‘DUNPLAYIN’

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home / For lack of money, and it is all right / Places they guarded, or kept orderly / Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly / We want the money for ourselves at home / Instead of working. And this is all right

Last Sunday, on a beautifully soft, dew-drenched south London morning, two Kent District Under-10 teams played their last cricket match of the season. Four hours, 300 runs, one jaw-dropping gully catch and a single huge slapped six into the sunflowers later, the home team had won a high-spirited end-of-season friendly by 35 runs. The players trooped off. Hands were shaken, boundary markers collected, weather-beaten district kit packed away until … well, forever, as it turns out. Stack those chairs. Stow the scorebooks. Let the grass grow. Exeunt omnes. Finis. With apologies in advance for retreading old ground, this week’s Spin is the sequel to an ending, a return to a subject that has in itself seemed to demand a follow-up. Welcome to the Death of Inner City Cricket Part Two: the autopsy.

As of last Sunday, Lewisham cricket is no more. One of these two end-of-season district XIs has been reorganised out of existence. In a peculiar turn this also happens to be the team that won the match and provided the ground – self-funded, self-maintained – plus a few extra players to make up opposition numbers. And so that really is that. A borough of a third of a million people, a place in which cricket was already, frankly in full retreat now has no dedicated representative cricket team for the first time in as far back as anybody cares to remember.

Another tranche of ground conceded: the tragic end of Lewisham cricket | The Spin Read more

The same scruffy, bricked-in urban borough that gave Kent its two most prolific bowlers of all time, Colin Blythe and Tich Freeman, has been euthanised out of existence by its distant parent county. Freeman is still the second most prodigious wicket-taker in first-class cricket, a 5ft 2in wrist-spinner with a lethal skiddy flipper who spent his final years in retirement at a cottage called Dunbowlin. Blythe was from deepest un-leafy Deptford. A schoolboy favourite of the great Neville Cardus, cricket correspondent of these pages, from a distance he cut an elegant, sensitive, cravat-wearing figure. Cardus imagined Blythe a poetic aristo-in-exile type, and later recalled his schoolboy shock at straying near him for the first time on the boundary and hearing his hero shout out in a sandpapery voice of deepest south London something along the lines of “Oiwhuthefackinfackayafackindoinyoufackinfacker!!”

Times have of course changed. For England’s 18 professional counties the wider battle is now for financial survival. As part of Kent’s strategy to join the saved not the drowned, the county has decided it is no longer the right thing to maintain the old overloaded district system with its mob-handed array of teams, a reflection of the sheer size of the county as well as the mix of London sprawl and rural spread. And so cricket retreats a little further, another little step back taken.

It is of course an emotive business, a hard decision made no doubt with some compelling logic on its side. What is certain is that the previous Spin on this topic drew a huge range of reactions. The reader comments under the article were fascinating, many from those who recognised a similar process elsewhere: the desire to retreat towards the fewer who can pay more, whole sports reconfigured increasingly around the wealthy and the pre-converted.

A slew of emails followed, many sorrowful or angry at the prospect. The local MP Heidi Alexander, now the shadow health secretary, expressed concern. Parents, coaches, teachers, groundsmen, youth workers, men who start sentences with phrases like “I don’t read the Guardian but …” have all had sympathetic words. As have members of other clubs in other counties and districts (a bumper sticker campaign has been cautiously mooted).

One local man, John, gave me a bundle of photos and clippings from his own days as a Lewisham cricketer in the 1950s, with the hope that they may somehow help show what exactly is being struck out of existence here. There’s John there, standing up on the left, with David Shepherd, later umpire David Shepherd, in the middle. And there they are, the Lewisham boys of 1957, angular skinny happy city kids.

Heavy boots and knitted jumpers apart they look pretty much exactly like the current lot, one of whom is John’s grandson, a year 6 boy at a local primary school, a ragged, galloping, talented seam bowler with just a few net sessions behind him. But who now has no local district team, or at least no sensible pathway towards one.

Technically Lewisham cricket hasn’t been struck out of existence completely. Instead the team has been “amalgamated”, ie taken over by neighbouring Greenwich, leaving twice the number of boys to play the same number of games. The Lewisham side will be tossed suddenly into a non-development set-up located an hour away by public transport across one of the most densely populated parts of Europe. They have already begun, naturally, to drift away.

There are still clubs, or rather there is still one viable, active club left in the borough. But the reality is what has come to fill the gap once filled by schools and terrestrial TV and regular facilities; the small band of volunteer coaches operating, distantly under the banner of Kent, engaging parents, rustling up players, introducing the sport into lives it would otherwise not touch.

