It’s almost over, then. There is probably a detailed study to be made of the relationship between English cricket’s innate sense of wistful ennui – the good is all gone! The bad is all to come! – and the fact the whole business happens to stop every year just as the summer ends and earth turns a shade of sad.
Either way, within the next 10 days Australia’s cricketers will be going home for the second time in two years and the current back-to-back-back triple stack of conjoined Ashes tours will finally be over, a 15-match gorge that has felt at times less like a celebration of cricket, more like the end of something.
Certainly there has been a general purging effect. Twenty-five months on from that first Test at Trent Bridge – Ashton Agar and all that – it is possible to sketch out a pretty decent combined team of popular, established Test match players who have either been culled, prematurely exhausted, or simply waved off on their way into the sunset by the experience (my own Goodbye XI: Rogers, Trott, Clarke, KP, Watson, Prior, Haddin, Bresnan, Swann, Harris, Panesar).
But then in England the end of the summer always brings endings. There will be the usual drip of retirements and career obituaries. And beyond that some more diffuse, if no less profoundly felt goodbyes, right down to the game’s desiccated grassroots. By way of example – and there is perhaps no reason why anyone outside of a specific pocket of south-east London should care about this – as of last month the London borough of Lewisham no longer has a cricket team.
Lewisham District has ceased to exist, shuffled out of existence by a wider reorganisation of the Kent junior age level system. Instead of small, intimate districts, Kent has moved on to a mega-district model, merging its 16-zone development structure – from which the county’s age group teams, and ultimately its academy players are creamed off – into a new series of larger catchments.
There is no reason, perhaps, to care about this. But it does seem to fit with a wider trend. On a micro level, and for hundreds of players and parents who have come into contact with him down the years, the death of Lewisham means the de facto retirement (enforced, but also, in fairness, overdue) of one of the great men of south London inner city sport development.
I’m pretty sure John Palmer doesn’t read the Spin so – sshhhh!, it’s OK – we can talk about him here without embarrassing him. Most districts and clubs across the country have someone similar, the volunteer professional coach without whom the whole shebang simply wouldn’t function. John is one of ours. For the last few years, as the sport has retreated from view, John has basically been cricket in Lewisham, a London borough with a population the size of Nottingham but deprived, lacking in green space, its primary schools stuffed and stretched, its spaces effectively de-cricketised.
John is one of those people who fight against this tide without really seeming to notice they’re doing it. Reports of his actual age vary, but somewhere in his mid-70s seems to be the consensus. He played football to a semi-professional level. He bowled wiry left-arm pace in the Kent leagues. Beyond that he has been a teacher, a development officer and now a roving, track-suited inner city guerilla coach, going into schools, spreading the word, talking to parents, coaching in the nets and drumming up a working district team out of a bunch of kids who quite often wouldn’t ever come into contact with their own fading summer sport any other way.
There are cricket clubs in Lewisham – two of them – for which John acts as a kind of unpaid recruitment agent, putting the word around and sending kids their way. Walk around Catford and Cyphers CC and grown men, small boys, tough looking teenagers will all wander over for a reassuring word with Lewisham cricket’s own in-house Yoda (“This is Dave,” he’ll tell the nearest 10-year-old of some vast, muscular, multi-skilled fast-bowling youth. “Ten years I’ve been coaching him. And he’s still absolutely useless”).
This is John’s style. At one of the under-10 net sessions this year one of the kids had bowled a wide or half-volley, or a full toss and was wandering back moaning about the state of the ball. “Something wrong with that ball James? Give it here.” Shuffle. Whoosh. Clang. Seventy-something year old John ambles in off two paces and pings down middle stump. “Nothing wrong with that ball, get on with it.”
These days he does all this for free. A few years back he was honoured by the BBC, nominated for one of those people’s award types. He met Gary Lineker and has a BBC badge discreetly sewn into the lapel of his training jacket. Other than that, this is a man who has simply refused to retire, despite the patient promptings of his wife, Lynn, who rolls her eyes at times but still keeps on quietly turning up with the orange squash on match-days.
This year Lewisham’s under-10 development group even won a match, the famous last-over taking-down of Greenwich Borough in front of a rapt gallery of parents and grandparents. They tied another against the powerhouse that is Bexley, cue for wild, shrieking scenes of jubilation (from some of the players too) that brought a corrective 10-minute post-match bollocking on respecting the opposition, meeting triumph and disaster just the same, and, oh well, go on then.
The best part of Lewisham, though, is the spirit. Everyone who comes, improves, shows some heart – and quite a few of these kids come blinking and uncertain, unused to any kind of organised sport – gets a game. Everyone bowls, everyone bats, which is not the way with some other boroughs, the ones who want to win just a bit too much. The kid who gets it suddenly, who does something different, plays forward, cocks his wrist, swings the ball, finally takes a catch: that’s what gets our team going. At the end of which I can honestly say it is the most orderly, positive, happy, benevolent team I’ve ever been around. Here you really do feel sport as a force for good, a pure green space.
