I never met Pete Rocket, and even now know nothing about him, except what I read scrawled on the wall of the scorer’s hut at the ground where my father used to play. “Pete Rocket retired again.” Once I asked Dad what it meant. He laughed and told me it was an in-joke among the players. That every close season Pete Rocket would quit and then come back again in the spring. I guess there’s one like that at every club. The phrase is dyed in my mind, indelibly, one of my earliest recollections of cricket, along with the great plates of crisps and grated cheese sandwiches with curling crusts, and the enormous coffins, impossible to lift, crammed full of obscure bits of kit, boxes, bails, and balls on sticks which he used for knocking in new bats.
Early memories, these. Of long summer Saturdays scurrying around the boundary rope, disappearing into the woods over the far side of the ground from the pavilion. According to Matt Dwyer, the ECB’s director of participation and growth, the research shows there are three main reasons why children start to play cricket. The first is a friend took them to the club. The second is their parents did. And the third is a teacher or another significant adult did. I found it through my dad, who used to take my brother and me along to watch his games, just to get us out of the house and give my mother some peace. They were both far better players than I ever was or would be but that must have been where I first fell for it, and why, 30 years later, I make my living writing about it.
At my state school they didn’t play. Though one year Andy Hayhurst, then Somerset’s new signing, came up from Taunton to run a few masterclasses. They cost a lot, and, equipped with hockey sticks because the school had no bats, we spent the sessions patting back half-volleys, practising our forward defence, fighting the urge to try to launch the ball into the rooftop rafters of the hall. Occasionally, someone would succumb and Hayhurst would rebuke them. Years later, he was convicted of stealing more than £100,000 from the Lancashire Cricket Board and the Lancashire Youth Cricket Charitable Trust. He had been submitting phoney invoices for children’s coaching sessions that he’d never run.
Every single player and spectator, everyone who loves the game, will have their own versions of these stories. First memories of cricket. A quick skim through a few books on the shelves either side of my desk shows that for David Gower it was in the backyard of a house on stilts outside Dar es Salaam, where his father was the district officer, batting against the servants. For Alec Waugh, it was in the long, narrow garden of his family house in West Hampstead, batting against the cook’s bowling, his young brother Evelyn a reluctant wicketkeeper, there to spare Alec time spent searching for the ball among the cabbages in the vegetable patch. For Marcus Trescothick, marked out in the article announcing his birth in the local paper as “On The Team For 1991?”, fuzzy recollections of walking around his house with a “little plastic bat” given him by his dad, hitting everything he could find. “If there weren’t any balls to whack I’d have a go at those square wooden alphabet bricks.”
And for WG Grace, way back in 1854, a visit to Bristol to watch William Clarke’s All-England XI take on the local 22 in a field behind the Full Moon hotel in Stokes Croft. His father was the captain. WG, six, sat with his mother in their pony-carriage beyond the boundary. “I don’t remember much about the cricket but I recollect that some of the England team played in top hats.” The common theme in all the stories, that, as WG put it, “if I was not born a cricketer, I was born in the atmosphere of cricket”. More often than not, a love of cricket is an inheritance, passed on from parents to sons and daughters. It’s perhaps too awkward and ungainly a game for a child to come to instinctively.
That “atmosphere of cricket” has grown thinner lately. Everything except the highlights have disappeared from free TV. Dwyer says the fourth reason why children take up cricket is that they “want to play like their hero”. So TV, he says, is less important than many think, secondary to the encouragement of a parent, pal, or teacher, but is still a significant factor. At the same time, despite the admirable efforts of Chance to Shine, fewer state schools are playing cricket. Best estimates are that over 10,000 school playing fields have been sold off in the last 35 years, 275 of those in the last five years. And so, according to a 2013 survey by All Out Cricket, only 50% of the 413 players contracted on the county circuit were state educated.
Earlier this year, the Guardian sent me to New Zealand to write about the All Blacks. One of the most enlightening aspects of the trip was a conversation with Buck Anderson, the NZRU’s community manager, who explained the union doesn’t just measure its success by the results of the national team, or the size of its profit margin, but by the number of people playing the game. Anderson says the NZRU puts more effort into persuading mediocre players to stick with it as it does into helping good ones to excel at it.
As Anderson explained: “It is about these kids having fun and enjoyment with their mates, learning the skills, being part of the national game. Having that love of the game that will then mean they watch it on TV, they buy Sky subscriptions, they join their provincial union. And more importantly than all of that, that in a generation’s time they are the new set of parents who take their kids to play rugby, who help run Saturday morning kids’ rugby, who go and do a bit of coaching.”
Over the years, the ECB has perhaps strayed too far from that line of thought, and put too much store in elite performance and its own bottom line. But there is hope. Those who know say Dwyer is a good man for the job. David Hopps, a canny soul with a keen appreciation of the issues, argues it is time for the cricket community to quit carping and get behind the ECB. He says its new plan to increase participation is the most “coherent, ambitious, self-aware” he has seen in 30 years. Here’s hoping he is right. Because as participation falls, clubs close, and as clubs close, participation falls. Fewer mothers and fathers, then, to pass on the love of the game. As with so many things, it starts at home, and always has done.
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
