Make cricket accessible

Cricket already has more than 10m followers and 2.5m players in England and Wales but we want to broaden this loyal base to make the game more representative of our modern and diverse society.

We want to broaden cricket’s loyal base to make the game more representative of our modern and diverse society.

The Hundred, the new world-class competition which launches in 2021 with games broadcast on Sky and BBC, will provide a new gateway into cricket with new digital communities and participation products spinning off from it.

By 2030 it is estimated that 88% of us will live in towns and cities but currently only 10% of cricket clubs are located in high population density areas.

The installation of non-turf pitches and urban cricket centres will provide more opportunities for people living in towns and cities to play the game. This programme is a key part of the South Asian Action Plan, which was launched in 2018.

Open All Hours

Arfan Akram, Essex County Cricket Club’s East London co-ordinator and development lead on the first urban cricket centre in Leyton which opened in 2019. 

“Leyton has a proud history of staging top-level cricket – local lad Graham Gooch played in the last first-class match on the ground in 1977.

“In 2016 there were only thirty days of cricket played on site but in 2018 there were 132 so it became a proper local hub again. We want to make sure that hub is enjoyed by many different partners.

“We conducted a community engagement evening in early 2019 with in excess of three hundred teams represented and all of the junior programmes. One of the key outcomes was the desire that the indoor cricket centre should be open from 7am until midnight, which for a leisure centre is almost unheard of.

“But many people in the South Asian community have jobs that require long shifts, or they have multiple jobs, so for the centre to service the local community properly its opening hours had to be flexible.”