And this is proper urban cricket: where lunch is from the corner shop, the home ground is often a cramped local park metres from the traffic, with drunks, dogs, toddlers or London park madmen likely to wander across the square at any moment (there to be politely, genially escorted off). Catford Cyphers, the real heartland, is a lovely, rickety urban leftover of a sports club with a clubhouse that resembles an ossified London pub. It is a club the leafier parts of the Kent leagues, ie the bits that aren’t really in London, ie pretty much all of them, call a “rum and reggae club” and roll their eyes at, but which is quite simply a brilliant, happy, inclusive space open to anyone who feels like walking in through the gates. Crowded in by housing and supermarkets, preserved from bulldozers by the happy accident of its own long-standing ownership trust, it feels at times like a miracle of soggy green, a last island of slightly scrubby beauty in among the grey.
And now, for Lewisham District, this is all over. Not that anyone is really to blame. As ever, the system is under strain. Budgets are tight, resources stretched. Kent County Cricket Club, which ultimately runs all this, remain the poor relation of the London counties, without a Test ground or a base in town to hoover up all that corporate hospitality cash, the after-work pint crew that has help turn the Kia Oval into such a raging financial powerhouse.
Kent do a fine job. My son did winter nets with the under-11s and, frankly, it’s a brilliant, inclusive, extra-mile kind of setup even at that age group, run with real craft and patience by some fine coaches. Just look at the first XI. At one point this season Kent were fielding a team with nine or 10 players born in the county. Sam Billings came though that way, as did Sam Northeast, Daniel Bell-Drummond, Matt Coles and plenty of other current young guns.
Finances are cautiously on the up, too, with another marginal improvement in revenues last year. Kent are back in Beckenham, with a lovely renovation to the Copers Cope Road ground. It is hard to avoid the feeling that if they really want to make it pay, they should simply relocate a little more in that direction, with plenty of low hanging fruit to be hoovered up in one of the wealthier south-east suburbs. But nobody in Canterbury wants that. And Kent is – let’s face it – Kent, not south-east London.
Which brings us back to Lewisham. As of next season John Palmer’s team will cease to exist, amalgamated by the more powerful, more leafy, better-stocked Greenwich borough. Of course, Lewisham’s kids will be welcome in the new mega-borough. But this is now a vast, dense, London sprawl measuring 10 miles across. Greenwich has three times as many private schools, with well-stocked playing fields and well-resourced kids with all the right kit, parents with cars, pay TV, tickets to the Kia Oval and Lord’s in the summer.
Lewisham, poor old fragile Lewisham, with its mission to tempt out those primary school kids for whom cricket is simply a rumour, a folk memory, a game for someone else, doesn’t really stand a chance here. And cricket will vanish a little more as a result, just as it has already from other parts of inner London. My own experience is that, a few committed exceptions aside, there is simply no regular cricket in London primary schools. There isn’t room, or time or equipment. Teachers are horribly overstretched. Come 3.30 they need you out the door so they can start faddling their way through wodges of administration. Teaching the doosra, or ferrying kids to some distant astro wicket in a minibus isn’t really on the agenda.
You can see this dying away in the England team even now. The last London-born and raised England Test debutant was Ravi Bopara eight years ago. The next, if we’re really lucky, might be Bell-Drummond, once of Catford Wanderers, an inner city kid spirited away at the right age to a posh country school, and already something of a cult hero in these parts.
There is of course a much wider point here about disappearance and stratification. Let’s face it, for much of the country cricket is now basically a private school game, or something that belongs to the green, grammar school suburbs. It is for the pre-converted or those who can afford to have an interest.
This is a tragedy of disappearance that goes way beyond the idea of raising England players. The kids who come into Lewisham cricket aren’t going to play professionally. But they are cricket’s future consumers, the carriers of the torch. The sport will be good to them if they keep playing, and they will be good to it in return. It is a healthy, low-friction, mutually beneficial relationship. And it will now die as the sport retreats back behind the TV veil, a rumour, a game played by the kids in the big houses up the hill. Lewisham no longer has a cricket team. And there is a fair chance it will never have one again.
This isn’t really anybody’s fault, perhaps. But it is definitely a little sad. “It is the next generation who, as ever in those deals, will be the losers,” Wisden said in 2006 of the “catastrophe” of cricket’s move to cut the wider public loose and wall itself up as a sport for the pre-converted. And here we are now. Another tranche of ground conceded, another staged retreat on the map.
• This is an extract taken from the Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe just visit this page, find “The Spin” and follow the instructions.