In Lewisham’s case how much money are we talking, really, to keep a dedicated presence in this messy, huge, largely cricket-less borough? Some admin hours? A few incidental costs. Lewisham cricket is basically just an idea, a notion of sport for all, maintained out of duty and a sense of societal well-being, an inherited obligation. The financial saving will be small. The cost is, as ever, measured on a different scale.

It’s hard to say who wanted it to happen / But now it’s been decided nobody minds / The places are a long way off, not here / Which is all right

So, a lot of replies, a lot of talk. From everybody that is except Kent County Cricket Club, who have had nothing to say about this at all. No comment. Kent, who are in the business of selling public entertainment, have refused to talk to the Guardian. No clarifications, no delivering of hard unpalatable truths, no other side of the argument. A county whose own existence depends on the continued interest of those who love the sport enough to pay the Sky TV fees and keep on visiting Test match grounds, has nothing to say on this.

In part this is because the club were annoyed about the subject coming up at all. This is an institution already under stress, with a chief executive, Jamie Clifford, who has essentially rescued the county from unsustainable debts over the past five years. Some tough decisions have already been taken, including the unlovely but necessary redevelopment of the St Lawrence Ground and the lovely and indeed successful making-over of the ground at Beckenham against some local resistance. Squealed noises off, protests, hurt feelings: this all perhaps starts to sound like a necessary soundtrack to progress and tough decisions.

Plus county cricket clubs aren’t like Premier League football clubs. Kent have a single, apparently quite inexperienced press officer who simply seemed surprised by these questions, incoherently besieged, unable to deal with the issues raised.

More to the point, it is probably an issue they’re simply best off staying quiet on. At least judging by the content of the only club communication on this matter, a letter sent by Clifford to the parties behind the conjuring up of Lewisham’s short-lived home ground, venue for that final victory before the plug was pulled.

This letter is quite a piece of work. Not just because it appears to have been written by a committee of the ill-informed. But more because in it Clifford unwittingly makes a brilliant case for abolishing his own county. Really, you couldn’t have put it any better.

All the counties are playing musical chairs right now, menaced by debt, shadowed by the possibility of franchised T20. The great fear is someone, somewhere is going to go under. In attempting to defend cutting off his own weakest borough, Clifford makes a brilliant, unanswerable case that this should be Kent.

The most telling, and indeed most jaw-dropping bit is Clifford’s suggestion that Lewisham district development group, which is, above all about participation, deserves to be shut down because they haven’t won enough games. “One of the positives that should come out of this is that young cricketers from Lewisham will now play in a more competitive team environment,” Clifford writes. “It must be very difficult for young players when they only ever play in losing sides.” Let’s take a closer look at this shall we? Kent CCC are currently the least successful county in England, with one T20 cup and two one-day trophies in the last 37 seasons. Kent played 16 county championship games, winning four, and went out in the first knockout round of both one-day competitions. It is a notably lower win ratio than, say, Lewisham Under-10s, who last season lost twice and won twice across five matches.

Sadly, the Spin can’t help but conclude players like Matt Coles, Sam Northeast and Daniel Bell-Drummond would benefit from a more competitive environment. The chief executive’s own policy is clear: better to amalgamate this losing Kent team. Better for everyone if the county is simply swallowed up by Surrey Sluggers or The Oval Browncaps. Franchise them. The chairman has spoken. Nothing personal of course. It’s just about raising standards.

From what we hear / The soldiers there only made trouble happen / Next year we shall be easier in our minds / Next year we shall be living in a country / That brought its soldiers home for lack of money

Of course, this is simply to take some terribly wonky argument at face value. Nobody wants Kent, wonderful club, the cradle of cricket, to take a step into the background. Just as nobody who actually cares about participation, the basic joy of the sport over bottom lines and ideologically driven revenue-wringing could seriously want Lewisham to shut down. Plus the good news for Kent is Clifford has actually done an excellent job in reversing the financial position he inherited, the vast debts racked up around projects as diverse as the infamous pop concert weekender featuring the Sugababes and James Morrison. With the help of a few soft loans, losses have been turned into profit in the past few years, a fine thing in itself.

Even better when it comes to development at the elite player level, Kent are a credit to English cricket, something the Kent executive is rightly proud of. There is currently a startlingly high number of Kent-born players in the first team, many of whom have come right up through the age groups, sped along by some fine coaches and a progressive academy system.

