With thanks to Tom Evans @ Merseyside Cricket Online (merseysidecricket.com can be supported @ https://buymeacoffee.com/tomevanscricket)
Liverpool’s grassroots cricket community might have to turn its back on grass altogether in order to address a desperate lack of facilities.
With pitches in the city at a premium, enthusiastic and talented youngsters are likely to find a roadblock on their pathway once they need to graduate to hard-ball outdoor cricket.
The dearth of turf is having a particular impact on cricket-hungry migrant communities in the city, forming a barrier to people playing up to their potential.
What results is a large number of cricketers playing at nomadic clubs, without a home to call their own, and therefore without a path to the top.
A glance at last year’s Love Lane Liverpool Competition 3rd XI Premier Division reveals three teams in the top five – Merseyside Sports & Cultural Club, South Liverpool and Liverpool Superkings – who fit the template of no square to call home and a large number of players of South Asian origin.
It was the same story in 2023 when MSCC finished top, with South Liverpool and the Superkings not far behind.
Winning the 3rd XI title is a goal in itself, not simply a stepping stone, and it’s easy to make incorrect assumptions about whether “higher level” is the ultimate goal of every recreational cricketer.
But players such as MSCC’s Rifaquat Khwaja and South Liverpool’s Shaiju Joseph, both of whom excelled in 2024, have two choices – stay at the same level, or leave their clubmates behind.
There isn’t much the established clubs can do about it. The same goes for the Comp and the Southport & District Amateur Cricket League – they work tirelessly to give the clubs a structure to play in but have no power to set aside extra space for the game.
With two squares each at Liverpool and Sefton Park and one each at Aigburth, Alder, Cheshire Lines, Liverpool College, Mossley Hill, Old Xaverians and Wavertree, there are currently 11 natural squares laid out within the city’s boundaries.
At various points over the past century, there may have been as many as 36, according to a map painstakingly compiled by Wavertree chairman Phill O’Brien.
It takes a second for a works side to call it a day, for a housing developer to make an offer someone can’t refuse, for a university to wonder how it can justify maintaining a square it hardly uses in these straitened times.
But setting aside an acre or more of land and giving a new square time to settle in has never been so difficult or costly. Almost impossible, in fact.
“What’s needed is someone to get in a helicopter and see the bigger picture,” says O’Brien, who is also part of the local Cricket Development Group.
“There’s two stories here – there’s a lack of facilities and there used to be a lot more, but we have to acknowledge the growth of the sport in the city in the past five or 10 years.
“Women’s teams, junior teams and people from South Asian backgrounds.
“At the last Cricket Development Group, we listed the nomadic teams in the city, teams who every year need to hire a facility. It was more than 20.
“Cricket facilities are a victim of death by a thousand cuts in this city.
“Nobody has oversight over the whole picture.
“At the CDG, we are lobbying to raise the issue in the hope someone pays attention. It’s about being a polite nuisance.”
The high point for squares at workplaces, universities and schools seems to have come in the middle of the last century.
A series of maps published between 1904 and 1914 reveals eight cricket grounds – one fewer than today, not counting the 2nd XI pitches at Liverpool and Sefton.
Alder, Cheshire Lines, Mossley Hill and Old Xavs are new additions, but grounds in Croxteth Hall, Gateacre and Wavertree have vanished without a trace.
The old Wavertree pitch, now housing, was used by Sefton Park and has been effectively replaced by the club’s lower pitch. Initial enquiries carried out by Merseyside Cricket Online revealed people tend to get cranky when you suggest knocking down their house in order to lay out a cricket field, so this one is a non-starter.
Croxteth Hall is only slightly closer to being brought back into use, occupied by a herd of cows who might be open to finding alternative accommodation, but who have not taken notice of the need for a true outfield.
However, the Gatacre field is an empty space, with bushes encroaching on three sides but still recognisably cricket pitch-shaped. If an enterprising cricket-loving millionaire came along, they could theoretically buy it and set it aside for cricket.
It still wouldn’t have a square, though. Sooner or later, it becomes impossible to consider this question without landing on artificial wickets.
“I think non-turf pitches are an opportunity,” says Paul Morris, the Lancashire Cricket Foundation’s cricket development officer for Liverpool and Knowsley.
“Starting afresh with a grass wicket is a long and very expensive process and very difficult to do, notwithstanding having to acquire the land.
“A long-term view is can we put something into a public place and change the league structure to allow that, then potentially when we see the benefit that has for the community, we can talk about grass wickets and other facilities over time – pavilions, sightscreens, covers.
“But at the minute, the nomadic teams are having to try to find the best opportunity to go and play and that means a lot of travel for them if they want to go and play at a certain level.
“A lot of the South Asian players are playing together in nomadic teams because it’s more of a social thing than playing at a certain level.
