In February, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) wrote to its 23,000 members with a grave bulletin. The MCC’s chief executive, Guy Lavender, had “been in direct contact with the Head Masters of both Eton and Harrow and the respective representatives of Oxford and Cambridge University Cricket Clubs.” The sombre news he imparted to the wearers of the famous “egg and bacon” striped tie was that Lord’s, the north London cricket ground that is the home of the MCC, could no longer accommodate the annual Eton-Harrow and Oxbridge fixtures.
This break with centuries of tradition came about, the MCC claimed, because it needed to protect the Lord’s pitch by restricting the number of matches and promoting wider playing opportunities for junior and “female cricket.” (The need to make space for lucrative professional matches was surely also relevant.) Lavender assured his fellow members: “this decision did not arise as a result of any ‘anxiety to kowtow to the woke police’ as recently reported in the media.”
The Eton-Harrow match has a rich history. As Derek Birley wrote in A Social History of English Cricket, in the late 18th century, fierce rivalries developed between England’s top private schools. “By 1804 Eton versus Harrow was sufficiently big box office for the boys to hire Lord’s as a venue,” Birley wrote. “Among those impresarios was Lord Byron. Afterwards both teams got drunk and, according to Byron, headed to the Haymarket Theatre, where they ‘kicked up a row, as you may suppose, when so many Harrovians and Etonians were in one place.’”
Viewed in isolation, Lord’s dropping Eton vs Harrow might seem a further example of cricket’s pursuit of money over tradition—its faintly desperate commercialism. But it was also a rare setback for England’s private school system.
The vast expansion of wealth and influence by private schools over the last 20 years can be accurately measured by the state of cricket. A 2019 study commissioned by the Sutton Trust found that the men’s professional game was in the top 10 professions dominated by the privately educated—tied with the news media on 43 per cent. Senior judges were top of the table with 65 per cent.
In their book Crickonomics, to be published this year, Stefan Szymanski and Tim Wigmore trace the tradition of Gentlemen vs Players—upper classes vs workers—that broadly ran from 1806 to 1962, but whose after-effects are with us today. Since 1965, 32 per cent of professional cricketers in England have been privately educated, against 7 per cent in society.
Is cricket retreating to become a game for the 7 per cent who went to private school?
Unlike many sectors of Britain, where privilege remains undisturbed, cricket’s inequalities have been thrust into the sulphurous light of an inquest, on the back of events in the southern hemisphere.
This winter’s mortifying 4-0 Ashes defeat for the England men’s team in Australia stoked the dread that red-ball cricket—chiefly Test matches, the most sacred form of the game—is being destroyed by the shorter, snazzier white-ball competitions like The Hundred. The Hundred, launched by the ECB in the summer of 2021, is a kind of digital cricket, which miniaturises the sport (and the attention span) to a century of deliveries for each team. It is a boiling down of Twenty20, or 20-over cricket, previously thought to be the end of the line for brevity. The new competition also hopes to promote women’s cricket and attract a new, younger audience to the game.
For the first time after an Ashes defeat, a postmortem focused not only on the England team’s technical and tactical flaws, but the very soil in which the game is rooted: its inaccessibility to ethnic minorities, the struggle for the equality of the women’s game, regional imbalances and the growing domination of fee-paying schools in producing players.
The obliteration of England’s Test team had the unusual effect of casting privilege as the enemy of success. The team was not a meritocracy, people said. The route was blocked to players who might bring greater hunger. England were too posh and too soft.
Against the backdrop of revelations of institutionalised racism at Yorkshire County Cricket Club, where the former player Azeem Rafiq exposed a litany of abuse and discrimination, Eton and Harrow and Oxbridge losing their annual jolly at Lord’s was framed by some as a rare “victory” for egalitarianism.
And rare it was. The numbers are indisputable. In 2020, private schools supplied nine of the 11 England players who faced Pakistan in a Test match at Southampton. Tom Brown, a coach at Warwickshire, wrote a PhD in talent identification revealing that 95 per cent of specialist England batters in Tests since 2011 have been white, and that 77 per cent have been privately educated.
