For those at the sharp end, trying to make county cricket clubs reflect their local communities, these are challenging times. “Some clubs are clearly not going into the BAME communities and nurturing talent from diverse backgrounds,” says Chevy Green, director of the ACE (African Caribbean Engagement) programme. “They stick to what – and who – they know.”
Despite promises from the counties and the England and Wales Cricket Board that lessons from the Azeem Rafiq racism scandal have been learned, the new year hasn’t started well. At a hearing of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee this week, the chairman of Middlesex, Mike O’Farrell, attempted to explain why his club brought on just a handful of the black, Asian and minority ethnic players that make up 60% of the county’s 130 feeder clubs. O’Farrell, who later apologised, initially blamed the attraction of football and rugby to young people from Afro-Caribbean communities and the lure of education to those from south Asian backgrounds.
“It makes me so angry when I hear that,” says Green. “It’s cliched and it’s insulting to the BAME players and their families who travel all over the country and invest in the game only to be dropped before they can make a living from it.”
Green worked for Surrey’s charitable foundation before Ebony Rainford-Brent invited him to join her at ACE. “African-Caribbean participation in this country has fallen by 75% in the last 25 years. Just 1% of professional players are black. That’s a massive decline and it’s not because they don’t want to play. It’s because they have suffered racism and been made to feel unwelcome at mainstream clubs. It’s taken Ebony setting up ACE to start to reverse that. The clubs didn’t seem to even notice.”
Green says in some counties 70% of players up to the age of 15 are from south Asian backgrounds, but by the time they get to the academy and first teams, it falls to around 3%. “Why do all those talented players drop out? You can only put it down to racism.”
According to calculations by the Guardian, the four county clubs in and around London – Middlesex, Surrey, Kent and Essex – have 12 British BAME players in their first-team squads, and only five of those come from state schools. “That’s shocking,” says Green. “Especially considering they cover the London boroughs. It shows that the counties are not doing nearly enough to tackle discrimination at professional performance level. We are working really hard to get Kent to branch out, for example, from their usual white, middle-class hunting grounds of Canterbury and Tunbridge Wells and venture into the more diverse London boroughs like Lewisham and Greenwich. We faced some initial resistance but they are now more open.”
It has been a hard process, Green says. “Kids have told us when they go for trials, they are asked what school they come from. It’s crazy. If you are from an ethnic minority and a state school you’re doubly disadvantaged. Cricket is hardly taught in state schools these days, especially in deprived urban areas where there are higher proportions of ethnic minorities. That ensures that this endemic racism is built into the system and makes it almost impossible to challenge.
“While there is a lot of good work going on to take the game to more urban and deprived areas at recreational level, it’s not translating to elite level. There’s a lot of tick-box exercises going on but we need to see evidence of real change.”
Others share Green’s concerns. Surge Singh-Birring, the Asian ambassador at Dartford Cricket Club, says the situation had improved since he was the only non-white player in his school and community clubs. However, he says: “The county clubs are old school – they are living in the past and don’t want to change. It’s a very privileged game. We keep seeing really talented Asian kids turned down by selectors and their parents ask us why.”
Duncan Stone, author of Different Class: The Untold Story of English Cricket, said cricket’s historic elitism had been reinforced by the selling of 10,000 state school playing fields between 1981 and 1997 and the demise of workplace sports clubs. He points to a wider cultural problem too. “When the England men’s team go out on to the field to Jerusalem, I think: that’s not my England,” he says. “Whose England is it? It’s certainly not an England that an Asian kid in Bradford would recognise. This cultural baggage of it being the English national sport has to go. You see the Barmy Army, England supporters, almost all of them white and affluent enough to afford the Test match tickets. They all look the same. It’s not a reflection of our nation.”
Middlesex say they launched a wide-ranging equality, diversity and inclusivity programme in 2020, but plans to go out into communities were postponed due to Covid. Surrey are also thought to have new projects ready to go. Kent did not respond to requests for comment. Arfan Akram, Essex’s cricket operations manager for east London, insists his club have already made changes. He says Essex recognised the enormous barriers to Asian participation and launched a programme in 2014 to open new pathways, partly funded by the ECB and partly by Essex, which was now showing results.
“We asked Asian players what the problems were and we listened,” Akram says. “As a result, we’ve addressed it from every angle, going out into east London communities and giving them the resources and clear talent pathways they need to be the best they can, while removing barriers around culture such as introducing halal meat, breaking for Ramadan and helping talented players from more deprived backgrounds with funding. We’ve also set up new indoor facilities.”
As a result, they now have several east London players with BAME heritage coming through their academy. “We’ve shown it can be done if the will is there.”