INSIDESTORY
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IKE the whirr of a mower or the smell of freshly cut lawn, the sight of kids playing cricket in the street is still one of the clearest signs summer has arrived. Whether it’s in the front yard or back, side street or school oval, a bat’n’bowl with your mates is one of the great Australian traditions. But as the world changes and more kids connect over the click of a mouse than a flick off the pads, has a good old-fashioned backyard battle become exactly that: old fashioned? Or is it a sign of a wider issue? That children are not embracing the age-old game of cricket like they used to. Riddells Creek Cricket Club’s Peter Cullen certainly thinks so. And his opinion carries as much weight as a hefty club kit. He’s the kind of bloke who provides the glue at most sporting clubs, the salt of the earth allrounder who’s been president, coach, even the barman. Cullen says his club is ‘‘surviving’’. It won the McIntyre Cup last summer for the bestperforming club in the Gisborne & District Cricket Association. However, the picture is far less rosy when you look further down the grades. ‘‘It’s dying slowly in the junior grades,’’ Cullen says. ‘‘We see a big drop-off at the under-16 level. We didn’t have an under-16 team last year for the first time in years.’’ Cullen goes along with the common belief that more and more kids can’t see the appeal in standing in the sun for hours on end, hoping for a ball to roll their way. ‘‘There’s a real challenge ahead for the game,’’ he says. ‘‘You have to market it in schools; you can’t just sit back and expect the kids to turn up because they won’t. ‘‘The season is too long. It’s hard to find kids who will commit to a six-month season.’’ Traditionally, blokes like Cullen wield the most power and influence around a typical Australian cricket club. But these days you could argue the junior coordinator has the most important job. With so many other activities vying for attention from children with short attention spans, it’s their job to get them interested in cricket, and keep them that way. Luckily, Darley Cricket Club has a good recruiter in Tim Gallagher, who mas more than 30 years’ experience in the game. Gallagher’s concerns for his own club begin in a much younger age bracket than those at Riddells Creek. He says the club’s youngest access point, the Milo in2Cricket program, has lost 10 kids over the past four seasons, and he admits the game has a huge fight on its hands to stay relevant. ‘‘I hate to say it, but it’s declining,’’ Gallagher says. ‘‘The numbers have fallen slightly with senior, junior and Milo cricket in the past few years. I’m aware of a number of clubs that have lost junior sides.’’ He blames increasing sports fees, families’ financial struggles and other emerging sports for the exodus. The Australian Bureau of Statistics shows cricket isn’t even in the top four for most popular sport for children aged between five and 14, and it captures less than one tenth of the market. Outdoor soccer (20 per cent), swimming (17 per cent) and Australian Rules football with 16 per cent dominate the age bracket. When it comes to planning and marketing the game’s future, Cricket Victoria’s game and
market development manager, Rohan O’Neill, is at the coalface. Schools are factories for churning out cricketers, but O’Neill, a former Premier League cricketer, is concerned that while there’s plenty of potential stars going into the system, too few are coming out the other side. Victoria remains a national leader with 273,000 cricketers at last count, but O’Neill says there’s been a notable decrease in registrations at club level. ‘‘It’s a bit of a concern,’’ he says. ‘‘There is always an attrition rate with sports and people don’t have the same commitment like they used to. ‘‘Not everybody wants to commit to a cricket season for six months.’’ Yet 2012 has undoubtedly been a good year for cricket. Last summer’s Twenty20 Big Bash captured a new market, the Australian Test team is on the way back up the world rankings, and Channel Nine’s recent Howzat! series about Kerry Packer’s cricket revolution was watched by nearly three million Australians. But will it equate to more bums in whites, and on seats when the big matches come to town? At least the powers that be don’t have their heads in the sand. A cricket governance review in 2011 says Cricket Australia (CA) faces an uphill battle to win the hearts and minds of youngsters: ‘‘Much of the money is increasingly concentrated at the very top of the sport, and not so well at grassroots.’’ Which is why CA is pushing the game hard at schools, with introductory programs like Milo in2Cricket, which had a 1.7 per cent rise in registrations during the past financial year. Overall, CA believes the game is holding its own. Its latest annual report stated that total participation in outdoor cricket grew from 464,253 to 662,364 in the eight seasons leading up to 2010-11. At the entry level, numbers increased by 30.73 per cent to 127,279, running neck and neck with another popular Australian sport in tennis, whose official kids’ starter program, Tennis Hot Shots, aimed at 5-12-year-olds, leapt to 248,013 participants in 2010-11. While some cricket clubs fear for the future, in a little town called Elaine in the Moorabool Shire, the juniors are bucking the trend. The local cricket club had been in the wilderness for 12 years until the collective enthusiasm of the town’s junior cricketers inspired a renaissance for the game. Elaine Cricket Club vice-president Shane Dunn says the winds of change picked up last summer when 35 youngsters signed up for Milo In2Cricket. ‘‘That set everything going,’’ Dunn says. ‘‘They got a little taste of cricket and now they want to play junior cricket and it’s inspired the older blokes to put on the whites again.’’ It’s a unique story and one to be heard by millions. Cricket Australia will refer to it as an inspiring case study during its promotional campaign this summer. It’s probably why Rohan O’Neill is confident about the game’s future. ‘‘Cricket is still very much part of the fabric of Australian culture,’’ he says. How big, and in what form, remains to be seen.
Darley Cricket Club’s Tim Gallagher instructs Darcy and Asha Picture: Madeleine Swain
Riddles Creek’s Jack Radford pads up Picture: Marco De Luca
October 3, 2012 WEEKLY – YOUR COMMUNITY VOICE
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