(Available on bbc iPlayer)
I hope some of you have watched the first two episodes, the third (& final) one was shown yesterday (& I'll watch it soon...)
There are quite a few statistics that are quite alarming and only briefly mentioned.
Fistly, the Ashes winning England was consisted of Freddie and 10 privately educated children(iirc), there have been lots of parts of the grounds that need a lot of refurbishing and none of the children has even heard of FF. Looking at those it was hardly surprising how much cricket is decaying.
There was one lad (& his Fosters) talking about how traumatic his journey had been and now showing he (still) loved cricket.
My main interest is (or was) FF opening his eyes and talking about how much he loved cricket.
So how do ECB get anyone interested in (watching and playing) cricket?
I watched one of the episodes last week and it was rather engaging.
Much of it is about the backgrounds of the boys in the team rather than cricket per se, which is the hook to try to support their development etc. The young Afghan asylum seeker story is a hard watch - when his application is turned down.
Cricket clearly has some major issues in terms of who plays and who watches. There is a clear perception (probably correct) that it is a sport for posh people (the FF and 10 private school team-mates rather bears this out). I also think that the lack of coverage on terrestrial tv hasn't helped, and I've never understood why no cricket matches are on the list of events required to be available live on terrestrial tv.
I also think the authorities have massively missed a trick on encouraging kids from asian backgrounds to play the sport - cricket is huge in India, Pakistan etc yet the ECB seems to have failed to recognise that this should mean there are big pools of potential players up and down the UK from those heritages. The racism hasn't helped, of course.
