“Complacency on racial equality is not acceptable. We must open our doors to everyone.” The contrite, heartfelt, revolutionary words there of the England and Wales Cricket Board in the wake of a devastating report into the state of prejudice and inequality in cricket.
Yes, 1999 really was a hell of a year. Google had just been invented. Yugoslavia existed. Tim Lamb, head of the ECB, was free to be appalled, kind of in the background, by the inaugural Big Report into Cricket Racism, commissioned by the ECB in its founding year and followed by almost total inaction in the quarter of a century between that report and the latest one.
Although, to be fair, there has been some progress in the inter-report years. Judging by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket’s findings, published this week, there has at least been a demonstrable uplift in the quality of report writing, to the extent that we can surely claim to lead the world in the framing, drafting and publication of damning reports. Plus English cricket is now aware not only that it is institutionally racist, but that it is also institutionally sexist and classist. So some progress there.
If this sounds a little cynical on the prospects for actual change in response to an utterly devastating report, then this is with good reason. There has already been a quiet massing of the forces of stasis. The word “wokery” is out there rustling in the treeline. There are splutters about conspiracy and cultural Marxism. Perhaps, who knows, a conspiracy of woke cultural Marxism. All of which seem like odd responses to heartfelt parental tales of not being able to pay for your child to play sport.
More insidiously there is a temptation to shrug wearily at the weight of all this, to point to societal prejudice and inequality, to the decline of state school sport. Many of these have already been hoisted into place in mitigation.
This is all fair game. You can point to unfairness in the allocation of resources, to the sale of green space, to the decline of infrastructure, all of which we have watched taking place under our eyes while repeatedly voting in the same governments. But in the end this kind of fatalism is also the best possible way of ensuring nothing will change.
To this end, one of the best parts of the ICEC report is how clear it is on things that can actually be done. So let us linger here on one of them. Reform the county pathways! Or how about: abolish the county pathways, flush this entire unhappy world out into the light and replace it with something more accessible and more genuinely geared to finding all the best talent, not only the talent that already has a kit bag and goes to a school with nice nets just down the road.
The report puts this point clearly: “The structure and operation of the talent pathway remains a barrier to equity and inclusion.” A wealth of evidence is included to back this up. Perhaps I can add a little more here based on the experience of shunting two kids though a combined 16 years at two London county pathways. It has been the most startling, absorbing, occasionally miserable, often utterly bizarre experience.
There isn’t space here to list the greatest villains, the most jaw-dropping scenes, the feverishly shared stories, the most shameful squandering of resource (this will all come. Seriously: I have a dossier). It should also be said most of the coaches are decent people trying to make the system work. This typically involves running county age groups from 10 up to 18, with 15 or so kids selected and told (absurdly as no one knows who’s actually going to be good) that you are our focus, the best in your age group, something which is pretty terrible practice and no good whatsoever for the kids themselves.
It can seem like a comically thin world. Imagine a place where the Manchester United academy is run by the dad of one of the junior players. Imagine Chelsea FC academy sessions cancelled because a local boarding school is having a game and that’s basically most of their players. Imagine a well of thwarted ambition, tracksuited mini-despots, comically untrained attempts to communicate with children. Imagine gruelling, loveless days posited as a public school-style test of character. Imagine doing all this and most of the time it doesn’t even make you any better at cricket, while simultaneously making you hate cricket.
These are just the kids who fit the system. And this is where the real problems intrude into a pathway we all indirectly fund. Most obviously there is the issue of private school dominance. There is an idea out there that private schools should be praised for becoming such prolific producers of England cricketers. This is as absurd as suggesting we wouldn’t have any prime ministers were it not for Eton and Winchester. Private schools don’t produce cricketers, they simply scoop them up and use them as a marketing tool.
In practice their dominance is a cultural and literal bar to entry. There are direct connections between private schools and county pathways: in personal relationships, shared facilities, private coaching jobs. Favouritism, off the books one-to-one coaching, weirdly involved relationships with influential parents. This is all commonplace. And of course, as the report sets out, all of this is wrapped in demonstrable underrepresentation of minorities, and the near total exclusion of black kids, coaches and administrators.
Even if you do manage to penetrate these structural barriers, pathway cricket is shot through with more glacial forms of hostility. I have seen kids from state school and minority ethnic backgrounds discouraged completely because of things such as not having the right accent, the most expensive kit, not being in the same-school gang. I have seem the groups of non-white parents gather on the boundary in small clumps away from the main group of People Like Us, in ways that just seem so cricket, so normal no one ever thinks to comment or even notice. Talent will always out. But how much harder, how much more difficult it must be when your foundling experience is to feel excluded.
There are of course good things about the pathways. Women’s cricket needs this infrastructure right now, as long as it is open and accessible for all. This really is a pathway and it should be made as wide as practically possible. It is also true that those state school kids who have made it into the pathway will benefit as this might often be the best cricket they’re going to get. But even this feels like a feature of a pre-existing problem, not the solution to it.
What is the way forward? The report suggests an idea that has been bubbling away for a while, first put forward by Rob Ferley, once of Kent, now an influential junior coach, that the pathway shouldn’t exist below 14 years of age, and that when it does kick in it should be purely for inclusion and outreach, for spreading the game beyond its narrow frontiers.
This is present in the State Schools Action Plan, which posits not only free pathway cricket but actively engaging with state schools as opposed to polishing the easy riches of the private sector. And why not? This is a unique quality counties have, their trump card, the ability to act as ambassadors for the sport and in the process increase their own chances of surviving the coming rapture.
And what else is sport for in the end, other than making people’s lives better and healthier, whether it ends in professional sport or not? The cricket pathway may be no more than a mirror to the wider world. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Sport can strive to be the best of us, not the worst.
We should be due another report some time in the 2050s. Time enough for this thing to finally eat itself, to throw the last of the ancestral dining chairs on to the fire; or to try, at least, to fight that setting sun.
