CMJ: Comment: Tradition nurtured on the nation`s Lindfield commons (02 June 1997)

Monday 2 June 1997

Comment: Tradition nurtured on the nation`s Lindfield commons

By Christopher Martin-Jenkins

WHETHER the forecast for thundery weather during the first three Tests proves true or false, and however much one might feel that cloudy skies will make the coming Anglo/Australian series a genuinely close contest, I hope above everything that weekends will be fine for the rest of the season. Saturdays and Sundays are the days that matter for most practising cricketers and especially for the young ones.

Everyone who has played the game at school will remember the intense disappointment when match days dawned grey and wet. Summer terms are shorter and for those who do get the chance to play school games, exam pressures are building at this time. Summer Saturdays should bring relief from the tension and, though they may not realise it, cricket will teach the young much more than the simple arts of the game, which could be distilled into only one maxim if necessary: bowl straight, play straight.

The game imparts the art of concentration, the value of shared responsibility and many another lessons which will pay dividends long after exams have been passed or failed.

For those young enough still to be in blissful ignorance of the spectre of the exam paper, Sunday mornings are, in most parts of the country, the times when it must not rain. Club cricketers up and down the land have been "putting something back" by organising, coaching and cajoling their young charges, filling in for schools or, increasingly, building on what schools have already done. This is where future Ashes series are going to be won or lost. At least equally important, this is where the long tradition of English cricket will be passed on from one generation to another.

How long a tradition was brought home to me on Saturday night when I attended a dinner celebrating the 250th anniversary of unbroken cricket on the common at Lindfield in West Sussex. Sons still follow fathers into the teams fielded by this village club.

On a tour of Australia last winter they lost every match, but that did not bother them. Fielding colts teams at three different age groups is more important to a club founded when George II was on the throne and the Scots were still licking wounds after the battle of Culloden. Fostering the tradition is every cricketer`s responsibility. Gradually, a more logical progression from playground to Test arena is winding its way through the baffling maze of youth cricket.

TO GIVE but one example, Northamptonshire were not just playing in the Sunday league against Middlesex yesterday: their under-10s were playing Surrey at Charterhouse; their under-11s and 12s were at Chigwell School playing Essex; their under-14s were at the Royal Grammar School, Worcester, against Worcestershire; and their under-17s were on the county ground itself, at home to St Thomas`s College, that pillar of Sri Lankan cricket.

Northamptonshire employ three men full-time on youth cricket and although their chief development coach, Neil Foster, was as tough a competitor as any in his days as a Test bowler, his perspective is sound: "We are committed to producing excellence on the field of play but also the highest standards of sportsmanship," he says. "Northants` young cricketers are expected to show 100 percent commitment but also to show the same amount of enjoyment."

Like other counties, Northants organise their cricket into nine age-groups. Four of their current county team, David Ripley, Mal Loye, Paul Taylor and Tony Penberthy, spent their winter coaching in schools.

But the administration of the game in this, as in most of the 38 counties, remains too complicated. When the Northants County Board was formed with a view to co-ordinating all activities more logically, the Northants Cricket Council, already trying to do much the same thing, remained in being: it has representatives from the Northamp- tonshire Championship (theoretically the strongest 12 clubs in the county); the Northants County League (30 clubs with four divisions); the Northants Alliance; the South Northants league; and the Northampton Town League. Add to that representatives for the schools, the umpires and scorers, the coaches and the county, and you begin to see how easily youth and club cricket can become bogged in petty politics.

Often it is a case of well-meaning individuals, happy to put their own time into cricket, misguidedly protecting small empires or unprepared to change systems which have worked well in themselves, but do not fit any truly balanced national programme. In a nutshell, that was why the attempt to set up a league of leading clubs in Lancashire to play two-day cricket from next season foundered.

We should rejoice, however, that there has been a reversal of the trend away from playing cricket in schools. Over the last 12 months 3,000 primary school teachers have attended introductory training courses organised by the England and Wales Cricket Board.

With the help of the Youth Sports Trust, a colourful teaching aid called Time To Play has just been produced. It will be given to every teacher who attends a course and would help adults with no previous knowledge of the game to organise simple and enjoyable games such as `keep running cricket`, wherein the batsman (boy or girl) has to run whether he or she hits the ball or not and the bowler delivers the next ball as soon as he or she is ready. Keep the game running: that is what we all have to do, because it is the best game of the lot.

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