English cricket's 'main aim' must go beyond beating Australia

PAUL EDWARDS: It should be the main aim of all those involved in English cricket to make the game available to everyone who wants to play it, regardless of their background, ethnicity or family’s wealth.

Had visiting supporters been allowed to watch this winter’s Ashes series, it is probable that many of them would have worn T-shirts sporting the following famous quotation: "The aim of English cricket is, in fact, mainly to beat Australia."

The words, of course, are Jim Laker’s, although, frustratingly, I have been unable to locate their source. I suspect they come from one of Laker’s books but it is always useful to place such statements in context. (Quite recently, I have seen an England Test player quoted in a headline as saying: "We play too much cricket," with the word "marginally" after "play" omitted from the actual statement in order to enhance the comment’s punch).

At the same time, I’m not sure what sort of context would help me in this case. You see, I do not believe that beating Australia is the main aim of English cricket.

Now before one or two readers start wondering where they can buy a gibbet and stage a public hanging, please let me stress my love of Ashes cricket and my belief that it is important that the five-match series against Australia should be competitive.

And yes, I want England to win. I stayed up listening to the commentary on the 1970/71 tour; I rearranged holidays to see the 1977 series, and I covered every Ashes Test as a journalist in 2009. England won on each occasion and they are among my fondest memories.

^{Jim Laker knew the importance of the Ashes (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)}

But I absolutely do not believe that the health of our game should be judged by our success against one nation, albeit they are our keenest rivals.

For one thing, we are hazarding a great deal on a factor we cannot control viz. the strength of the opposition. England had some very fine cricketers between 1989 and 2004 but they never came close to beating the Australian teams led by Allan Border, Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh. It was, indeed, a green and gold age.

My central objection to Laker’s argument, however, is that it is far too restrictive.

What are we prepared to sacrifice in order that this great aim is achieved? More significantly, perhaps, what are we prepared to destroy in the mere hope it might be? And to put it even more clearly, would there now be a high-performance review into English domestic cricket if Joe Root’s team had lost 3-1 instead of 4-0?

If you wish to revisit the season prior to England's previous victory in Australia in 2010/11, you will find that every county played 16 LV= Insurance County Championship games, many of them in high summer. That was a decade before we became the only country in the world to cram two top-level short-form competitions into our season.

"If you have a morning spare, you might do well to investigate the range of programmes and courses that your first-class county runs. I suspect you will be surprised."

Maybe it would be useful if I put forward an alternative aim, one that is composed of a few strands rather than just one.

Firstly, let us not fool ourselves that aims count for anything without human agency. So let me redraft the opening of Laker’s statement and say that it should be the main aim of all those involved in English cricket to make the game available to everyone who wants to play it, regardless of their background, ethnicity or family’s wealth.

I think we should ensure that people can make the most of their diverse talents within the game and its formats, but that if they leave it, they think well of it. And I reckon we should try and hand on to our children a better, richer, more inclusive game than we found when we first saw figures in white on green and fell in love at once. 

How does that sound? Too woolly? Yeah, I know, but that’s the problem with broad ideas when set against narrow goals.

Should beating Australia be part of those aims? Absolutely, but only a part.

Millions of people will enjoy cricket in this country over the coming summer and they will do so without giving the Ashes a thought. They will do so at the thousands of recreational clubs whose competitive seasons are just getting underway. They will do so at the counties, both first-class and national, whose work is far more wide-ranging than some at the ECB appear to admit.

The Ashes - an English obsession (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)

If you have a morning spare, you might do well to investigate the range of programmes and courses that your first-class county runs. I suspect you will be surprised.

Many of these initiatives have no explicit link to the England men’s team; some will concern women cricketers or those that are disabled to some degree. They show that the counties understand their roles in their communities to be very wide-ranging and they are determined to fulfil them in every possible way.

Rather than see them as targets for culling or reorganisation, the ECB should view the counties as powerhouses. They know what they’re doing and they are delighted when their players are chosen to play for England. Producing such cricketers is one of their goals.

But let me return to the recent Ashes series for a moment and offer some guidelines to those responsible for future trips to Australia.

Firstly, we should make sure the mental health of any tour party is sound. I would have done all I could to postpone this winter’s series until 2022-3. Ben Stokes’ withdrawal from all cricket last summer was as clear a warning as the ECB needed that our players were becoming mentally exhausted by life in various Covid bubbles.

There would have been financial consequences but over the past two years, the governments of the world have adapted their economies, paid their citizens to stay at home and taken on levels of public debt unseen since wartime. In that context, rescheduling an Ashes tour should have been small potatoes. If ICC officials objected, they should have been politely told to stick their flip charts up their fundaments.

"England didn’t come close to winning a Test this winter but one member of the coaching staff still thought he deserved a cigar."

Then we should insist that the England touring team plays three four-day first-class matches against Australia A or any other opponents Cricket Australia chooses (the courtesy would, of course, be extended to touring sides when the Ashes are played in England and the counties would have to wear the loss of some players).

An important element in our preparation for playing Down Under should be batting and bowling on Australian pitches. It would certainly beat the hell out of blaming our own groundsmen, many of whom have done superb work to produce top-dollar wickets for this April’s County Championship programme (incidentally, I think we are the only country in the world to apologise for its pitches. Is it so surprising that English cricket is played on English wickets?).

Of course, there were other blunders: picking the wrong teams at both Brisbane and Adelaide was one and believing that batting in the nets on one leg helps you to cope with Pat Cummins bowling at 90mph was another. The whole affair was a shambles.

England didn’t come close to winning a Test this winter but one member of the coaching staff still thought he deserved a cigar. And at the end of it all, some in the hierarchy and a few in the media blamed domestic cricket.

I wish they could have seen the intensity and high levels of skill I have witnessed in the first three rounds of this season’s County Championship. But more on that in the coming weeks. This week I am off to Taunton and that prospect should be enough to cheer any cricket writer.

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