No quick fix for English cricket (21 December 1998)

21 December 1998

No quick fix for English cricket

By Michael Parkinson

THERE are signs it has finally sunk in. It took a while, but finally even the most ardent fan has come to realise English cricket is in a hopeless mess. However, when you remove the rhetoric about the lads doing their best and management leaving no stone unturned in preparation you are left with not so much a defeated team as a discredited system.

It is easy to blame misguided administrators, and they must take the lion's share. But other elements have conspired in the debacle. Powerful voices in the media have resisted change, putting their trust in some runic system of cyclical metamorphosis. Flat earthers provide a powerful freemasonry within the hierarchy. To many, the boundaries of the game seemingly extend no further than the view from Lord's. The world of cricket appears so incestuous it ought to be investigated by social services.

Belatedly cricket has come to realise it must change the structure of the game. It must also do something about the way it is perceived. In the past decade or so there has been a cultural shift in Britain, and cricket is not part of it. There is no longer a cricket season. What we have is a football season with cricket, instead of a marching band, at half-time. Cricket is no longer our national summer game. It is a minority sport with diminishing appeal to youngsters increasingly attracted by the powerful commercial magnet of the Premier League.

These are children without choice because cricket is not part of their lives. It is not on the school curriculum. It has no heroes. Mrs Thatcher told schools to fend for themselves, so supermarkets prosper where once children dreamed of being Ian Botham. In any event the education system had already let them down. Teachers decided it took too long to supervise cricket, educational theorists (who would count synchronised swimming and bird watching as sports) decided that competitive events were unhealthy. A pox on them.

In the old days we would have sent them to Australia for their perfidy. Which is where we must look today for answers. We have only to understand the source of Australia's strength to see where we are weak. In Australia the cricket season has its own, inviolate pride of place. It is not squeezed out by Aussie rules or either code of rugby.

The wearing of the baggy green is every child's ambition. It starts at school and is carried on through a club system where the cricket is purposeful and not simply a pleasant way of working up a thirst. Underpinning all is a belief among the populace and those they elect that all games and particularly cricket are important in the education and well-being of their children. In other words sport has an important part in the cultural life of the nation.

What we have instead of belief and resolute action is inertia. When we say we are going to do something, we appoint committees and sub-committees, working parties and quangos. What happened to the Sports Academy? What happened to the Cricket Academy? The answer is they have been buried in a bog of bureaucracy, dithered to death, sunk in a swamp of sloth. Do you know what we are? Bloody hopeless, that's what. And that goes for the lot of us, politician's, administrators, media toadies and the rest who year after year cling on to the forlorn hope that just by hanging on things might get better. Well they won't, so now you know.

The situation will remain irreversible until such time as cricket reasserts itself and regains what it has given away. The politicians must play their part (fat chance) but, as importantly, the ECB must start by reducing the gap that exists between league cricket and the counties. The most significant difference between the Australian system and ours is that cricketers move naturally between league, state and, indeed, international cricket. By comparison our leagues serve only as convenient sources of income for young cricketers from the southern hemisphere, who earn easy money demonstrating the gap between their best club cricketers and ours.

At county level two divisions will make the game more competitive. Those who worry that this will mean a concentration of talent in the hands of half a dozen or so counties are missing the point. If that is what it takes to improve our cricketers so they no longer embarrass their hosts, then so be it. It can surely get no worse than a situation where the Australians, of all people, start feeling sorry for us. That fact alone should be enough to start the revolution.

Similarly we must be bold in identifying the kind of cricketers required in the future. There are vacancies in every department. Next season the selectors must be imaginative in their choice to play New Zealand. Let them pick young players and give them a full Test series to show us what they have got. There will be a temptation to go with the present lot in the hope of restoring morale against weaker opponents.

I doubt anyone will buy that and I imagine the fans staying away in their thousands. On the other hand they might be persuaded to support a team displaying signs of youthful ambition and selectorial enterprise. This is what the Australians did when they were in the dumps.

When all is said and done, any 11 cricketers chosen at random from the counties could do no worse than the present England team. The Ashes remain with Australia, and they will keep them for a while yet. However, this defeat could have a positive significance for English cricket if it brings about radical change; action instead of a sub-committee. What is the sense of enduring yet another humiliation by the Australians if we don't find out how they do it so we can do it back to them?

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