Cricket's equity crisis
Holding Up a Mirror to Cricket, the report unveiled on Tuesday by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC), will make all but the most blinkered (and blazered) cricket aficionados reconsider the sport they love. The very sensible recommendations – embed a commitment to inclusivity in the administration of the ECB; establish an action plan to reverse the decline of cricket in black communities; seek to remove the class barriers that exist in cricket; allocate more resources to the women’s game and move towards pay parity between professional men and women players by 2029/30; play women’s Tests at Lord’s rather than the Eton v Harrow and Oxford v Cambridge matches – are the least of it. Far more profound and contentious is its questioning of what might be called the foundation myth of cricket: that the game has always been a social unifier in Britain and was exported to the empire as part of this island’s great civilising mission.
Unusually for a 317-page document organised in numbered paragraphs like the driest of legal texts, the chapter on the history of the game is a riveting read. “We believe,” the report argues, “that cricket needs to engage more frankly with the fact that, despite conjuring images of tradition, continuity and togetherness, cricket’s history is also replete with tensions and social conflicts, even histories of brutality and oppression.” There is a delicious irony in the fact that John Major, who would surely buy completely into the roseate view of cricket’s past, has written the foreword to the report, recalling “with a warm glow” his upbringing in Brixton playing cricket with young West Indian migrants. It is the Windrush equivalent of Sir John’s famous image of Britain as “the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer … and old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist.”
Sir John hymns a lost utopia and supports the idea that cricket needs, to use the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) jargon, a “reset”. The report, commissioned by the ECB in response to global movements such as Black Lives Matter and Me Too and produced by four independent commissioners chaired by Cindy Butts, dismisses the bucolic idea of a lost Eden, arguing that cricket has always been a sport divided between “the rural and the urban, social classes, ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’, North and South, private and state educated, men and women, and white colonisers and ‘non-white’ peoples.” Cricket, according to the report, does not need to rediscover its roots; it needs to tear up those roots. This is Year Zero.
The report has been widely welcomed. The ECB has made the “unqualified public apology” the commissioners demanded. But once the old guard understand just how radical it is – in effect, consigning much of cricket’s history to the dustbin – there will be a counter-attack. The report, perhaps unhelpfully, labels the “white, middle class men” who dominate cricket as players, administrators and spectators “Type K”. Many of the “Type K” respondents who supplied information to the report did not think their beloved game had a problem with discrimination or inclusivity. A “Type K” backlash against the findings of the report can be confidently predicted. Bazball will once more be on show at Lord’s this week in the second Ashes Test. But MCC members in their privileged seats in the pavilion have themselves just been Bazballed, and despite their sedentariness they will not take it sitting down. Cricket’s future starts with a battle over its past.
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