While they are one of “The Big Three” players in international cricket, England’s status is not widely reflected in the performance of their men’s Test Team.
There have been several contributing factors to this decline.
England invented the game of cricket, and it has been played there at a competitive level since the late 16th century.
As England’s influence spread throughout the world so did cricket such that it is now the national sport of several of its former dominions.
The first Test between England and Australia in 1877 kick-started “The Ashes” rivalry, which remains the longest standing international competition in existence.
It is eagerly anticipated by both countries every time it takes place. The day after an Ashes series all cricket followers from both countries begin looking forward to the next series. The Ashes is in fact more than a series of matches – it is a continuum. It never really starts and finishes.
Perhaps not surprisingly England were dominant in the early days winning 11 of the first 12 series held. To that point England had prevailed in 23 matches to Australia’s nine. Both sides then enjoyed periods of superiority up to the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
Australia had, however, clawed back much of England’s early dominance such that by the first series after the war they surpassed England in Test victories for the first time. Australia and England largely jockeyed for dominance until the early 1970s.
England was the highest-ranked side from January 1970 to January 1973 at which time the baton was passed to Australia.
Since then, the world rankings have been:
Australia: 248 weeks
West Indies: 175 weeks
India: 87 weeks
South Africa: 49 weeks
England: 31 weeks
New Zealand: 8 weeks
Pakistan: 4 weeks.
In that time Australia have won 66 of the Ashes Tests decided to England’s 42 and the series decided have been 15-10 to Australia.
Of the 10 Australian batters to have averaged over 50 for their Test career, eight of them have played in the past 50 years. By complete contrast of the 10 English players to have done so only two – Joe Root and Harry Brook – have played in the same period.
Using a metric, covering wickets per match, average, economy and strike rates comparing bowlers from both countries over the last five decades, 12 of the top 15 Ashes combatants have been Australian.
(Gareth Copley/Getty Images)
With some exceptions, England have struggled to be competitive on a regular basis and Australia have been the most consistently dominant. While it never diminishes the anticipation of the upcoming contest the reality is that England have not won a Test in Australia since 2011.
When England won the 2005 Ashes, the triumphant players were paraded through London in an open-top bus and awarded MBEs.
In reality the result was a 2-1 victory against an Australian side missing Glenn McGrath for a couple of the vital clashes due to a training injury. Australia lost the second Test by a mere two runs and had that result been reversed giving them a 2-0 lead in the series the outcome may have been quite different.
Nonetheless England did win. It was a close, hard fought, fascinating and highly anticipated and viewed series. and it was hoped that with exciting players like Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff this would herald the dawn of a new era for English cricket.
Unfortunately, 18 months and a 5-0 whitewash in the following Ashes series later, things seemed to have reverted to the status quo.
As the ICC Rankings above would indicate it is not just Australia who have improved relative to England over the past five decades. The improvements in performance by almost every side seem largely to have come at the expense of England.
From a management perspective, England largely led the world attempting to address issues within the game. They had a high level of sponsorship with products like the John Player League as well as listening and responding to the markets perceived weaknesses within the game and developing different formats to address complaints around the speed of the game and the many drawn contests after five days.
They have led the way in addressing these issues through the development of limited-overs cricket. The rest of the world has essentially followed their lead.
Like all countries, however, they were negligent in considering the wants of all stakeholders and by denying reasonable payments to players left their game vulnerable to the Packer revolution as well. Since many playing nations went through this, however, the issue was certainly not particular to England.
England women’s team coach Jon Lewis, after the recent series in Australia, pointed to climactic and cultural reasons as being behind his team’s defeat.
I think there is more to the fall of the English Cricket Empire than this.
The English media savages the performances of their side but seemingly like the ECB, they appear largely bereft of solutions to address the issue. It was not surprising that they jumped onto “Bazball” as a way to address the problem when new coach Brendan McCullum introduced the new and aggressive style of cricket to take the national team forward – particularly when it met with some initial promising signs.
The sports media highlighted such issues in England’s defeat in the last ashes series in Australia as being largely the result of defective batting techniques, dropped catches, poor preparation, the lack of a world-class spinner, inadequate fielding drills, lack of imaginative leadership and so on.
(Photo by Adrian Murrell/Allsport/Getty Images/Hulton Archive)
It really is difficult to see these as the symptoms rather than the actual disease. A focus on addressing these weaknesses in on-field performance appears to ignore the root causes of the problem.
It doesn’t really answer the question of why.
Succinctly,
- Cricket is no longer the “game of the people”. It has been superseded in this position by football.
- Cricket is viewed by much of the population as elitist, racist and out of touch.
- The challenges created by the reclamation of Government controlled school playing areas in the 1980s were never effectively addressed.
- Cricket is still largely run by “stuffy old men” whose conservative approach to maintaining the status quo will never effectively address the issues confronting the game, largely because they maintain a blinkered approach to the uncomfortable issues within the game.
Without doubt cricket used to be the pre-eminent sport of the back pages of English newspapers. For example, in 1929, England suffered its first defeat to non-British or Irish opposition in soccer, the Herald led its sports section with an article about Wally Hammond being presented with a Grandmother clock.
Even in 1947, when Liverpool clinched the League Title in an incredibly tight finish, previews and reports took second place to speculation over who would play in Trent Bridge’s first Test between England and South Africa.
In Hitchcock’s 1938 film, “The Lady Vanishes” the two comic characters in the film ask every English passenger they meet on the train “How’s the Test going?”. It is thought that a modern remake of the film would probably feature “what was the United score?” as the featured question.
