Let’s face it – English cricket has a class and race problem
Cricket, Football and Rugby Union are England’s three great national team sports, but if you look at each of their national teams, the composition is very different.
Not all football supporters may be free of racism, but the stars of the England XI are mostly black and almost all leading footballers are state-educated. The Rugby XV may be predominantly educated at independent schools, but several will have spent years of their schooling in the State system before getting sixth-form scholarships into the independent sector. Around half of Eddie Jones’s first-choice team are children or grandchildren of immigrants – black, brown or of mixed race.
Cricket presents a very different picture: members of the Test squad are mostly white Anglo-Saxon. The exceptions in recent years being Moeen Ali and Adil Rashid, grandsons of immigrants from the sub-continent of Pakistan and Indi, and the black fast bowler, Jofra Archer, born in Barbados but with a British passport.
Despite amateur status in first-class cricket being abolished thirty years before Rugby Union permitted professionalism, most of the present England players are also products of the independent school sector. James Anderson and Ben Stokes (who has Maori and English ancestry) are two exceptions, and the captain Joe Root spent only his last year or two years at the fee-paying school Worksop College. Nevertheless, it remains the case that first-class cricket in England is mostly white and middle-class.
Take the class question first and trackback to the Forties, Fifties and Sixties. There were always players, usually batsmen, educated at independent schools and Oxford or Cambridge: Peter May, Colin Cowdrey, David Sheppard (later Bishop of Liverpool) and Ted Dexter. On the other hand, arguably the four greatest English batsmen in the first thirty or forty years after World War II; Len Hutton, Denis Compton, Ken Barrington and Geoffrey Boycott were all state-educated. As were almost all the great bowlers; Alec Bedser, Brian Statham, Fred Trueman, Jim Laker, Tony Lock, Johnny Wardle.
Why are things different now? Well, here’s a pointer. Denis Compton, born 1918, was first noticed at the age of twelve playing at Lord’s – yes, Lord’s –for North London Schools against South London Schools. Two years later, at Lord’s once more, he made a century for London Elementary Schools against C F Tufnell’s XL. (Tufnell was, I think, a former Kent player, a committee member at Surrey and, I assume, a member of the MCC.) Another future Test player, the Surrey wicketkeeper, Arthur McIntyre, also made a hundred for the Elementary Schools, against Mr Tufnell’s XI.
How many state-school boys in London nowadays have the opportunity to play cricket as Compton, McIntyre and thousands of others did between the wars and indeed for at least twenty years after 1945? The answer must be very few unless they have fathers or uncles who play club cricket themselves. The decline of cricket in state schools and even disappearance in many places is reflected in the make-up of Test and County teams today. The shameful eagerness with which local authorities have sold off playing fields over the last twenty or thirty years has, of course, contributed to this.
Forty years ago, it was commonly assumed that, given their inherited enthusiasm for the game, the sons and grandsons of West Indian immigrants would make a big contribution to English cricket, and in the 1980s and 90s, the assumption seemed well-founded. Several pace bowlers – Norman Cowans, Phil de Freitas, Gladstone Small, Chris Lewis, Devon Malcolm and Alex Tudor – were fairly regular members of the England attack, and most delivered the occasional match-winning performance. But it didn’t last and, strange as it may seem more black and mixed-race cricketers represented England in the last two decades of the twentieth century than in the last twenty years.
In this context, it is worth looking at Kent’s Daniel Bell-Drummond. Born in 1993, to parents of Jamaican descent, he was spotted by Kent as a very small boy playing for a junior side of his club Catford Wanderers. He came up through the ranks and had a very successful career in age-group cricket playing for England under-19s. If he has not quite fulfilled youthful promise, he has established himself as a very good county player with a first-class average of 33; he has hit 10 first-class hundreds, among them a particularly magnificent one against Australia in 2015. He may yet play Test cricket, though his younger Kent colleague Zak Crawley has got there before him. But he may be encouraged by the example of his other club-mate Joe Denly who had to wait till he was a couple of years over thirty before being called up by England.
This, however, is by the bye. There are two reasons for referencing Bell-Drummond here. First, two years ago it was revealed that there were only eight black or mixed-race cricketers playing in the County Championship and that Bell-Drummond was one of the three aged twenty-five or under. This is not only sad; it means that an awful lot of potentially gifted cricketers are missing out. Recognizing this, Bell-Drummond, having been fortunate enough to have won a scholarship to Millfield himself, set up Platform, a project aiming to reintroduce cricket in primary schools in Lewisham and to encourage clubs actively to seek out young recruits. With his business partner, the cricketer staged a junior cricket festival in Deptford. Others run similar projects elsewhere. More are needed.
Young boys and girls deserve to have the sort of opportunities that were available to working-class children like Denis Compton and Arthur McIntyre almost a hundred years ago; opportunities which State education no longer cares to provide. Denis played at Lord’s at just age twelve, kitted out in short trousers. What are the chances of a boy from an inner-city comprehensive doing that now, whatever his social or ethnic background might be?