Albeit this in itself raises a thin end of something else. At every level, in football, cricket and rugby, there is currently a process at work you might describe as the commodification of those who play for fun. Academy versus development. Performance versus playing. Across the board, English sport, most notably children’s sport, has become an arm of the professional game. It is a process that reflects above all on the kind of person we have in charge now, the all-business model that has become the norm.

Who are they, really, these sporting Thatcherites, these finance and sales-driven marketeers? For a detailed portrait of the world of the salesman-cum-sporting mandarin, the Spin would recommend Death of a Gentleman, a documentary film about the ongoing commercial hijack of the world’s summer game. In many way Kent’s Clifford is not typical in this company. He may resemble the clubbable popinjays of the global sporting administration set. Most chief executives have had a business background these days, shifting product, cutting costs, trimming overheads perhaps in finance or industry. But Clifford is a Kent man through and through, a career cricket administrator who clearly carries the club in his heart. The only way out from there, you suspect, is some future “pathway” promotion towards big league wonkdom with the ECB. Except there is – isn’t there? – something missing here. Maybe it’s just the tone, the texture of the entirely financial priorities of this new breed of asset-maximisers and revenue-generators. The obsession with the bottom line has become so widespread it would be easy to imagine this has always been the base note of sport, that nothing else has ever gone into the founding of these great and enduring institutions.

The wider question is always the same: what is sport supposed to be for? What do we want it to look like? As with all the best things in life, sport is there to improve us in other ways. Not just in terms of quality of life, exercise and participation, but as something that binds and enriches. Sport can’t solve society’s problems but it was, before the current era of pure capitalism, at least vaguely caught up in them.

It was the Victorians who invented the modern idea of organised spectator sport, of local clubs, leagues, codified rules, a structure of participation. For all the entrepreneurial spirit involved, this wasn’t solely about income but also structure, social conscience, benevolent inclusion, just as so many local teams were born out of the church, the boy’s clubs, the temperance movement, funded and run by those with an interest for beyond simply the financial.

The closure of Lewisham speaks to how plainly this has been lost. Not least in the very blunt and graceless tossing aside of the volunteers and benevolent influences who have kept Kent cricket going in these areas for so many years. “You can take a view on whether Kent cricket should offer opportunity for all,” Clifford writes. Sure you can. But on the other side of the argument are coaches who have simply gone about making it happen for the love of the game, social workers, mentors, evangelists for the sport. Where should we position ourselves here? Who will build a stronger, more benevolent sport?

It is of course important to remember that all these administrators are simply passing though. The owners and officers of clubs and counties are simply caretakers, briefly, of our shared wealth. For now the vogue is to chase every revenue stream, to wring away furiously at all sources of income. It is sport’s share in the wider shift towards the commodification of everything, where the only language that carries weight is that of financial success and failure. Growing the game. Spreading the sport. Somehow this has come to mean simply growing its short-term revenues.

The statues will be standing in the same / Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same / Our children will not know it’s a different country / All we can hope to leave them now is money

“I have a picture on my wall of Lord Harris who established the modern Kent club in the 1870s,” Clifford of Kent once said. “He did the job that I now get out of bed every morning to do.” It is of course a beautifully Pooterish statement. Harris was a giant of the Victorian era, under-secretary of state for India, under-secretary of state for war, the man who communed the first ever version of the ICC, credited by many with introducing the sport to India. Clifford, meanwhile, is the bloke who helped open the new stand at the Worsley Bridge ground in Beckenham.

He may share feverish dreams of Harris-scale administrative triumphs but you wonder what Harris or rather his great friend WG Grace would have made of the man who closed the door on Lewisham. Grace saw out his own days in the borough. His last job was as second XI coach of Eltham cricket club, which involved wrestling with unprofitability, overgrown outfields, untarred pavilion roofs and generally providing another shoulder to the wheel in the grand, benevolent Victorian tradition that has bequeathed these moth-eaten sporting jewels to the current generation of profit-hunters.

Graces’s last innings was in Grove Park, almost 100 years ago to the day, and within half a mile of where Lewisham played its final match last Sunday. Fifty years on David Shepherd and his pals were still going strong just up the road. Fifty years further on the door has creaked shut for good. Who knows, maybe it is all for the best. Maybe it really was unsustainable to maintain a dedicated presence. What we may choose to resist, beyond cricket and beyond sport, is the wider thrust of the death of Lewisham. The idea that only finance, bottom lines, winning teams have a place in our sports. And the logical endpoint that from here on only the deservingly well-resourced get to play.

• This is an extract taken from the Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe, just visit this page, find ‘The Spin’ and follow the instructions.