Brown calculated that white, privately schooled cricketers were 13 times more likely to make the professional grade than their white, state-educated counterparts. At the nexus of race and class lies an existential question. Is cricket retreating to become a game for the 7 per cent, or can The Hundred and the lessons of the Yorkshire scandal save it as a mass participation game, embedded in our culture?
Cricket has always positioned itself as an expression of English life. Its metaphors (sticky wicket, straight bat) pepper our conversations. The “Spirit of Cricket” reads like a code for life. If the game is exposed as anti-meritocratic and riddled with prejudice, will English society continue to hold it up as a mirror?
Join me for a tale of two cricketers—and two Englands. Not just any cricketers, but the country’s all-time leading Test batsman, Alastair Cook, who attended the private Bedford School, and its leading wicket-taker, Jimmy Anderson, who came through the Lancashire League at Burnley Cricket Club and attended St Theodore’s Roman Catholic High School in the town.
At Burnley CC, a serious league-winning outfit, where pride in Anderson is unconfined, visitors are assured: “two of our three bars serve real ales and they’re chosen by a special group of members who just proper love beer. Proper drinkers they are, so you’re in safe hands.”
At Bedford School, the promotional literature is geared more to the 40 different sports and 1,200 sports fixtures that cram the schedule: the £1m sports pavilion, £3m music school, £1.8m library and £6m theatre. Full boarding in upper and sixth form costs £35,430 a year.
Cook (12,472 Test runs) and Anderson (640 wickets) have in common immense talent, physical and mental strength, consistency and character. To reduce their cricketing prowess to a disparity in schooling might seem reductionist. But the statistics in social background across cricket tell a story of public sector decline and private sector expansion, despite the heroics of Anderson and Ben Stokes (Cockermouth state school), England’s finest all-rounder since Ian Botham.
From an early age Cook displayed multiple talents, learning the clarinet and becoming a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral School while turning out for Maldon Cricket Club near his family home in Essex. Cook ascribed his ability to focus with bat in hand to the concentration he learned in choral singing. He joined Bedford as a boarder and took up the piano and saxophone. Somehow, he also found time for batting. A century in a Bedford game aged 14 indicated that music would not be the defining influence of his packed teenage life.
In cricket and rugby especially, private schools trawl the state system for gifted youngsters and award them scholarships
Bedford School’s cricket records stretch back to 1866. The school runs four U-14 teams, four U-15s, three U-16s and five senior sides. By any measure this is industrialised sporting output. Bedford teams are often national finalists in competitions and among their regular opponents are Eton, Harrow, Stowe, Oundle and Repton. A host of first-class and international players adorn the school’s honours board. Cook, England captain for five years, provides unsurpassable lustre for the marketing department. Bedford is also high on the list of scouting stops for county academies.
Opportunity could hardly knock louder. “Masterclass sessions” are delivered by former England internationals Bob Taylor and David Capel. It has an Arcadia of facilities: six new indoor nets, 18 outdoor nets, nine squares and four bowling machines, including a new Merlyn “spin machine.” Tours have taken the school’s teams to Barbados, St Lucia, Antigua, South Africa, Australia, the UAE and Spain.
“The experience I got from playing at Bedford School was incredible,” Cook told pupils on a visit to his alma mater. “Everything, if I ever needed it, Bedford School put on for me, as long as I was prepared to work hard to do it.”
As Cook indicated, facilities make a spectacular difference but can’t, by themselves, guarantee a record-breaking England captain. Cook said he woke early for 7am batting practice, but he also acknowledged the ex-county cricketers who were gathered around him.
In cricket and rugby especially, private schools trawl the state system for gifted youngsters and award them scholarships. This deprives state schools of talent and improves the results of a highly competitive private sector. This process of disguising “talent grabs” as philanthropy is resented by many I have spoken to at grassroots level. But the system is seldom challenged.
