No level playing field in cricket

Famously Lord’s cricket ground, the self-declared “home of cricket”, has a marked slope. The 27 June report from the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket confirms that English cricket is more generally not played on a level playing field.

The report looks at the deep institutional racism and sexism in cricket, and links it to broader class inequality. English cricket long had a strict and explicit class divide, up to 1963 being played by Gentlemen (amateurs) and Players (professionals), using different changing rooms and entrances onto the field. The game (both domestic and international test cricket) was controlled by the MCC, run as an exclusive gentleman’s club.

Although the MCC’s grip was largely broken in the 1990s, this class inequality lingers. 59% of recent England male players were privately educated.

The report points to both ingrained class prejudice in administration and the underfunding of schools and community sport in perpetuating this bias.

The report is sharp on the legacy of Empire on attitudes and structures. There was once strong participation in grassroots cricket from the Windrush generation of black British players, but they were shut out of the established club structure. So they mostly played in black community clubs, starting with Leeds Caribbean in 1948. That has dissipated, with black participation in grassroots cricket now negligible.

Resultingly, there has been a reported decline in Black British professional cricketers of 75% in recent years. Further causes of this are not hard to find and exemplified by the 1997 closure of the community-run Haringey Cricket College, a major pathway for black players into the professional game. The ECB ignored calls to help fund it..

The grassroots game among players of South Asian heritage remains strong, accounting for 29% of players, but they remain largely in separate clubs and unrepresented in the official structures of English Cricket. Routes into professional cricket are still limited.

While the profile of women’s cricket has increased in the last five years, inequalities remain massive. Lord’s has never hosted a women’s Test Match, although it finds time for an annual game between two top private schools, Eton and Harrow. And England women’s internationals receive only 20% the pay of their male counterparts.

Cricket not only reflects but magnifies the inequalities of British society. As the Trotskyist, historian and cricketer C L R James wrote, “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”