What's going on? No need for panic over surveys

Sports participation surveys can be worrying events for administrators of codes because of knee jerk reactions that can follow as new trends emerge to suggest a swing away from a particular sport.

That was what was found in Australia when a Morgan Poll showed that soccer had supplanted cricket as the game of choice for a majority of Australians. The poll, published over the weekend, should that an estimated 1,218,000 Australians aged 14 or more, played soccer while 1,057,000 played cricket.

Should Cricket Australia be worried about such a trend? Probably not. If cricket, in its lower levels, were a winter sport then there might be cause for concern. If soccer ever went the way of the Australian National Soccer League and played its games in summer then there might be even greater need for worry.

But cricket is still the preferred game in summer. It is entrenched in the Australian psyche and will long remain that way. And as the Australian team continues to dominate the international game in Test and one-day cricket that is likely to remain the case.

Before anyone overseas reads into the figures the prospect that Australians might be turning off cricket, they need to remember that more than most other countries in the world, and New Zealand and South Africa would be obvious exceptions, Australia is a sports-minded country.

Its whole lifestyle is centred on sport. There are many options for settling the competitive urge for Australians and cricket is one of the foremost expressive outlets for the country. Soccer may have taken over in a significant way, but it also needs to be remembers that in most countries of the world, kicking the ball around in a soccer match is often the first sporting experience of many youngsters.

It is often a stepping stone to other sporting endeavours and Australia is no exception to that.

New Zealand, a rugby-mad nation where the game is the national game, has long seen its national sport out-flanked by other codes. Golf, according to the 2001 census, was the greatest participation sport for New Zealanders with 502,000 having played the game in the 12 months before the census. Tennis had 317,900, touch rugby, a summertime derivative of the national game had 260,900 participants and cricket was next with 224,100. Rugby only had 158,100.

But therein also lies another factor. Taking part over the previous 12 months could mean someone having played only a round or two of golf. New Zealand Cricket has done its own census after the last summer and it showed 103,000 people played competitive cricket.

Now if there was a knee jerk reaction to the Government census figures, cricket administrators would be tearing their hair out. In actual fact, the difference is that the Government census could relate to someone playing cricket at the beach, on the back lawn or out in the street.

What was significant for New Zealand Cricket was that its own census showed 9000 more people were playing the game competitively than had been the previous summer. That is significant in its own way.

It is easy to react to participation figures, but it is when the psyche of a nation changes, to the point where Australians don't care whether their cricket team is winning or losing that you have a catastrophe on your hands.

Evidence would suggest that is far from the case for Australians at the moment. And New Zealanders would add that while golf may be top of the participation stakes for a Government census, the fact of the matter is that it is not golf that fills the airwaves from talkback stations. Rugby is still king.

Suspended Australian legspinner Shane Warne has his problems at the moment, but telling the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to mind its own business is a bit like Saddam Hussein telling the United States to buzz off. It doesn't quite work that way.

And while WADA doesn't yet have the total legitimacy that would allow it to be the regulated policeman of drug cheating in world sport, it is still the leading, and increasingly powerful, arbiter in these matters. To tell them to mind their own business is missing the point completely.

Cricket, not so long ago, found itself dragged into the 21st century by a gambling scandal, something it had never catered for in its laws. The curse of drug abuse has been part and parcel of sport for some time, and groups like WADA have been introduced because of the abuse by sportsmen looking to gain the advantage over their opposition by unnatural means - in other words, by cheating.

It behoves cricket to show that it has nothing to hide and to chase after drug cheats as zealously as it now tries to prevent match-fixing taking place. The sooner WADA's anti-doping regime is in place, the better for cricket.