And it doesn’t just happen in England. The great Australian spin bowler, Shane Warne, who died recently, attended a secondary modern in Melbourne before receiving a sports scholarship to Mentone Grammar, where the annual fee is now up to about £16,700 (still small by the standards of England’s most opulent schools).
In Australia, the myth of self-proclaimed “mongrel” cricketers snapping at the heels of English imperialists is undermined by the flow of privately educated players in baggy green caps. Their current captain, Pat Cummins, was educated at a fee-paying grammar school. In Australia, though, private sector schools have grown from 4 per cent of the total in 1970 to 15 per cent in 2020.
Jimmy Anderson’s story contrasts with Cook’s luxurious ascent. Mick Ennis, who ran the cricket team at St Theodore’s Roman Catholic High School, which Anderson attended, has said: “the players usually didn’t have any equipment. It was basically the football team who turned up to play cricket. They used to turn up in their school uniform, take off their ties, and play.”
Phil Broadhurst, a senior coach at Burnley Cricket Club (formed in 1833), which has produced numerous county players, told me: “He [Anderson] has not had that privileged background. He’s a good cricketer. That’s the bottom line. We look up to him and the kids are inspired by him simply because of his achievements, and because he will come to the club with no airs and graces, and just chat to anybody.”
Burnley’s ethos at junior level, Broadhurst says, is “just enjoy playing cricket. Don’t get hung up about playing for your county side or being first team. Just enjoy cricket. We’re not all going to be Jimmy Anderson.” State schools are encouraged to use the ground for competitions. And the odd fee-paying child has joined the Burnley set-up: “We don’t bar anybody. Any background. We don’t expect poorer families to spend money on buying pads or whatever. We have a supply of those. We try and make it sport for all. There’s no big ‘I am.’”
Each great England player has his or her unique school story. Anderson’s accomplice in English cricket’s most prolific bowling partnership, Stuart Broad, reached the top by the other route. Broad went to the picturesque fee-paying Oakham School. On the Private School Finder UK website he is quoted saying: “there is no arguing with the facilities and the coaching and the reality is that you have to pay for these things now. We could play sport most afternoons and every evening and the sports facilities were always open to us. And the coaches we had were Frank Hayes and David Steele—both former England players. So, you can see why I have done well.”
It was also in his blood. Broad’s father Chris scored 1,661 Test runs for England. (Anderson’s father Michael, for comparison, was second team captain at Burnley). Atherton, a former England captain and Manchester Grammar School boy whose own son now plays for Middlesex, argued strongly after this winter’s Ashes that the apparent annexation of the national side by privately educated cricketers was more nuanced than it appeared. “This story is given oxygen from time to time, and dictates a narrative (a false one) that the game is an enclave of the very posh, privileged and privately educated,” Atherton wrote. “[Sam] Billings and [Zak] Crawley do come from wealthy families and were privately educated. Haseeb Hameed, Joe Root, Ollie Pope, Rory Burns, Stuart Broad and [Jonny] Bairstow were all privately educated too.
“But the conclusion that private schools offer a defining advantage for young cricketers is a wrong way of looking at the issue. Good young cricketers do not emerge miraculously from private schools—good cricketers (usually already formed) go to private schools. This is obvious in cases such as Hameed and Root and Jos Buttler, who all received scholarships on the back of already attained cricketing excellence, but will be true for many others too, who are not on scholarships. Family, club and county will have been the key.”
Cricket has always been a reliable haven of class and privilege. Over the past 30 years it has increased its dependence on private schools themselves, bolstered by an inflationary spiral—in fees, facilities and demand from parents here and abroad. The example of cricket is also the story of schooling and outcomes in England.
Derek Birley points out that by the 1830s, Harrow, Eton, Westminster, Winchester and Charterhouse had formed a closed shop of elite cricket schools. When Shrewsbury wrote to Eton asking for a game, Eton replied: “Harrow we know, Winchester we know, but who are ye?”
