The House Article | Out Of The Rough: Cricket’s Battle To Open Up To All

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By any standards, the England cricket team had a difficult winter. As well as the now-traditional overseas Ashes thumping, there were headlines about drinking and a general lack of preparation on tour.

Amid the opprobrium over their performance, another jibe became a refrain: the England team were overprivileged, as well as bad. Only three of the losing England team who were educated in the UK did not go to private school (by contrast, the 1985/6 tour saw five who went to private school and 11 who didn’t).

As the Guardian writer Barney Ronay had it: “England cricket has long since been Thatchered, emptied out, atomised. It’s a private party, a silent disco for a small and privileged minority. The England team are at least expressing some truth, that the sport exists most vividly in private schools and private fields.”

The truth, however, is rather more complex. English cricket is, to coin a phrase, working through some issues right now. The game is changing rapidly. Money is flowing in from the subcontinent to newfangled, noisy franchise teams that play in The Hundred, a short-form, city-based format that takes place throughout August, designed to attract a more diverse audience.

While a proportion of this money has flooded down to the counties and the recreational game, many of the stalwarts who are fans of a more traditional format are finding the pace of change bewildering at best and mortifying at worst. For them, a portion of the English summer has been sold off; the rest of cricket has been pushed to the margins of the season’s calendar, to little positive effect.

But at the same time, the women’s game has been utterly revolutionised: the first auction of its kind in a major British sport saw The Hundred create some of the highest-paid sportswomen in the UK this year. As around the world, there has been massive growth in viewership, commercial investment, and player remuneration.

And while this turbulence plays out, there is a genuine belief among the staff of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) that its chief executive’s stated aim to become “the most inclusive team sport in England and Wales” is now attainable.

It is five years since the ECB took the brave decision to give the green light to an independent commission into the game, which delivered a thunderbolt of a report. It described how private school players were 13 times more likely to become pro than those in state schools, found women faced sexism and structural pay discrimination, and described how working-class children and those from minority backgrounds faced huge barriers to inclusion, including clear, documented examples of racism.

Multiple ECB employees told this magazine at the time how uncomfortable a read it was, and how determined they were to make a change and open up the game to all.

Following the commission, the ECB developed an internal dashboard that measures cricket’s inclusion, diversity, fair access and equity, using a standardised grading system of A to F. In the ECB’s recent state of equity report, it awarded itself a C+; it was a D two years ago. The aim is to hit B by 2028. But to do so, there are significant structural challenges that must be overcome.

Take England’s mostly privately educated Test team. The reasons for the dominance of private school players in the professional game are complex, and demonstrate how a deeply flawed form of accessibility developed within a sport that became, over the years, increasingly exclusionary.

Just over half of professional cricketers will have gone to private school, but just under a fifth of male players will have seen 90 per cent or more of their fees funded by bursaries, while others will have received smaller grants.

While it’s inaccurate to dismiss the professional game as being entirely dominated by the rich and privileged, as the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) report had it, the resulting proliferation of former scholarship pro cricketers is “by no means a systemic response to the class and socio-economic inequities within the game”.

For Kate Aldridge, the ECB’s director of business operations, the key to broadening access is about working with the system as it stands and building partnerships between the state and private sector. “Private schools do contribute a lot to the cricket ecosystem in terms of facilities [and] opportunities… We’re focused on [how we can] work with private schools to open up their facilities, to share the expertise that they’ve got, the opportunities to play matches that they have with more children.”

The other side of the coin for Aldridge is about “levelling up the playing field” for state school children. State schools have been stretched by the hollowing out of statutory services. As Luke Sparkes of the Dixons Academies Trust recently told The Cricketer magazine: “They do this vital work with no extra money, stretching staff and burning them out… Too often it is the very things that bring joy, build character and create well-rounded citizens – sport, drama, and music – which are lost.”

Aldridge describes how the restructuring of the talent pathway will help: an early engagement programme will, she says, give 7,000 young people “a free-to-access trial, gives them coaching, gives them match play at a young age before they get selected into county age group”.

Another support programme designed for state school kids will give them 50 per cent extra training alongside the county programme. “What we know from our research,” says Aldridge, “Is that if you go to a private school, you get disproportionately more access to coaching, and then by the time you come… to U-15s or U-17 trials… you obviously are performing better.”

She says the narrative that there is no cricket in state schools is not true: a partnership with Chance to Shine and Recreational Cricket Boards delivers cricket in 4,268 primary schools, which is about a quarter of all primary schools in England and Wales. However, only two per cent of state-school students currently play in competitive inter-school or intra-school competitions.

