Author Archives: swannick

Sport England is making up to £195 million of funding available to help the sport and physical activity sector through the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.  The package includes a £20 million Community Emergency Fund, which is now open for clubs and community organisations to bid into.  Grants between £300 and £10,000 are available.

This guidance has been issued to rugby clubs by the RFU. It appears to answer all the immediate questions on government support schemes that clubs have. We assume it applies equally to cricket.

Did your old coach ever tell you that ‘you can look like a cricketer, even if you can’t play?’  Does that principle extend to looking like a team?  Does uniformity improve the team culture and performance?  Is or could it be a nice little earner for the club through sponsorship and/or supplier kickbacks?  Do youContinue reading “Club clothing – New Year survey”

I have been asked to explain why I say the much quoted data on playing numbers is ‘spurious’. Any number of articles refer to the loss of 150,000 regular players since 2005. The ECB hierarchy were questioned on it again this week in a parliamentary appearance before the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.Continue reading “The strange death of English cricket”

Bolton v. Stone [1951] is a leading House of Lords case in the tort of negligence, establishing that a defendant is not negligent if the damage was not a reasonably foreseeable consequence of their conduct. Mrs Stone was hit by a cricket ball which had been hit out of the ground; Mr Bolton was aContinue reading “Are you negligent or just a nuisance?”

You will no doubt have seen regular media stories of the ‘slow death of recreational cricket’ variety in recent years. These are often based on spurious data on the number of playing recreational cricketers or disappearance of local town and village cricket clubs. Ahead of a forthcoming article in The Cricketer on the health ofContinue reading “Perhaps the most definitive survey yet on recreational playing numbers”

Ask anyone who runs a cricket club what preoccupies them and the list will look little different to the concerns of anyone running a small (or not so small) business: cashflow; finding the capital to invest in maintaining and improving facilities; recruiting and retaining good people; developing and differentiating a quality product to confront ever increasingContinue reading “Cricket Club Development Network: doing what it says on the tin”