More than a century later in the 1950s, those foundations remained: “public school and Oxford or Cambridge was still the royal road to cricketing success. Leisure, coaching, good wickets, good fixture lists and easy access to the magic circle were crucial elements in the making of a Test match player; it is no accident that May, Sheppard, Cowdrey, ER Dexter and MJK Smith were among the best batsmen of the time.”
Three years ago, the “Elitist Britain 2019” study for the Sutton Trust showed that the proportion of privately educated male professional cricketers had risen by 10 per cent since 2014, while 35 per cent of England’s female internationals were also from the private sector.
In British rugby, 37 per cent of male union internationals had come through private schools. But in the women’s game, curiously, 82 per cent had passed through comprehensives. One in three Olympic medallists were private sector products. A headline-grabbing detail of the report was: “an Old Etonian has won a medal in ‘sitting down’ sports at every Olympic Games since 1992.” In rowing, sailing and equestrianism, private schools reign supreme.
Of the 37 professions examined, only in football were private schools under-represented, at 2 per cent for women and 5 per cent for men, compared to the 7 per cent figure for the country at large. While Premier League clubs have made increasing use of fee-paying schools to accelerate the non-footballing education of promising youngsters and prepare them for the kind of elite environment they can expect at club academies, and football scholarships are now offered by several independent schools, clubs also have “special partnerships” with outstanding state establishments in their areas. Marcus Rashford is one of numerous Manchester United players to have spent time at Ashton on Mersey School. In the age of oligarchs and nation states owning clubs, the Sutton Trust report is a striking reaffirmation of football’s claim to be the people’s game.
In Different Class: The Untold Story of English Cricket Duncan Stone writes: “ultimately, the gulf between the state and independent sectors has never been greater. Whereas Dulwich College—where it cost more that £45,000 a year to board in 2021—has eight grass cricket fields, the entire Borough of Southwark, in which it is located, has only six. Of these, only one belongs to a state school, Bacon’s College in Rotherhithe.”
Since 2010 alone, more than 200 school playing fields in England have been sold off. Some schools diverted part of the proceeds to indoor facilities, such as gyms and sports halls. But the construction is unlikely to match the grandeur of the facilities at, say, the independent Millfield School in Somerset, a powerhouse of talent development, which has new £2.6m cricket and golf centres, with “PitchVision technology” and a “state of the art 4G fielding area.” Meanwhile, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, state school spending per pupil in England fell by 9 per cent in real terms between 2009-2010 and 2019-2020—“the largest cut in over 40 years.”
Their super-abundance reflects the wider growth of wealth at Britain’s private schools, several of which now operate satellite operations in, for example, the Gulf states. Last year the Byline Times website reported that the top nine private schools in England—the “Clarendon Schools”—had increased their assets by £600m, or 44 per cent, over the preceding six years.
Of Eton, Charterhouse, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster, Winchester, St Paul’s and Merchant Taylors’, Boris Johnson’s alma mater remained clear of the field. Eton’s assets had risen 37 per cent to £611m.
Back in the public sector, governing bodies in sport talk of “talent pathways” and initiatives and pilot schemes. Cricket’s “Chance to Shine” programme claims to reach 600,000 children a year. But by the England and Wales Cricket Board’s own admission, only 7 per cent of state primary school children play the game; at secondary level the figure is even lower.
Two burly doormen stand at the gate to a life in the professional game. One is education, the other—racism.
When the ex-Yorkshire cricketer Azeem Rafiq lifted the lid on ingrained racism at his county club, there was an expectation that shame would consign bigotry in the sport to history’s dustbin. Despite Yorkshire’s attempts at a cover-up, Rafiq’s revelations about the abuse and discrimination he had endured between 2008 and 2018 on account of his Pakistani heritage were heard by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, which encouraged those at other clubs to come forward with similarly harrowing accounts.
