Word: cricketer
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...explain why he's worried about cricket's future, Greg Chappell must first hark back to his past. So, over lunch in a Sydney restaurant, he describes the Adelaide backyard where he and his brothers contested their fierce "Tests" - played always, at the insistence of their father, with a hard ball. Other times, with local boys, they'd set up stumps at the park around the corner or at the beach, where they chose between two types of pitch - fast (the hard sand) or a subcontinental turner (the soft stuff). These games could go for hours, like sessions...
...fair to say that all the Chappell boys kicked on in their cricket. Trevor played three Tests; Australia has had no shrewder captain than Ian. Greg became a batting maestro, retiring in 1984 after scoring more than 7,000 Test runs at a superlative average against some of the most fearsome bowlers the game has seen. But just why he could play as well as he did is something he believes he grasped only recently. Those carefree boyhood games, he argues, amounted to more than just mucking about; they were the making...
...strife. His reasoning goes like this. Life in the suburbs, in those precious hours between school and dinner, has changed. If they're not trekking home from distant schools, kids are more likely to be clutching a video-game controller than a bat. For many, their only experience of cricket is in its most structured forms, at the nets (where the coach may be barking at them) or in matches (where the pressure's on). For the gifted, more impediments lie ahead in the form of degree-brandishing coaches. "This is the antithesis of how I learned to play," Chappell...
That path is littered, Chappell claims, with disaffected kids who are "leaving the sport in droves." Playing standards, he adds, are declining at many levels. The knee-jerk retort - What could be wrong with a system that's kept Australian teams at the peak of world cricket since the mid '90s? - is "simplistic," he says: the consequences of what's happening will soon reach the top, and dynasties can crumble. The West Indies were dominant in the '80s, but cricket there is now languishing, as it is to varying degrees and for different reasons in England, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe...
Some 436,000 people play organized cricket in Australia, and junior numbers have been stable for the past five years, says Cricket Australia. But like most sports, cricket loses a disproportionate number of players in their early teens. Many of these could be retained, Chappell argues, if cricket went easier on them. It needs to realize that without a backyard initiation, many kids are finding the real thing too hard. They need to be held back from competition so they can devote at least "their first 100 hours of (cricketing) activity to triggering intuitive learning." Coaches are trying to compensate...