A most hopeful vision of English cricket’s future will be on display in London this weekend – and not, with all due respect to Bazball, at the Oval. On Saturday, the National Hubs finals at Lord’s will showcase talent from the state-school training network that the MCC Foundation has built up over the past three years. In the wake of the damning findings on elitism in the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket’s report, there are plans to quadruple the programme’s reach over the next three.
There are 77 nationwide hubs helping to plug the huge hole where state school cricket should be; since their inception in 2011 they have offered high-quality coaching and matchplay to 20,000 young players who lack the well-documented advantages of the private school system. By 2027, the foundation’s director, Sarah Fane, who believes the scheme offers a ready-made answer to English cricket’s intractable issue of education-based exclusion, is determined to grow the number of hubs to 250.
“We’ve all seen the ICEC report,” says Fane, “and we all want to play our part in answering the questions that it’s posing. We have this amazing offering which is doing precisely what is needed and therefore we have a great ambition to go out and get funding so we can deliver to four times the number of children. We’re at a stage now where we’re ready to scale the programme up and we’ve got the infrastructure in place to take that to the next level.”
An obvious comparison is the ACE programme targeting young black cricketers, which began as an independent project at Surrey and has since been embraced and funded by the ECB. The national hubs are already solving some of the diversity and inclusion issues that the organising body has been instructed to fix by the ICEC’s recommendations.
“If we work alongside Chance to Shine and other projects we can be that real link between participation programmes and traditional cricket infrastructure,” says Fane. “And because our intake is 100% state school, we can have a knock-on effect on the talent pathway where those metrics are underrepresented. Hubs can be a big part of the solution, but it needs a game-wide approach and we would love support from anyone who can give it.”
The foundation already runs one joint hub with ACE in south London, and its London Action Programme, piloted last year, has been hugely successful in offering extra support to young players in underfunded communities from Tottenham to Tower Hamlets, Leyton to Lewisham. Sixty seven percent of its London users are from diverse ethnic communities, and out of 40 picked for its advanced talent camp, a third have now been selected for traditional county teams.
Among the ICEC’s recommendations on schools cricket were the reallocation of ECB budgets and nationwide state school competitions, and the replacement of the Eton v Harrow fixture at Lord’s with the final of that competition. There was also a plea to the government to “require and resource significantly higher levels of cricket in state schools”.
“Nothing will replace the government saying they’re going to put cricket into every state school,” says Fane, “but unfortunately I don’t see that happening any time soon. It would be lovely if state schools had pitches and teachers that could teach the game, but you can’t get that overnight. So for now, we want to make sure every state school pupil can reach one of our hubs.”
