Club Mix

GH on community cricket and its discontents

Artwork by Fisher Classics

So it begins.  Again.  This weekend thousands of community clubs round Australia commence their summer’s cricket, as naturally as migratory birds sensing the change of season. Not always naturally, of course.  If you’re a club volunteer like me, you’d love a dollar for the number of times you’re asked: ‘So when does the season start?’  FFS mate, the week after the footy finals, just like it always does. But in general it’s a quiet marvel, that intermediate step from the yanking out of goal posts to the quiet marking of crease lines. 

Elite teams have been playing a while now, thanks to the increasingly porous boundaries of our eternally overstuffed summers.  But round one is an opportunity for reflection on the health of grass roots cricket, as distinct from elite cricket, and even on relations between the two.  There’s data on this now.  That’s data on everything.  As we know, however, data is not information, and information is not knowledge.  There’s a great many causes for concern, going beyond the perennial issues of dwindling volunteerism and funding support, exacerbated by COVID. Some may be of cricket’s own making.

For a start, the numbers are patchy.  They may be more reliable than five years ago, when it was revealed that padding via double-counting was endemic.  But the system still exhibits difficulty distinguishing a twenty-year male club veteran from an eight-year-old girl whose parents are trying to direct her wavering interest to the Woolies Blast between violin and Taekwondo lessons.  You get the feeling that the last cricket club in Australia could burn its gear on a bonfire and Cricket Australia would still be reporting encouraging signs of warmth.  There’s certainly no constituency for bad news - after all, there are sponsors to entice and broadcasters to buoy.  Oh, and repeat after me: PlayHQ is working well….

The last few years have been happy ones in the women’s space, because it’s been possible to relate the growth in female participation to the glories of that night in Melbourne.  That’s the way it’s meant to work!  Here was cricket’s Matildas moment, avant the Matildas: a glimpse of that longed-for virtuous circle, whereby the success of a national team preludes a surge in public enthusiasm that in turn inspires the next generation of talent.  Never mind that women had had to play cricket more than a century to scale such heights. Anyway, that saga continues....

Growth, however, brings challenges also, ranging here from inadequate infrastructure to burdens of compliance.  Anything involving juniors now is complicated.  There are child protection checks.  There are demanding parents, who no longer want to drop their kids off but stay to watch and kvetch.  Better problems to have than a lack of demand, perhaps, but problems nonetheless.  Female growth has also blurred the outlines of what remains a largely male game, while progress in some states has obscured regress in others.  Viz a recent Cricket Australia ‘Cricket Participation Scorecard’. 

One observes that the two worst performing states, Queensland and Victoria, are those that cut community cricket investment most publicly under the cover of COVID; they’re also, coincidentally, led by CEOs whose names are somehow to the forefront in the executive search for Nick Hockley’s replacement.  Just fancy that….

For all the growth at entry level, retention into the teens has emerged as a problem, while a further issue was sketched by our friend Trent Copeland, general manager of the Sydney Thunder, on the podcast this week: the growing phenomenon of players by-passing community cricket almost altogether, having been yanked at the first glimpse of talent into ‘the pathway’ - the gilded world of junior academies and metro carnivals with its aspirational symbols of national under-19s selection and juicy rookies contracts - before their entrenchment in the club system.  You can hear it here at the forty-minute mark…

There’s a disconnect.  Because it’s difficult.  There so much more cricket in the calendar at the elite level, and the pulling up of those younger players into the elite level is happening way earlier. So when I was starting there was the odd Moises Henriques, Phil Hughes, David Warner of the world that at sixteen we knew, they were it, they were good.  Josh Hazlewood, Pat Cummins. They got sucked up naturally because they deserved it.  There is with Big Bash cricket now the contracting hunger, but also the trajectory of players like Jake Fraser-McGurk into the IPLs of the world, that now go and play in the MLC and the Caribbean, that sucks players out of our domestic system, which sucks players out of our premier cricket system, quicker than it’s ever happened before. You can’t begrudge players for that.  Every time I am in conversation with people in this regard the thing that I always draw back to is you are nothing without your foundations. So when all the great things that are happening to you now go away for whatever reason, God forbid, someone has an injury, they’re unavailable to play, COVID happens, whatever - if you don’t have the foundations and the real love of the game at grass roots level, it’s not sustainable.

Is that message getting through? There is a treatise to be written here.  Somewhere along the line, cricket started freaking itself out about the ‘war for talent’, perhaps because the CEO of Cricket Australia had a son for whom cricket and football were competing.  Out of this emerged a desperation to grab youth early, and to micromanage their path to the top.  CA still pays obeisance to the idea of wholesome, organic emergence: against every name in selected Australian XIs these days, one sees in brackets the name of their first-grade club (also, latterly, their BBL franchise).  

But it’s a bit of a backward glance.  The days when CA coaxed internationals to turning out for their clubs are far behind us; even the days when CA recommitted to grade cricket post the Longstaff report did not last. And it feels increasingly as though the priority is achieving vindications of the system, flowers that have bloomed in the high-performance hothouse, while the term ‘clubby’ has emerged as an expression of contempt.  After all, who needs a community when there’s a market? Who wants to muck around with an old-fashioned club when there are sexy franchises? But an outcome, as Trent says, is players with nothing to fall back on when the going gets tough - as inevitably, cricket being cricket, it will.  The system cares not.  There will always be more raw material, more desperate ambition, more bullshit machismo (‘Yeah, got a pathways tournament coming up’; ’Yeah, just getting Bich to work with him on his front arm’ yada yada).  But along the line, as Peter is robbed to pay Paul, lots of wastage and disillusionment too.  And the good book reminds us, a house divided itself cannot stand.

It’s twelve years since I delivered the Bradman Oration on the subject of the cricket that most of us play.  ‘This is something Australians have historically been good at,’ I said.  ‘The theory and practice of forming cricket clubs is in our blood and in our history.’  I also worried aloud:

Some of you would have seen the figures of the recent Australian cricket census, which were touted as showing cricket to be the country's biggest participation sport at the same time as it disclosed a 3.5% decline in the club cricket population.  We don't have the advantage of exit interviews, of course, but I wonder how many of those individuals passed out of the game because they don't like the way it is run, and promoted, and headed. I don't wish to spread alarm, but this would not wish to be remembered as the cricket generation that grew so obsessed with flogging KFC and accumulating Facebook likes that it let its core constituencies fade away.

Everyone applauded the former sentiment and shook their heads at the latter.  Never happen!  Long live cricket!  But there exist grounds for concern that go beyond the 9mm of rain forecast in Melbourne…..