Leshia Hawkins, the ECB’s managing director, describes the challenge: “You know, a lot of state schools don’t even have grass, let alone enough grass and a cut wicket… We tracked how many kids are playing each team sport in schools. And technically… dodgeball does beat us. But why? Because it’s so easy to do… you need limited equipment. You can sort of play it anywhere.”

So the ECB is launching a new national softball competition, softball being seen as much easier to deliver than hardball. The rules won’t be different, says Hawkins: “When you’re out, you’re out, you’re caught, etc, but [it’s about] introducing the joy and that first moment when you take a catch or you hit a four or a six.”

Getting state schools to adopt any new initiatives will require teacher buy-in. This is why the ECB has launched Cricket For Teachers, a short entry-level course. “It’s looking like in the pilot year, we’re probably going to train nearly 650 secondary school teachers,” says Hawkins, adding that there’s a 50:50 gender balance among those signed up. She suggests a quarter of a million children could be given access to the game as a result.

The recreational game, says Hawkins, will also benefit from money that has trickled down from the sale of stakes in the Hundred franchises: “we’re able to focus that investment on… women and girls, disabled participants, ethnically diverse participants, and those from lower socio-economic groups, those who’ve been underserved by cricket”.

On women’s cricket, from the poor base as described in the ICEC report, there has of course, been enormous progress in recent years: at a recreational level, the number of women’s and girls’ teams has doubled since 2021, while a record number of girls (30,627) took part in All Stars and Dynamos, the ECB’s national youth programmes. In the professional game, salaries for women in The Hundred have more than tripled in more than three years.

There is huge excitement around the potential for more commercial investment too. Back in 2013, Hawkins was a business development manager trying to sell sponsorship for women and girls’ recreational cricket (“I had to kiss a lot of frogs,” she jokes), and it feels like the game has come a long way in just a few years: “It’s not, you know, sponsors coming in now and just having their brand on the perimeter. It’s a real care… it’s a real purpose,” she says.

There are still areas where progress has been slow, however. The cricket writer Andy Bull recently noted that while women were fetching huge prices at the Hundred auction, it was still “a room full of men sitting around weighing the relative merits of young women so they can bid against each other for their services in a competitive auction”.

Aldridge acknowledges there is work to be done on leadership in cricket: “We’ve gone from eight per cent in 2019 to 20 per cent female. Now that is still far below where we want to be, but it is a consistent year-on-year improvement and increase, particularly in the recreational game.” Could they bring in targets? The challenge, she says, is that, “If you start to put quotas or targets in place around your workforce, particularly for professional counties and recreational cricket boards, you start to incentivise behaviour that could be illegal.”

Quicker progress also needs to be made on developing cricket in the Black community too, which the ICEC report noted had declined from a strong base in the 1980s to be so low as to be statistically irrelevant. Aldridge acknowledges an issue: “I don’t think we have cracked it yet… whether it’s enough initiatives, or whether the initiatives are quite working the way that we want them to.”

The playing base is smaller than for the South Asian population, and it presents a different challenge: the majority of the population lives in around 10 UK cities, in areas the ECB’s data shows are often lacking in facilities. The ECB is attempting to use non-turf pitches and domes to engage the population. One recent success came via upcoming superstar Davina Perrin, who smashed a staggering 42-ball century for Northern Superchargers in last year’s Hundred eliminator. She was mentored by Ebony Rainford Brent, founder of the African Caribbean Engagement programme.

For all this progress, there has also been one significant setback. In 2024 things were looking up: then-prime minister Rishi Sunak pledged £35m in grassroots cricket funding, which ECB staff told this magazine would never have happened without the ICEC report laying bare the game’s ills. But after the general election, that funding dropped to a mere £1.5m, with Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy deriding the funding as a “fantasy”.

It was a huge blow for the ECB. The money would have funded 16 all-weather domes as well as the delivery of cricket into state schools. The ECB is working on ways to fund these domes – with two now open in Bradford and Darwen, Lancashire, with a third opening soon in Willenhall, West Midlands. Further projects are advancing in Farington, Lancashire, and Luton. Just before this magazine went to press, a further £2.5m was announced, which The House understands will go towards funding four more domes.

When approached, Sunak did not comment on the decision itself, but told The House: “I love cricket and I believe it is one of the things that can bring people together. I know there is huge potential to grow the game even further and open it up to everyone, from all backgrounds and in all parts of the country.”

There is clearly a genuine belief the game is about to turn a corner. An ECB spokesperson said: “We have a golden opportunity to capitalise on England and Wales hosting this year’s ICC Women’s T20 World Cup, and the men’s competition in 2030, to inspire a generation to pick up a bat and ball. With government support we can reach so many more people through new and improved facilities.”

The only question is how quickly the game can force its way up the list of Westminster’s sporting priorities.