Among 16 employees sacked by Yorkshire were the director of cricket, Martyn Moxon, and Andrew Gale, the head coach. Across the game several county backwoodsmen downplayed the problem or displayed their ignorance about the minorities struggling to gain a foothold in the sport. But in March this year Rafiq said: “since DCMS a lot has happened, but from some of the stuff I’ve heard it’s becoming clear that the counties don’t actually see it, they don’t get it. Not all of them.
“Since I spoke I don’t feel enough has changed. I don’t feel there’s enough of an energy to make changes. I think there’s some good people trying, but as a whole in the county game there’s still a lot of resistance to anything that goes away from the status quo.”
Much was learned about what cricketers from ethnic minorities had been through over decades. Another catalyst—not just in cricket, but world sport—was the murder of George Floyd in America, which moved political protest by sportsmen and women into the mainstream. On Sky Sports, Michael Holding, the former West Indies fast bowler and commentator, said: “what people need to understand is that this thing stems from a long time ago, hundreds of years ago. The dehumanisation of the black race is where it started.”
The clip was watched seven million times. Holding then appeared on ITV News, where Mark Austin asked him about the emotions he had until then held back. Holding began thinking of his parents (“my mother’s family stopped talking to her because her husband was too dark”) and started to cry. Ebony Rainford-Brent, who played for England’s 2017 World Cup-winning women’s team, also spoke affectingly about the prejudice she had faced in cricket and society as a
black woman.
In interviews, the former England bowler David “Syd” Lawrence recalled a knock on his hotel room door in the 1980s and finding a banana skin on the floor outside. Phil DeFreitas remembered the letters he received from the National Front and being reluctant to tell the England management.
Race and class converge in complicated ways. Cricket seems to be finding it hard enough to confront the two separately, never mind together. But while state school cricket withers, the figures once more show that the obstacles to non-white players are also higher as they advance through their teenage years.
Tom Brown, who wrote the PhD study, told reporters that “at a recreational level, 30 per cent of the demographic that plays the game in England and Wales are British South Asian. That drops to around 20 per cent at the academy (elite junior) level for first class counties, which then drops even further to 5 per cent when it comes to the professional game.”
In September last year, Sky Sports put out a documentary that revealed the number of black professional cricketers in England has dropped by 75 per cent in 25 years. Dean Wilson, the Mirror’s cricket correspondent, who worked on the documentary, said: “there are myriad reasons. It’s not a simple story. Clearly the reduction of cricket in [state] schools and urban areas plays a big part, as that is where the black population is at its greatest.
“The love and passion the Caribbean community had for the game when they first came to the UK, it was just taken for granted that it would always be there. Actually, if you don’t do anything to support it and feed it, you end up where we are
today. I think it is a problem that has arisen by a lack of action. A carelessness,
actually.”
A decade ago, the day before an England football match in Europe, I was with the press pack in the Italian coastal city of Rimini. With previews filed, somebody suggested we split a game of beach cricket into private vs state schools.
Nobody demurred. It was a comfort to us comprehensive school kids to have the England manager Gareth Southgate, then working for ITV, on our side. Automatically, we fell into the ranks of the English school class system and picked up bat and ball. And despite our crushing lifelong disadvantage (only kidding), we won.
The picture observed by many in the game now is of white-ball cricket supplanting the red-ball game, of smaller counties being cut adrift within five years, and of the game still struggling to confront the reality of dehumanising language and discrimination.
All the while the growing power of private schools appears unstoppable. It is at once a resurgence of 19th-century dominance and one of the sharpest reflections you can find of how modern Britain works. In that sense England is in danger of ending up with the summer game it deserves.
At Burnley Cricket Club, though, Phil Broadhurst is undaunted. He insists his state school kids are “oblivious” to who they’re playing: “they don’t care that someone else has an ex-England cricketer coaching them. It’s all about playing the game and improving yourself. It’s not about someone else getting better coaching. Is it better coaching? That would be the question mark. We do our best. Fear nobody.”
