How healthy is English cricket?

In a long piece in the Financial Times, Matthew Engel visits several village clubs in England to check on the state of the game. The number of entries to the Village Cup has plummeted worryingly, but the quality of cricket has gone up, with clubs getting more and more serious about the game.

Above all, old-fashioned village cricket, where what mattered most were beer and fellowship and summer sun and a lingering sense of eternal youth, has gone out of fashion. No more do the likes of Jack Hibberd bustle round the pub and press-gang any half-sober male into making up the numbers, or enlist a kid to field somewhere quiet, bat No. 11 and perhaps save the game. Over the past four decades organised leagues have taken over, overwhelmingly. Most clubs have gone one way or the other: they have become large, serious units with multiple teams and junior sections and girls' teams and coaches. Or they have quietly disappeared.