Cricket of the people, by the people, for the people

Instead of issuing pernickety regulations, cricket authorities should do more to make the recreational game viable.

The pandemic has left cricket clubs financially exposed Picture: Yuri Kouzmin

The last live cricket I was able to watch, just as the lockdown boom was descending on Melbourne, was a final involving my club. It was notable for our young quick taking eight poles, although that is not the only reason I will remember it.

What I also recall are the celebrations of each wicket, players converging excitedly on what should have been a regulation high-fiving huddle, then pulling up just short in socially distant deference to the pandemic. I hoped I might never see anything like it again. I presumed too much.

Under cover of big football, recreational cricket has now resumed in most locales in Australia. The exception of course is for those of us marooned in Dan Andrews’s grotesque social experiment.

Watch the 2020/21 Marsh Sheffield Shield LIVE on Kayo. New to Kayo? Get your free trial now & start streaming instantly >

The return of anything savouring of normality is a big deal. When club cricket resumed in England on the second Saturday in July, there was a remarkable outburst of media coverage, on the BBC and Sky; national newspapers sent reporters to games at Henley, Hampstead and Chorley. “Somehow it stood for something,” writes Paul Edwards in a lyrical report, “Paradise Regained”, in the latest edition of The Cricketer.

Perhaps COVID does not hang over Western Australia and South Australia the way it does the eastern seaboard. But you seldom pine for cricket so much as when you would like to be playing but cannot, so the prospect, in Victoria especially, feels very much like a chance to pick up the threads of disrupted lives.

Early tidings are disarmingly buoyant. People, especially kids, are itching to “get out there” again. Cricket NSW is reporting 50 per cent year-on-year growth in junior registrations. Cricket Queensland is optimistic. Even associations in metropolitan Melbourne, which won’t resume for a month at the earliest, are cautiously hopeful.

But there are layers to the challenges COVID sets. Cricket has the good fortune to be a non-contact, socially distant outdoor sport. It takes time and shares facilities and equipment, which calls for caution.

Fifteen years ago attitudes might have been more robust: just shutter the changing rooms, and leave guys to take a sneaky leak behind a tree. Increasing female playing populations, senior and junior, have imposed higher minimum standards. Good thing too.

So how to enforce decent hygiene, aside from the well-publicised limitation on saliva use in ball maintenance?

For an example of the wrong way, come, inevitably, to the land of creeping assumptions. Like Andrews, Cricket Victoria has published a “road map for reopening”; like Andrews, it adopts a condescending, scolding, joyless tone, enough to drive anyone to golf.

“Cricket in a pandemic is a privilege, not a right!” thunders CV’s Season 20/21 COVID-19 Plan — an absurdly highfalutin way of saying that discretionary activities now involve responsibilities. Well, d’uh: this is the state where going to the supermarket has taken on the lustre of luxury tourism.

CV’s document is 20 pages of repetitive, arbitrary and pernickety regulations, even of training sessions, where, for example, face masks are to be worn at all times by everyone over 11 and every second net is to be used for throwdowns — bad luck if you only have two. The slogan is: “Get in. Train. Get out.” This invites a two-word reply, the second of which would be “off”.

Now, the attention span of your average recreational cricketer is probably a bit longer than that of your average security guard, but we’re also not getting paid, and we’re there to leave behind workaday cares rather than don PPE and enlist in an ersatz health bureaucracy.

The document could and should have been condensed to a single page with half a dozen easy-to-remember commandments. Instead, written for a pen-pusher’s satisfaction, it is uninviting and unenforceable. Because if on a 35-degree day your umpire prefers not to wear a mask because he cannot see through his fogged-up glasses, what are you going to do? Call the police?

It also leaves unaddressed the vastly greater challenges of the economics of running a club under such circumstances. Sports clubs have three main sources of revenue: subscriptions, sponsorship and socialising. Most operate in an annual range of between a $5000 profit and a $5000 loss.

But what if your numbers take a hit, your sponsors are short of money, and you can neither host functions nor even serve drinks? The minute a club opens its doors, it begins incurring expenses. Often those expenses are front-ended, with revenue coming in dribs and drabs afterwards.

The fear must be that getting out there will be only part of the battle. How sustainable will cricket be afterwards? Passing costs on to members risks pricing cricket out of people’s reach. Digging into reserves leaves nothing for future shocks.

Some useful grants have been rolled out; there are also encouraging signs that local councils are attempting to alleviate the ground hire load, by discounting/waiving fees, and offering to shoulder utilities charges. More stubborn are the costs of cricket equipment, balls especially. A Kookaburra turf ball, an item that can be used in a single innings, will now cost you nearly $100 at a sports store, which is about $20 per over that it swings. This was ridiculous; now it is scandalous.

Cricket administrators could do much to redress the marginal economics of recreational cricket were they to facilitate a competitive market in balls instead of allowing Kookaburra to back the truck up every year. Whomever succeeds the departing Belinda Clark as executive general manager of community cricket at Cricket Australia should regard this as their first task.

Clark has done some excellent things in her interrupted 2½ years in the role, enhancing CA’s knowledge base and going some way to addressing its Enron-style accounting of participation numbers. But here’s another modest proposal for her successor: rethink the name.

Community cricket is a tautology. It’s just cricket. It is not a variant; it is not a subsidiary; it is not a by-product or an add-on. It is the original, authentic cricket of Australia, of the people, by the people, for the people. And this summer, if we can but take it, cricket offers those people an opportunity to come back together — albeit at an agreed 1.5m distance.