thread. Although the game is in the wars, people all over the country are rallying on its behalf. There are many good people within the game and each summer brings fresh hope.

By far the best news of the week came at Lord's. It is customary to denounce MCC as a den of antediluvian conspirators but they are not the greatest cricket club in the world by chance. On Tuesday they unveiled a magnificent media centre, designed by a Czech emigre, and constructed in a Cornish shipyard by a Dutchman. As it faces directly the magnificent Victorian pavilion, it is effectively the 21st Century paying its respects to the 19th. It is a wonderful symbol of the game renewing itself, as well as a gesture of terrific confidence that, 100 years from now, there will still be a game worth celebrating.

Cricketers of England, now and to come, it is time to throw off your chains.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)