People have all sorts of ideas about the best way to tackle a bad hangover: cold showers, carbohydrates, coffee, perhaps a good cooked breakfast or a turn in the fresh air. One thing no one has ever recommended, though, is the remedy the ECB concocted for their World Cup-winning team, which involved a meet-and-greet with hundreds of screaming primary‑school children on the outfield at the Oval, a round of press and TV interviews and then, to cap it all off, a swift hair-of-the-dog with Theresa May at No 10 Downing Street. Watching the players come stumbling downstairs from the dressing room at 11 in the morning, the drinkers among them conspicuous by their sunglasses, it looked less like a party than it did a punishment.
When Sri Lanka won the World Cup in 1996 their captain, Arjuna Ranatunga, lost the cheque he had just been presented with at the victory ceremony because someone pickpocketed it from him during the pitch invasion. This time one wondered, for a minute, whether Eoin Morgan was going to lose the World Cup trophy when he disappeared beneath a wave of over‑excited schoolchildren, who started climbing all over him, and each other, to get at it. At one point one of the bigger kids seemed to have wrenched the cup away from him, before someone wisely decided that maybe they should hurry the thing back indoors again.
The players stuck it out for another 10 minutes before someone snapped and the stewards decided to kettle all the kids in a far corner. After that the players took a quarter-lap of honour in front of the few hundred adults who had come down to the ground after the ECB put out an invitation by email late on Sunday night.
There is no point in lying, it seemed a fairly strange, subdued and chaotic way to celebrate one of the great sporting achievements. In 2005, when England regained the Ashes, they marked it with an open-topped bus parade and a party in Trafalgar Square that pulled in almost a quarter of a million. This time, aside from the kids, they had perhaps a quarter of a thousand.
“A very different celebration compared to the one in 2005,” said Ashley Giles, who was involved in both, that one as a player, this as England’s director of cricket. “But the guys coming down here, sharing it with these kids, things like this are how you inspire future generations.”
It felt almost as if the ECB had spent so long planning how to win this World Cup, hiring Trevor Bayliss, rejigging their central contract system, rearranging the county schedules, that they had not stopped to think about what they would do if they did. It turned out that the children were all going to be here anyway for an event that had been arranged by Surrey. They had decided a couple of months ago to throw an after-the-Cup cricket carnival for kids from the local schools and clubs and England were piggybacking on that. The ECB approached them two weeks ago and asked if the team could come along to join in with them.
Silly as it all was, it felt sweet and fitting, too, a small new beginning for a sport that has been in slow decline for the past 14 years, ever since the ECB first shut it away behind a paywall on Sky TV. Amazing as Sunday’s game was, one day on free-to-air TV is not going to fix that. There is a long way to go but maybe here, among all these kids in their blue baseball caps waving their plastic bats and going crazy for their new heroes, screaming, shouting, clamouring, yammering over Ben Stokes, Jos Buttler, Jofra Archer, Adil Rashid and the rest of them, there were the seeds of the revival.
Joe Root seemed to think so. “It shows it’s a growing game and we’re doing everything we can to widen the reach of it,” he said. “As a team we talk a lot about how we want to leave the game in a better place when we finish. And I feel like the way we’ve gone about things in this World Cup has, hopefully, done that, like we’ve given these children an opportunity to see what we’ve achieved and want to go on and emulate it for themselves. I was 14 years old when I watched that 2005 Ashes series and it was hugely inspiring for me. Hopefully, we can do something similar for the next generation now.”
There are questions whether the ECB’s new competition, The Hundred, which will dominate the 2020 season, is going to be the best way to build on whatever surge of interest the sport enjoys this summer. But its CEO, Tom Harrison, did not want to front up and answer them right now, even though he was milling around on the outfield.
Giles did, though. “It is how it is,” he said, when he was asked how he felt that 50-over cricket was going to be marginalised next season. “Next year is really exciting and our focus will move towards 20-over cricket much more, because there are two T20 World Cups coming up, so for us having the preparation period of playing the T20 Blast and The Hundred is probably much more suited for what we’re taking on. And wouldn’t it be great if we could go and win that, too?”
Who knows, if they do, maybe the ECB will throw a proper party for them, too.
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