By Fred Atkin, ECB Reporters Network
If you’ve ever attended a cricket festival, you’ll recognise the traditional sights and sounds: marquees, jazz and complaints that children playing cricket beyond the boundary “aren’t even watching”.
The fact that they’re playing is a victory as far as Cricket4London and Kent Cricket are concerned.
“Our main aim is to target diverse areas, where there’s less income and less participation in cricket,” Asher Roberts explains, sitting in the pavilion at The County Ground, Beckenham, while the West Indies took on a First Class Counties XI this summer.
Roberts’ area extends from the south bank of the Thames to the fringes of the city, where London becomes Kent. It’s home to 1.5 million people, but while participation in the suburbs like Bromley is healthy, it falls off the closer you get to the river.
It’s in places like Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley where Roberts is busiest. He shares his Deptford birthplace with the Kent and England spin legend Colin Blythe, whose mentor William McCanlis described it as: “a place one would hardly go in search of cricketers. The lads of this town have only the roughest parts of Blackheath on which to play their occasional cricket.”
It’s over a century since McCanlis took Blythe to the Tonbridge Nursery to turn him into a professional. Today’s prospects (and Roberts has already identified several) no longer have to leave the city.
“Kent is very blessed to have two grounds. Beckenham allows us to have a facility to engage with different communities and cultures,” Roberts said. “I’ve always seen this ground as a hub, to engage all these different communities.”
We’re less than a mile from Catford & Cyphers, the club where Roberts first played organised cricket before ascending to the position of head coach. Even then he was acutely aware of the barriers to participation.
“When I took over, (the running of the junior section at Catford Cyphers) I made it my mission to make sure that anyone who needed equipment could get it,” he said. “We would either let them have it from the club for a season, or they could buy it from the club for a very, very low fee. We try and find ways to make it as accessible as possible.”
Another potential obstacle was geographical.
“People may not be willing to drive to an hour away, as they might not have a car,” Roberts says. “Since I was a boy, I’ve always known The County Ground, Beckenham as the Kent ground. I would like to think that moving forward it's going to be even more of a hub, it could be something special.”
With that in mind, the visit of the West Indies was too good an opportunity to pass up.
“Originally this wasn’t supposed to be this,” Roberts says, referring to a crowd of nearly a thousand on day one. “It was just the FCC squad training against West Indies, but the club agreed that it was a great opportunity to engage with the African-Caribbean Community.”
The decision to turn it into a festival of the West Indies was vindicated when over 600 primary school children swelled the crowd on day two and an even bigger crowd attended on day three, to the sound of specially hired steel bands.
Roberts has a number of ways of selling cricket to prospective players and their parents: it can teach you physical skills and mental discipline you can use at work and in every life, but it’s also a viable career choice.
The metropolitan part of Kent has always contributed a high proportion of the county’s cricketers: Alan Knott is from Belvedere, Derek Underwood was from Bromley and Tich Freeman was from Lewisham, the birthplace of Daniel Bell-Drummond.
If the historic names feel too distant to cut through with a younger audience, Bell-Drummond, Kent’s current Club Captain, is a perfect role model.
To find out more about Cricket4London, visit their website www.cricket4ldn.org/