Mark Ramprakash made some good points about cricket reflecting the unequal society it operates within, but I think he also managed to confirm that it is almost impossible for cricket to be egalitarian (I made my way in cricket but it is clear that was against the odds, 27 June). Unless inner-city state schools are magically given playing fields, groundspeople, minibuses and the funds to pay for all of this, cricket as a game will stay out of reach for a huge number of children.
There are also other human factors at play that serve as barriers to high-level sport. When my 13-year-old daughter got into county netball last year, the girls were divided into three groups, practising at three different sports centres. My daughter was placed in the group furthest away from where we live, without any discussion about whether we could get her there. The session was an hour’s drive from our home and started at 6pm every Monday. This despite the fact that another one of the groups practises only 15 minutes away from home. No one encouraged lift-sharing or stopped to find out whether parents could facilitate these sessions.
As an NHS worker, I had to change my hours to get her there and back on time every Monday – luckily my employer allowed me to do so. But how many other parents would have struggled with the time and petrol money needed to join this elite group? And thinking about cricket again, how many working parents can spare the hours needed for taking children to and from the leisurely games?
Laura Matthews
London
• CLR James’s classic work Beyond a Boundary (1963) taught us that cricket both reflects and reinforces existing structural inequalities in society (English cricket is ‘racist, sexist and elitist’, says landmark report, 27 June). In light of the “most devastating published critiques of a British sports body”, evidenced in “Holding up a mirror to cricket”, the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) report, it is essential that the England and Wales Cricket Board has transparent social inclusion criteria – for class, race, gender and disability – in its distribution of funding to counties, leagues and junior cricket, as well as a rigorous system for monitoring their implementation.
Perhaps the insightful quote from James: “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” should also be displayed wherever cricket is administered, watched and played.
Mike Stein
Pudsey, West Yorkshire
• The ICEC report demonstrates the need for radical change. A key starting point is the role of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). A members’ only club where membership is only open to those recommended by existing members is not consistent with accessibility. The MCC has a privileged role within the game that either has to be eliminated or the club has to be open to all. I have been a guest in the MCC members’ areas and it was uncomfortable, despite the fact that I am a white, middle-aged, middle-class man. That discomfort arose from the sense of entitled privilege that pervades. I hate to think what it must feel like for others.
Hugh Southey
London
• The disappearance of cricket from free-to-air TV may not be the only reason why the last 18 years have seen our national summer sport decline to the point where only about 5% of children play it and where Neville Cardus would never get a job on the Guardian, but it has certainly been calamitous for the game. Few people will pay nearly three times the monthly cost of a TV licence to watch a game to which they are not already committed. But, without a big increase in popular interest, cricket in England is doomed to become a niche sport in which the privately educated earn a living by playing T20 in international “franchise” leagues while Test match cricket dwindles away.
Michael Pyke
Lichfield
• Sometimes cricket’s class barrier is breached (Editorial, 27 June). During assembly at my state grammar school in the early 1960s, the headmaster proudly announced that three former pupils at the school were now playing regularly in the England Test team (Arthur Milton, John Mortimore and David Allen). Thirty years later, three old boys from the school sat simultaneously on the Church of England bench of bishops. We are told that this feat has only been equalled by Eton College. The difference is that our school boasted neither a cricket ground nor a chapel.
Rt Rev John Saxbee
Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire
• I can’t disagree with Paul Mincher (Letters, 27 June). When I started rowing on the Tyne 60 years ago, we regularly competed against crews of dockers and other manual trades. There was still a tradition of professional, working-class rowing races all over the north, with a history of huge crowds watching lauded champions. The sport has become slightly more racially diverse and significantly more gender diverse, but much less socially diverse. Where I row on the Thames now we probably have more women than men joining, but rowers are predominantly middle-class.
Peter Hutchinson
Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire
• I am pleased that Ben Stokes is calling for change in English cricket (Ben Stokes ‘deeply sorry’ to hear of cricket discrimination detailed in report, 27 June). Many of us who love the game will still remember the original decision to exclude Basil D’Oliveira from the England team due to tour South Africa in 1968, and the comment at the time from the wonderful John Arlott: “Few of those within the world of first-class cricket are political animals. That, however, is no excuse for being politically unconscious.”
Mike Sheaff
Plymouth
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