Annie Chave: Is the 100 leeching from or supporting county cricket?

The Editor of County Matters magazine Annie Chave writes her second column for Prost International.

See: Annie Chave joins Prost International

Cricket feels fragile and insubstantial. Try to reach out and touch it and it eludes you like a fatal vision. There are too many different threads, too many conflicting choices. It would surely have been possible to consolidate and repair the solid base that has grown over the years. Instead, the ECB has chosen to focus on glitzy novelty, and the solid base is shaking.

Since Covid19 struck, I’ve been alerted to the importance of community and just how essential it is to healthy growth.

During the early stages of the pandemic, WhatsApp groups popped up across the country, turning anonymous neighbours into altruistic helpers.

We learned to stop and consider others, and the shoots of community began to grow. This was echoed in the cricket world, where county players engaged with their membership, offering amusing and heartfelt videos, and making phone calls to loyal fans.

Then, when play was at last resumed at the county grounds, the livestream was available to all from the empty stadiums. The Bob Willis Trophy was a breath of fresh air, and we took it in gulps, desperate to breathe in the game we’d missed so much.

The inaugural 100 was cancelled for many reasons, one of the key ones being that it was an ‘International Competition’ that depended on international travel. And ‘there’s the rub’.

It’s not that the ECB aren’t concerned about ‘growing the game’, it’s just that the grassroots they are looking at are manufactured products, a hybrid strip, not natural growth.

Andrew Flintoff’s documentary ‘Field of Dreams’ is timely. It represents all the community projects, up and down the country, that are working for the future of the game, but does so in a ‘safe dirt consumer comfortable way’.

The 100 is glitzy. Grassroots aren’t. First-class cricket’s roots are already there in the county system, and this is where the real focus needs to be to develop the game itself.

Leicester recently held an open day
Photo John Mallett

I spoke recently with Sean Jarvis, CEO at Leicestershire County Cricket Club, about the incredible work that he has been doing. What struck me was just how committed you need to be to build on community links. Seeing sports clubs as integral to their communities, Sean is keen to promote several initiatives already running through the county pathway including free tickets:

“We should be celebrating the county game and encouraging people to come when they can. For example, our recent #SupportyourCounty initiative with https://www.countycricketmatters.com and the https://cricketsupporters.com was a great success for us and saw new faces come to the Upton Steel County Ground.

“Equally the recent 4-day visit of India saw over 10,000 (predominantly South Asian) supporters visit Grace Road. It’s now how we continue to build those relationships to encourage people to return. What’s more we are very keen for the #SupportyorCounty initiative to become a national one across a County Championship fortnight. Just image if all the Clubs did it together.”

Sean feels that ticketing initiatives or pricing strategies are only part of the solution and will never be more than one piece of the jigsaw.

“Again, for us, we are now trying to transcend the ‘well-worn pathway’ approach, and are introducing initiatives like the Connecting Communities Cricket Match. It requires a lot of effort, but we are sure the rewards will be manifold. In simple terms, the initiative is about bringing all different backgrounds together in a cricket match.”

ECB Headquarters at Lords

Sean Jarvis isn’t alone.

Counties have been reaching out to state schools and local communities for years, and this is the crux.

Whatever issues are at stake, we need to be willing to work at it, to get our hands dirty – like Flintoff (albeit without a film crew), find yourself in a field with a group of children who genuinely need to be shown how to hold a bat.

When I asked the ECB about how the transitory 100 helps grow communities, Jonathan Reed, a spokesman said that:

“The profile of The 100 enables us to hero players from different backgrounds, especially on the women’s side, to engage and inspire kids.

“Next week we’ll be launching a mural of Abtaha Maqsood for example, where we’ll have 75 kids (mainly Muslim girls) from the Leigh Trust group of schools in Birmingham meet Abtaha against the backdrop of her mural”.

This appears to be a fundamental principle of The 100, to make celebrity more important than cricket, side-shifting the game into the entertainment world. This celebrity culture is flown in, packaged in sponsors’ suits, then shipped off, leaving the pitch fighting for its life.

Jonathan acknowledged that fantastic work was already happening within counties, adding:

”The100’s community engagement falls into a few specific areas, including schools with a focus on kids on free school meals, community groups like the Ramadan League and Guides and Dynamos, where we can reward and recognise clubs who, for example, run girls’ sessions, or urban hubs running the Sky-funded sessions”.

It sounds to me as if The 100 is taking a piggy-back ride on these long-running groups. It certainly doesn’t feel like a solution, more like a leeching.

It’s hard to doubt that counties are being, intentionally or not, upstaged: they can’t “hero” their top players who rarely play for them because of The 100.

In short, The 100 breaks the playground-to-Test-Match pathway. How often do players like Issy Wong and Abtaha Maqsood or Jofra Archer actually play for their county?

So yes, in theory it’s fantastic to take an already very successful Scottish player and athlete and make her the Birmingham 100 icon, but couldn’t this have been done with the fantastic Kia Super League and through other current pathways? It feels as if The 100 is borrowing these community initiatives to promote its own bid to franchise out English cricket.

Andy Nash, ex-Somerset CCC Chair and ex- ECB Board Member, told me:

“Franchises’ raison d’être is to make money for their owners. They are parasitic in that they do not invest in the game’s infrastructure or its future. They simply rent grounds developed by the counties while playing a competition that’s undermining their host’s ability to sustain those grounds.

“Similarly they rent players from the counties investing literally nothing in their development and welfare beyond their fees for paying. The 100 is eating English cricket, and if allowed to continue will irrevocably damage the structure of the game.”

While we think ‘celebrity’, while we think ‘transitory’, and while we rely on ‘spectacle’, we won’t be fertilising and growing, we’ll be layering, spraying and patching. A Chelsea Flower Show, not a park game stretching into the evening sunshine.

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