Cricket clubs are no longer central to their communities, writes John Claughton; Martin Allen points out that in Australia, the game is still at the heart of youth culture; and Mike Stein raises the issue of inequitable funding
Martin Kettle is right to search for answers to England’s failure in Australia beyond the flaws in Burns’s backlift, but I don’t think it is blinkered complacency, either (English cricket is in disarray. It’s a metaphor for the country, 30 December). For most of the 20th century, two rivers of talent flowed into the county game: one from the club grounds such as Farsley in Yorkshire, which was always home to Ray Illingworth’s heart, the other from the playing fields of independent schools.
In the last 40 or 50 years, the latter stream has, perhaps unexpectedly, continued to flow and to deliver, while the former has slowed to a trickle. There are reasons: cricket clubs are no longer central to their communities as they once were; cricket in primary schools is frail and fragmented – despite the best efforts of Chance to Shine – and that means it barely exists in secondary schools.
