Students of the game should be wary of potential changes to our university cricket programme

PAUL EDWARDS: The Covid-19 pandemic means that money will be tight in all areas of the ECB's activities and there may be a temptation to slash expenditure on university cricket

Paul Edwards: Writing for TheCricketer.com throughout this strange summer

Opinion from The Cricketer

Students who leave university with only their degrees have probably wasted quite a lot of time. There is, thank God, vastly more to this world than certificates, and undergraduate life offers an excellent opportunity to explore what those things might be. They will be different for everyone but sport is one of them. 

In each of the last two years I have begun my season by attending a university game. In 2018 I went back to Oxford only to see the three-day match against Northamptonshire completely abandoned. Then last April I was at Fenner’s, watching Nottinghamshire’s Ben Duckett hand out some tap to the Cambridge bowlers.

On each occasion I met impressive and highly motivated young men who were committed to making the most of their cricket while reading for a degree. Some of them attended either Oxford Brookes or Anglia Ruskin university. Each institution supplied a clutch of players to their nearby MCCU team.

Yet I also chatted to Toby Pettman and Ed Hyde, both of whom were students at their ancient universities and were managing their time so successfully that they could play three-day cricket without compromising high academic standards.

Oxford and Cambridge were only two of the six MCC universities. The others were based at Leeds/Bradford, Loughborough, Durham and Cardiff. The original scheme, which was set up by the former England opener, Graeme Fowler, in the 1990s, was designed to ensure that talented young cricketers did not have to choose between the possibility of a cricket career and getting a qualification that would give them other options should their sport not work out. (We should remember that the average retirement age for a professional cricketer is 26.)

^{The ECB has assumed control of the MCCU scheme}

Players of the quality of Andrew Strauss, Toby Roland-Jones, Tammy Beaumont and Heather Knight all came to professional cricket via their time at one of the six universities and MCC’s sponsorship, which began in 2004, enabled it to continue.

At the last count 23 per cent of current county players had come through Fowler’s scheme. It is one of English cricket’s great success stories – and now it is to be changed.

As Mike Atherton pointed out in the Times on Monday, the loss of all university cricket this summer means that the first-class status of some games played by the six former MCCUs has been ended with hardly anyone noticing the fact. The ECB has taken over the funding of university cricket from MCC and had already made it clear that the classification of matches would change next year. If that was the extent of the alteration I’m not sure that it would matter a great deal.

Categorizing a dozen games against the counties and the Varsity Match as first-class had long been an anachronism, one that harked back to the eras when Oxford and Cambridge were predominantly all-male institutions and blues teams were likely to contain four or five future county players. In recent years some prospective students have been attracted by the possibility of playing first-class cricket but I’m not sure the overall lure will diminish if excellent coaching and academic tuition are still available

But other changes are planned. Playing a greater amount of limited-overs cricket and encouraging more women to play the game might have been expected. But changing the funding model to the universities risks wrecking a fine scheme, albeit one that lacks a centre of excellence in any part of western England.

READ MORE FROM PAUL EDWARDS

That latter point was made in 2018 by the National Performance Manager, David Graveney, and the view of the ECB seems to be that the £500,000 hitherto spent on the MCCUs could be divided up between more universities and give more students of both genders the chance to play the game. 

Such opportunities are not to be derided. A few undergraduates do arrive at university having played relatively little cricket yet they may render the game valuable service in later life if their enthusiasm is encouraged, not necessarily at the highest level but in matches between smaller representative teams such as colleges or halls of residence. At the same time, excellence matters, too, and it will be vital that any renewed emphasis on participation does not diminish the universities’ ability to produce first-class cricketers.

It will also be important that the counties continue to play the universities in pre-season warm-up matches. This year all 18 teams were scheduled to play an MCCU side and they may continue to do so, even if none of the games are first-class.

The prospect of playing matches with that status is attractive to young cricketers but it can hardly matter too much to professionals who are merely in search of useful practice on a decent pitch. And surely it is important that some of the finest young cricketers in the country get the opportunity to see what the fully professional game is like – even if the experience is a little painful for them.

When I was at Oxford I spoke to Graham Charlesworth, coach of both the MCCU and OUCC sides. He said this: “We are trying to help these cricketers achieve their goals. Some will have ambitions to be professional cricketers and some will simply aim to be as good as they can be. They have a dual aspiration, one is a cricket aspiration and the other is a career aspiration, which they will hope to realise through their university degrees. 

“Even the ones that don’t become professional players may make contributions to the cricketing landscape. They may captain a minor county or the first team at a club; they may run the junior section at a club or run a business which sponsors cricket. There are so many multiplier effects in place for these students when they leave and I think that’s an undervalued aspect of the MCCU.”

Over the next few months an ECB committee will decide how university cricket is to be restructured. The Covid-19 pandemic means that money will be tight in all areas of the board’s activities and there may be a temptation to slash expenditure on university cricket.

^{Matches against counties will no longer be first class}

If so, those responsible for making that decision should read Charlesworth’s words and resist grim parsimony.

If they need any further encouragement to take the greatest care of university cricket, perhaps the words of Callum Guest, last year’s Cambridge MCCU skipper, will help them.

“Everyone who gets on this programme feels they’re close to a professional contract or second-team cricket, and after a year of being on it you realise how far away you are,” he said.   

“That doesn’t mean you take your foot off the gas but a lot of the lads I’ve played against in the MCCU games have been county-contracted players

“But I feel like I’ve improved tenfold since I’ve been here. That’s been achieved by playing and training, but we practise properly, we don’t just practise for its own sake. I was Cambridgeshire’s player of the year last season and I wouldn’t have played Minor Counties without the MCCU. First-class cricket is probably not going to happen for me and I came to that realisation a couple of years ago.  But coming up here has given a new lease of life to my cricket and to me as well.” 

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