Since newspapers and other media are essentially driven by the market, cricket was, at that time, the pre-eminent sport if not with the entire population, then certainly with the segment who read newspapers and attended films.
When did this change? According to Martin Kellner in his book “Sit Down and Cheer. A History of Sport on TV” the baton was passed on May 2nd, 1953, when the most popular player in soccer Stanley Matthews inspired his Blackpool side to come back from 1-3 down in the last 20 minutes to win 4-3.
It is estimated that upwards of 12 million people watched the match on TV’s, many of which were purchased for the upcoming coronation. According to Kelner soccer has been the sport of choice for the English ever since.
The “BBC Light” sports program carried only coverage of the second half of the FA Cup match preferring to cover the Australia vs Leicester tour match and a championship match between Sussex and Hampshire.
Never again would this happen.
The increase in popularity of soccer has had other impacts. Since its inception in 1991 the EPL has encompassed now a 10-month season, so unlike Australia where cricket is the summer national sport and the various football codes scrap over our allegiance during the winter months, cricket has a relatively narrow two-month window to capture the nation’s attention.
Even if it is able to do this the soccer fans switch back as soon as the season starts back up.
(Photo by Tom Shaw/Getty Images)
The reclamation of open space from the 1980s on which cricket was formerly played from the state-run school system stopped the popularity of the game within the state run education system. As such cricket’s chief feeder is now the private school system which only educates 6% of English school students.
Martin Kettle of The Guardian points out that on the last Ashes tour to Australia nine of the 11 players in the final test were from a private school.
Add to this that roughly a third of recreational cricketers are of Asian descent and yet only 4% of these make it into the highest echelons and it is clear that the feeders of cricket potential are being stifled at an alarming rate.
England’s men’s football team has five or more minority ethnic players in the national side. It has comfortably transitioned to broad diversity – cricket has not. It was not always so with John Barnes suffering racist abuse from English soccer fans in the early 1980s.
This then would appear to be something that soccer has successfully moved through that cricket has not as yet. Soccer players take the knee – its cricketers do not – as Michael Holding noted – “cricket is just not serious enough”.
The Yorkshire CC scandal was only the tip of the iceberg in terms of racism amongst English counties. However, there are, of course, still factions within the Yorkshire CC yearning for the re-introduction of the rule that you had to be born in Yorkshire to represent the county.
While ever, cricket remains chained to the past like this progress will be slow.
Statistics such as these lead to understandable accusations that cricket in England is elitist, racist, sexist and just about any other “ist”.
For Martin Kettle to complete his article with “It requires particularly powerful blinkers not to see links between these factors and England’s Ashes defeats. England’s cricket – and it’s overindulged Barmy Army of supporters – is too complacent, not very good and spends too much time in a bubble of Anglosphere exceptionalism. Promoting itself as the envy of the world when it is not and resentful of its critics” speaks volumes.
Success breeds success. Perhaps one of the major contributing factors is simply that England’s lack of success breeds a culture where success is no longer expected or demanded of the national side.
“Cricket: A History of its Growth and Development Throughout the World” by Rowland Bowen in 1970 foresaw something of the plight of cricket 50 years later. While something of an eccentric perhaps best highlighted by amputating his own right leg in his bathroom at home simply to prove that it could be done and a somewhat flawed and quirky volume much of what the retired Indian army officer wrote resounds.
He largely connected the rise of cricket with the flourishing of the industrial and imperial ages and that English cricket was largely becoming unsustainable as this age was passing into obsolescence. He believed that most of the agonies of English cricket were caused by the wishes of those who controlled the game to preserve something that was doomed.
While written over 50 years ago his views of the history and present cricket would largely recognise that cricket’s problems have a larger social context. Pathways to renewal and growth have been closed and neglected making the game unsustainable especially in state schools which have had to sell off their playing fields or never had them in the first place.
He would have noted that cricket suffers because of its apparent invisibility live and on TV. He would have said, with some merit, that this is because the game has become overly professional and exists exclusively for the benefit of those who play, administer, promote and profit from it rather than being encouraged to grow in new ways within English society as it is now. It has become a sad relic of a bygone era.
At its heart sport is really part of the entertainment industry. The appreciation of the skills of the participants while central is only part of the equation. People do not queue up to watch heart surgeons despite the high level of skill involved. Sport as entertainment is essentially about the thrill of the contest.
While the last 50 years have seen a proliferation of exciting cricketers from all over the world, precious few of them have been English. This, of course, makes marketing the product considerably more difficult.
While not always for the right reasons both Ian Botham and Kevin Pietersen had cricket on the front and back pages of the popular press.
England has not simply staggered from one failure to another in this period, there have been periods when they have been ranked No.1 and played some great cricket. It has been their inability to sustain these successes and to inspire the British public with them that has seen cricket stagnate and in fact recede.
Jonathon Liew of The Guardian reported that it was by no means inevitable that England would become a force in world cricket again. “This isn’t India or Pakistan” he said. “The game does not live and breathe in our streets, public spaces or our school system. History and tradition aside, cricket does not flow through the national bloodstream any more than judo or surfing or esports.”
While most of the problems highlighted in the research underpinning this article are social ones it is a little difficult to believe that those responsible for the elitism, racism and other factors that are driving the size of the population of eligible Test cricketers ever smaller are likely to simply recognise and admit their failures and step aside for the good of the game.
So we must ask what, if any, lessons this may have for cricket in Australia.