According to our quick poll in March, way too many local club leaders lacked enthusiasm for the start of the 2022 season. We put it down to the Ashes debacle, the Rafiq affair and ECB flux. So we ran a survey to see how things were as the season drew to a close.
We’re used to evidence from the Network challenging the ‘cricket in decline’ narrative. It may be a skewed sample but the survey reveals much about the state of club cricket. The 42 per cent in our recent Network survey who say will step down in the next 1-2 years (80 per cent in the next 3-5 years) were a strong indicator of unusual disenchantment.
We pulled out the results just for chairs which was even more stark. While chairs tend to be slightly younger than the average club leader and in post for a slightly shorter period, they are more inclined to give up within the next 5 years and within 1-2 years more specifically.
The evidence from the survey revealed multiple reasons for these findings. It is backed up by one-to-one interviews with club chairs from Durham to the Somerset levels and South Wales to the Fenlands.
There are two broad issues that dominate the free comments:
- the perception of growing bureaucracy and lack of ECB support
- the feeling that while the leadership team (large or small) worked well together there was a lack of commitment and/or dearth of volunteers in the wider membership
However, there were also many positives. The majority of clubs represented in the survey say they have seen growth in membership, playing and finances in recent years. And new ways of doing things are emerging as a blueprint for running clubs in the future.
You can read more in two articles in The Cricketer which drew on the survey and interview findings and the first of those is reproduced here
The survey results are shown below.
