Give the People What They Want?

To survive, club cricket must remember people actually like playing it.

Mike Atherton.

The Times.

Thursday, 14 March 2019.

PTG 2751-13731.

Much of what is written about cricket concerns barely one per cent of the people who play it, or are involved in it, in the UK. It is no less true in the pages of ’The Times', where we concentrate largely on men’s and women’s professional cricket, here and abroad, at the expense of the recreational game.

Professional cricket may be newsworthy but it is not the heart and soul of the game, which resides in the clubs up and down the land — the 7,000 of them that make up the recreational game across Britain, along with the many itinerant wandering sides — and through the volunteers, enthusiasts and committed week-in week-out players who keep the show rolling along.

One of the great strengths of Australian cricket was the umbilical cord that joined the professional and amateur games, with players able to move almost seamlessly between the two, and links developed in childhood sustained through a professional career and beyond. These ties are weaker than they once were (PTG 2564-12912, 6 September 2018), but still stronger than in England.

Here, the professional and amateur games, though administered by one governing body, exist largely separately, the former well funded, the latter surviving hand-to-mouth. My own club career came unceremoniously to a halt once I had been capped by Lancashire, league rules at the time preventing a capped (ie established) player representing his boyhood club as an amateur — a ridiculous state of affairs. It should have been encouraged, not frowned upon.

No wonder, then, the irritation occasionally expressed when those from the professional game dare to tell their amateur counterparts how to run the show. Last week, Harry Gurney, the Nottinghamshire left-arm seamer, fresh from a triumph in the Big Bash League, suggested that all club and league cricket should be Twenty20, better to stop the decline in numbers and the loss of players at that crucial late-teenage stage of life, and the better to encourage wider participation from those for whom a longer game is too time-demanding.

Reaction was mixed, but there was, at least, a reaction: part sensible, part ridiculous, occasionally humorous, often spiteful. Mixed, too, in the conclusions there were some who agreed with Gurney; more who told him to stick to the pub trade (Gurney owns two pubs in Nottinghamshire with Stuart Broad).

The difficulty is partly knowing the state of the decline in relative terms. Last month there was an editorial in ’The Times' on the decline of village cricket and this weekend the Essex batsman Tom Westley’s old club, Weston Colville, withdrew from the Cambridgeshire Cricket Association league because of the difficulties in putting out a team. They first played cricket in that village in 1867 and now cannot put out a senior team, although the junior section will continue.

These closures tend to be newsworthy, but it is not clear that cricket is any worse affected than any other team sport. On the broadest definition of engagement, the England and Wales cricket Board (ECB) says that there are 2.5 million active players in England, roughly half of them senior, half junior. This, though, is a useless statistic, it being the broadest, most generous definition of inclusion. About 800,000 play some sort of formal cricket in leagues, and roughly a third of those might be termed regular, once-a-week, players.

The fact that numbers have dropped in recent years is undeniable, but almost every team sport faces the same issue. The most recent Sport England study comparing once-a-week participation for over-16s showed a decline in football, for example, from a little over 2 million players to 1.8 million over a ten-year period. The general trend is away from team sports to more individual pursuits, a trend that fits with the atomisation of modern life and the decline in membership of traditional, community-based institutions.

No club is typical; each has their own challenges. The story of my own — Radlett in the Saracens Hertfordshire League — is this: since the chairman Tony Johnson became involved in 1985, the number of senior playing members has held steady, at between 90-100, while junior participation has soared. The club runs 19 junior teams and has 220 registered junior players. It puts out four senior teams on Saturdays and one, sometimes two, on a Sunday.

There remains a strong appetite within it for a longer form of the game at the top end on Saturdays, the type of game that will enable players of all types to be involved and feel satisfied or knackered at the day’s end. The first team (in the county premier league, and therefore a very decent standard) play a mixture of timed cricket and overs cricket and some players come from university, hundreds of miles away, for a game — something that they would be unlikely to do for a 20-over match.

Likewise, in the same week as Gurney’s tweet, the Herts league held its annual meeting and I am told that there was widespread support for maintaining a longer format, especially in the top divisions.  Lower down, the bottom three divisions (out of 27) voted for a slightly shorter matches of 45 overs a side on Saturdays for this year.

It seems unfashionable to say it, but some people actually like playing the game. No sport, perhaps, does existential angst as well as cricket and in the rush for new formats to attract a new audience, for ‘Facebook' likes, ‘Twitter’ followers and bite-sized packages, there is a core constituency that enjoys the layered complexity of a longer, more satisfying game. There is a danger that they get taken for granted, or their wishes ignored.

Equally, it would be absurd to deny that, for many, long days do not tally with family commitments and many find two games a weekend a struggle. The former England captain Michael Vaughan’s idea of longer matches on Saturdays, combined with T20s on Sundays — juniors in the morning, seniors in the afternoon — certainly carries merit. ECB research suggests that numbers of core, regular players are holding up precisely because of the variety of options available. Choice of format is key.

The biggest challenge for many clubs is not necessarily playing numbers but social engagement beyond that and finding volunteers to fill key roles. All told, there are close to 500 playing and social members at our club but many use it as a cricketing facility alone, rather than as a social hub like it used to be. Again, these are societal trends, rather than problems particular to cricket, although they bring significant challenges to income streams. It is, says our chairman, a “precarious, hand-to-mouth existence”.

The debate around club cricket provides no easy answers, except to say that there needs to be a variety of formats to engage all, from the committed, to the irregular, as well as to provide a platform for growth. As the days lengthen ahead of the 2019 northern summer, the grass begins to grow and the trumpets of spring announce the end of winter, it is also a reminder that we can all do a little more for our clubs; no matter how good or incompetent, how committed or casual, it is where we all started out.