The traditional sign of advancing years comes when policemen start to
look younger, but for me it is when county cricketers suddenly seem to
be in the flower of their youth. This is not, however, entirely an
illusion: the nature of the modern game, despite every team needing a
leavening of experience, demands younger players. Unfortunately, our
educational system does not always permit the desired fast track from
playground to Test arena.
Consider the different paths which must be trodden to county
dressing-rooms by present-day Mike Brearleys and Ian Bothams. Their
approximate equivalents might be Ed Smith, of Cambridge, and Kent and
Andrew Flintoff, of Lancashire: both are 20 and both are potential
future England players. Smith has played very little first-class
cricket this year, after 1,163 runs at 43 last season, and he has
recently been locked in conflict or, touch wood, joined in harmony,
with the history examiners.
Flintoff, though he made only 243 runs last year at 30, went on the A
tour, did well and is making faster strides. He is a mighty striker of
a cricket ball and a brilliant catcher at second slip; if he can build
his bowling up again after back trouble the comparisons with the young
Botham will be valid.
No one can be sure which will prove the better player or end his
working life wealthier or happier, but Flintoff's future is likely to
be dominated by cricket, even when he has retired - he gained nine
GCSEs but chose not go on to A-levels - whereas Smith comes from an
academic tradition. The son of an English master at Tonbridge who
taught both Chris and Graham Cowdrey, he maintains a long English
tradition of the scholar-sportsman. The chances are that he will have
two careers and that, as with Brearley, the second will not embrace
the game which is destined to pay his wages for the next decade or so.
There is room for both routes to professional cricket, but both need
help. All would concur with Flintoff's assertion in this year's
Cricketers Who's Who that "Cricket should be promoted more in state
schools", but reform is needed in the independent schools too and only
a mutual agreement among them all can bring it about.
For many years the length of the summer term has been dwindling as
exam results assume ever greater importance: matches are fewer and the
time for practice less. There is an obvious solution to this, but no
one has had the drive to push it through. It is to play at least five
weeks more cricket in late August and early September, when the autumn
term begins and when sports grounds are often too hard for rugby or
other body-contact sports.
The even better idea of reverting to a longer summer term and moving
all public exams - GCSEs, A-levels, university exams, the lot - from
the languid middle of summer to the bracing period leading up to
Christmas, is apparently not feasible. Would that it were: dark nights
are better than hot, light ones for hours of study; and the common
cold of December is more or less cancelled out by hay fever in June.
Happily, there are plenty of initiatives not only to revive cricket
within state schools but to fill in the gaps beyond school hours. One
extraordinary example is the transformation of a derelict seven-acre
ground off East End Road at Finchley in Middlesex. In October 1992,
the county's Cricket Development Association took loans to buy a
50-year lease, with a further 50-year option, and converted it into
what is now the Wilf Slack Memorial Ground.
Aided by a UKP 150,000 loan from the Foundation for Sport and the
Arts, and by funds raised by the Trust which was formed when that
exemplary cricketer died so tragically young, the county now has a
fine ground with two squares, good grass nets and a quite magnificent
pavilion. All six county cup finals and four league knockout cup
finals will be played there for the first time this season. The
Development Association's chairman, Vic Cook, remembers his feelings
at the start of what became a UKP 600,000 investment: "Shortly after
signing the lease, certain members of the committee walked over the
ground, in some places sinking up to our ankles, trying to locate the
one-time cricket square. We surveyed the vandalised buildings, all of
which were unusable, and knowing that we then had the princely sum of
UKP 8,000, vice-chairman Gareth Williams asked, 'What have we done?' "
Shown faith, was the answer, in the game's continuing attraction to
new generations of cricketers. The same faith shown by Ted Hayter,
librarian at St Thomas the Apostle College in Peckham, who takes
youngsters from one of the most deprived areas of London to a ground
eight miles away for their only exposure to real, as opposed to
playground, cricket; by the Arundel Castle Cricket Foundation, which,
in vastly different surroundings, coaches 100 local primary and
secondary schools and thousands of young cricketers from further
afield; by charitable sponsors like the Lord's Taverners, or
commercial ones like NatWest Bank or Colonial Financial Services, who
have supported Durham University's Centre of Excellence; and by the
English Schools Cricket Association, still "serving children, serving
cricket" 50 years on from its foundation just after the war.
Their chairman, Alan Bennett, speaks with justifiable pride of the
various age-group competitions fostered by ESCA and echoes words from
the ECB's Raising the Standard about the dependence of youth cricket
generally on a "vast army of enthusiastic volunteers".
For most the enthusiasm never dies, not excluding one E W Swanton, to
whom county cricketers have appeared youthful for some time. He has
just made an inspired contribution to the MCC's debate over women
members by suggesting that the club should approach the problem not
out of commercial interest or political correctness, but by asking how
MCC can help women's cricket?
Swanton proposes that talented young women cricketers should become
playing members of the club, taking part in games against girls'
schools, universities and clubs, in just the same way that young men
have traditionally qualified for membership by playing in matches as
probationers. Thus are they sifted for skill, character and behaviour.
This would be good for the development of female cricket and good for
the club, too: the more cricket-aware the MCC membership is, the
sounder will be its influence on the game. The committee should heed
the advice of the Seer of Sandwich.
Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)