This short survey is based on information gathered to date for all clubs to self-assess the state of their preparations for dealing with the COVID-19 emergency. The results will inform our rolling webinar series supporting clubs at this time.
All the information collected will be treated as confidential and only used in aggregate and anonymised form. The results will also be shared with Network members and survey participants.
Please take the average 4-5 minutes to complete the survey here.
The England and Wales Cricket Board today announced a £61 million package to help cricket withstand the financial impact of COVID-19.
An extra budget of just over £20m will become available to the recreational game through a cricket club support loan scheme, grants through the “Return to Cricket” scheme and a 12-month holiday on loan repayments for recreational clubs.
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 you benefit from the brand profile of members wearing club casual and training gear in the local community?
But what are the practical challenges? What brand? Price or cutting edge design? Can you get enough people to wear it? How long does it take to get everyone looking the same – how many generations of club kit are on display in your teams? Do you need to subsidise? Does it suck up all your shirt sponsors money? Are the big brands affordable – will your younger players wear anything less? Can the smaller or local brands deliver what you need? And what happens if they withdraw from the market or go bust? Or just leave your disgruntled members with undelivered kit in July having paid their cash in March. Or worse still, the club left with piles of unwanted and unsaleable stock.
So what do you do? What are the considerations? New to the field? Or nursing burned fingers? Have you battled through the minefield that is club kit provision?
Whether yes or no, it is a recurring theme in past discussions and a subject ripe for a definitive view of who is doing what, who the favoured suppliers are, what people are paying and solutions to the key challenges.
So please take a few minutes to respond to this short survey. All responses will be treated in confidence and only anonymous aggregate results will be published, for Network members and respondents to the survey, by the END OF JANUARY.
You will find the survey HERE
In the meantime, post your comments in the accompanying discussion for members on the LinkedIn group.
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. There was no challenge; those numbers appear to have been internalised by the sport’s leadership.
The 150,000 comes from a selective interpretation of results from Sport England’s Active People survey – a phone canvass of several hundred thousand people a year to find out how many had played any of 30 funded sports in the past month – between 2005 and 2016. You can see the results year-by-year on a one page Excel sheet for yourself.
150,000 is the difference between the peak 428,000 figure (2008-9 as it happens, not 2005) and the final figure from the last survey in 2015-16. It’s a nice round headline-grabbing number. 150,000 fewer cricketers equals cricket in crisis.
But look again at the data. It’s a bit volatile – it jumps around from one year to the next, up and down – so how robust is the methodology? Were you ever phoned by Sport England and asked what sports you played? Do you know anybody who was? And what if you were phoned in February asking about the previous month? Or, in a hurry to get rid of the pollster, you skipped through the list of sports forgetting to admit to the annual office game against the accounts department you mentioned the year before?
Because that’s what it was seeking to measure. Any cricket experience, at any point, from the Test arena to the beach. It’s not asking if you play club cricket once a month. When it did do that – in a separate survey – the figures were far more stable. In fact, they actually registered a statistical increase!
Maybe that’s why Sport England canned the Active People survey after 2016. They would probably say there was a change of priorities and their focus is now on levels of physical activity, not the playing of individual recognisable sports, despite the fact they continue to fund those sports heavily. The cynic might suggest they were not too confident about the credibility of the data.
So why are those in cricket so prepared to accept the 150,000 slow death narrative? For some, it no doubt suits a purpose. On the one hand, it’s not unknown for organisations to exagerrate the scale of the problem to amplify an achievement. Creating an urgent need or recognising a crisis is a basic component of most organisational change strategies. And, on the other, there are those from an ideological perspective who welcome categoric proof of the game’s decline from the end of free-to-air coverage.
The ECB’s Select Committee response points to the complex change environment in which sport operates. That’s increasingly unhealthy and/or time-challenged people doing other or different things. We all see that, so it should be acknowledged when clubs have held things relatively steady in the face of the challenge.
The Network’s recent player numbers survey demonstrates this is the case over the last 10 years. Extrapolating the results, it shows a regular club playing population (aged 16+) of around 180,000 which is consistent with the Sport England club cricket findings. And 300,000 under 16s. Of course, players are far less available than in the past – 64% of clubs say so – and this is hitting the number of teams and Sunday cricket in particular.
But while we can all name clubs that are no longer around, or have merged, the number is surprisingly small. The anticipated shakeout from around 6,000 clubs at the early 2000s launch of Clubmark – which many saw as ECB goldplating Sport England’s safeguarding template to better identify the winners – has not happened. There are still around 6,000 clubs. If there was a big shakeout, it happened much earlier with the disappearance of semi-professional manufacturing company and industry institutional teams in the economic restructuring of the 1980s.
The real challenge now is for cricket to ensure it is in a pivotal position to play a key role in addressing those societal issues, responding to the ‘change environment’. That’s in schools and other community groups and better meeting the needs of those who might embrace, or return to, team sport rather than individual activity or none. Only clubs can provide the local infrastructure to support delivery of that effort. The welcome ‘Inspiring Generations’ ECB strategy bullet points the way forward, but it needs the appropriate funnelling of resources to make it a reality. And a willingness to listen to and build on the club experience.
