The Summer Field

102 review that ‘we are convinced that we see only the tip of an iceberg of talent, because so few primary schools encourage the playing of cricket’. Professional clubs were replacing schools in coaching cricket, whether because professional clubs had more money to spare, or clubs wanted to bring on the talented sooner and more intensely than any school could. Just as you could blame ‘the system’ – everything and nothing in particular – for England forever coming second to Australia, so everything – teachers less dedicated, teacher-trainers deploring team competition – seemed to make excellence in school cricket harder to attain. In Country Life in May 1983 Colin Cowdrey suggested a change between his 1940s youth and his sons’ 30 years later. Boys now seemed ‘oblivious about their deficiency’ in skills: ‘I don’t believe they are driven with the same urgency to keep topping up their skills as in my time.’ Cowdrey may have been an unusually diligent boy; and how helpful to most children was this modish talk of ‘topping up skills’? Adults could easily forget that children are not smaller adults. Professional clubs were no kinder to children than the fee-paying schools; they were only interested in the most gifted, of possible use to them. Tony Harris at Surrey in 1975 noted that more boys came to trials at the Oval in 1974 than ever. So did it matter to Surrey, if London state schools were giving up cricket?! * Schooling St Bede’s, Eastbourne.