Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

134 Change of Culture; Change of Cricket opinion. Comprehensive education involves a comprehensive view about physical, health and leisure education, a concept that attempts to provide a wide range of ‘taster’ sports in the hope that individual pupils will find one or more that appeals to them and aids both their bodily health and general enjoyment. Cricket is not ignored, neither is it sanctified. Indeed, and although junior forms of the game such as kwik cricket have been devised, cricket is not the most effective pastime, educationally speaking. At any one time nine out of 22 participants are sedentary with others only marginally involved. The actual game as a physical exercise is thus limited in effectiveness. Cricket cannot lay a claim, educationally, to any more priority than any other sport. It is no longer, if it ever were, the ‘national sport’. The notion that a school should concentrate on the cultivation of its first eleven in order that the cricketing section of the entertainment industry should be resourced is a palpable nonsense. As for recreational cricket, that is probably in a healthier state than it has ever been, precisely because the sport itself has taken more responsibility for its roots and flowerings and not abandoned the task to schools which have a much more profound purpose. Especially since 1997 with the introduction of a pyramidal shape for English cricket through the county cricket boards and the wholesale acceptance of league competitions, this has been a wholesome development. Lancashire, to take one instance, has 22 leagues comprising 276 clubs, all running two or three sides and, very importantly, energetically offering cricket at youth and junior levels, beginning with under nines. The county boards manage regional teams beginning as young as thirteen, so that opportunities do exist on a major scale, certainly more so than at any time in cricket’s history. This is something about which to feel pleased. Those of us who enjoyed compulsory school cricket will, if our consciences and memories are clear, recall the misery of those who didn’t. Apart from a few whose fathers force them to attend out of deluded hopes of future reflected glory, the children going along to club coaching sessions are volunteers. The only note of anxiety to express is that cricket, with all its paraphernalia of kit and equipment, is an expensive game. That must be a deterrent to many and subscribe to the concept of a cricket as a middle class province. Most of that is wholesome enough. Cricket takes its place among a score of other possible sporting pastimes without being, either in support or prestige, any better or worse than the others. An ECB survey in September 2016 worried cricket’s powers-that-be more than a trifle when it reported that fewer than a third of children recognised a picture of Alastair Cook, with a greater number identifying all-in wrestlers. So be it. The halcyon era when cricket prided itself on preeminence in the sporting hierarchy had passed. Thus while the recreational game and the limited overs variations continue in relatively good health, what makes for anxiety is first-class cricket at sub-international level. Since the inception of a formalised country-wide