Tom Harrison, the ECB chief executive, has said that the absence of cricket from state schools is “nowhere near good enough” as the governing body looks to capitalise on the “inspirational moment that can spark that interest in the game” provided by the World Cup final.
Speaking to Sky during the first Ashes Test, Harrison pledged to double the number of state schools playing cricket in the next five years, and said the sport needed to shed its “tag of privilege” in the UK.
“We’ve got an outstanding partnership with Chance to Shine, which enables us to reach around 22% of state schools in this country at the moment,” Harrison said, “[but] that is nowhere near good enough for us. We need to double that over the next five years at least, and make sure that we’re reaching out to girls and boys.
“There are sports that do it very well… that we’re talking to now to enable us to get that scale and that reach across schools, and make sure we give kids the opportunity.”
Harrison also claimed that cricket was competing “with everything” – including console games such as Fortnite – for young people’s attention.
“It’s all a big challenge trying to capture kids’ imaginations and young people’s imaginations,” he said. “We are competing with everything. We’ve had a lot of news about Fortnite recently in the news – that’s the kind of competitive landscape that we’re in.
“We’ve got a plan – it’s called ‘Inspiring Generations’. We launched it at the start of the year, [and] it’s literally kicking off right now using the Ashes and the World Cup as a platform for growing the game.
“It’s all about transforming the women’s and girls’ game in this country, and looking again at our schools strategy, because we’re not comfortable about where we’re at with schools in this country.”
Harrison praised the make-up of the crowds at the World Cup, and said that cricket needs to eschew its reputation as an elitist sport.
“Cricket is a wonderful game that somehow carries around this tag of privilege in this country,” he said. “It’s something we need to shed and get away from as quickly as possible, and that’s what we’re doing.
“Our country is changing, and so the game needs to change, as we’ve proved over decades that it can do. One of the great things about this World Cup is that we were filling grounds with vibrant, colourful, diverse crowds – noisy, amazing crowds that we want coming back to our grounds as often as possible.”
Harrison claimed that cricket had already enjoyed a post-World Cup bounce, highlighting strong sales in Vitality Blast tickets, and claimed that the ECB had seen “people writing in and saying ‘my family have never really looked at cricket as being an option’, and suddenly it’s something that their kids are talking about, they want to play, they want to be part of”.
Despite their apparent marginalisation to open up a window for The Hundred from next year, he said that the ECB have “got to put our counties at the heart of the challenge to grow the game in this country”, and to ensure “that our county clubs are filling grounds across the country more regularly and for more formats of the game”.
He also highlighted the role of the ECB’s South Asian community programme, and said England “have got an incredibly diverse team that won the World Cup and that’s playing in this Ashes Test right now” – despite the fact that ten of the side for the Edgbaston Test are white British and six were privately educated.