“They might well be good enough to go all the way to the top but they’d rather do that with their friends than split up and go and play at other teams.
“I think in the UK we look down on non-turf wickets, whereas in Australia and New Zealand they play very reasonable levels of cricket on non-turf pitches. If we can get those into public spaces, we can let people use them.
“We’ve just got to look at things differently. If we can somehow tackle the facilities gap then it’s going to be a huge win for cricket.”
Morris cites the success of Newsham Park, an umbrella club for the Superkings and other sides, which operates off an astroturf track in the middle of a public park.
Their roster of players is huge and largely drawn from South Asian communities who are keen to play but unable to progress in the existing structure, whether they want to or not.
“They’re at the forefront of how a modern cricket club should go about doing things,” Morris adds.
“They’ve spawned so many teams who are playing at Newsham or have moved to different areas and are progressing through the leagues.”
Part of Morris’s work involves delivering cricket in schools, with the Liverpool 8 School Cricket Hub winning a Chance to Shine award last year.
He says: “What I find from my experience going into schools is that everything is about football and a lot of the PE teachers are keen to give them other opportunities.
“It does hit a lot of the children who aren’t interested in football but don’t feel there’s anything else out there for them.
“But we go in and show them some cricket and they realise there’s another sport out there that can benefit them, get them active and healthy, give them new friends and new social groups.
“That is happening in virtually every school I’ve been in – there’s been a lightbulb moment within that child where they go ‘hang on, this is great, I love this’.
“There’s loads of fantastic stories where we’ve ignited a passion for cricket because they had cricket in their school for one day.”
Fresh from introducing non-turf pitches across Greater Manchester, the LCF’s executive director Jen Barden believes the same strategy can be effective in Liverpool.
She says: “Everybody at the Lancashire Cricket Foundation is committed to supporting Liverpool in helping the area to ensure that there are enough facilities across the city to meet the demands of teams and players at all levels of the game.
“We are committed to the ECB’s mission statement that ‘cricket is a game for everyone’ and that all players should receive equal access to facilities regardless of their ability, gender, race or disability.
“The implantation of non-turf pitches across Greater Manchester has been a huge success and it would be great to be able to replicate this in Liverpool in collaboration with the local council, creating new opportunities for local communities to access high quality cricket facilities in parks and recreation grounds.”
While Liverpool does not have the same reputation as a hotbed of talent as other parts of Lancashire, there is no reason that can’t change. Lancashire has already successfully drawn the likes of Tom Hartley, Matty Hurst and Ellie Threlkeld from the Comp’s wider catchment area; the LCF is all to aware of the need to identify talent wherever it reveals itself.
Ms Barden adds: “The Liverpool Competition is a strong and competitive league which has a long history of providing first team cricketers for Lancashire across both the club’s men’s and women’s teams and we will be working hard to ensure this continues long into the future.”
O’Brien agrees the passion to play cricket is still out there – it’s just a question of how to harness it.
And he too thinks non-turf wickets might be the way forward, even at the relatively higher levels of club cricket.
“If the institutions in the city that had green spaces allowed an astroturf wicket to be put on their facility, that would make a difference,” he says.
“The universities are a great opportunity. Most of the cricket season is when they haven’t got their students with them anyway, so it’s an opportunity for them to raise revenue by renting the facilities out.
“And lots of schools have fields that could have astroturf wickets on.
“There are people who are keen to play cricket and would pay for it.
“Newsham Park doesn’t have a grass wicket and there are no changing rooms or toilets there – but if more parks had even that kind of facility, it would be an improvement, it would be more places for people to play cricket.
“From a personal point of view, the lower levels of league cricket could do with shifting towards non-turf wickets as well.
“Would I rather play on grass? 100%.
“But the pragmatic way of dealing with it is to acknowledge that playing cricket is better than not playing cricket and if you’re on an astro wicket, then so be it.”
A desire to play on grass is more than just tradition for misty-eyed tradition’s sake.
The ability to read and react to natural conditions is a huge part of cricket’s appeal, and a vital part of the armoury of anyone who wants to go far in the game.
But Morris says today’s artificial wickets are a lot closer to the real thing than those of 10 or 20 years ago.
“They’re much better than the old ones,” he says.
“There are so many different types of wicket and you can specify them to do what you want – in the nets, you can have a spin lane and a pace lane, they will react differently and replicate grass a lot more.
“Some used in public places might be vandal-resistant. They’re a much better, truer wicket than historically, when they were a bit bouncy and not very good.”
This is a challenging time for cricket’s relationship with wider society, in the wake of the bombshell ICEC report of 2023.
With that in mind, O’Brien insists the game cannot afford to allow any form of discrimination – however unintended – to go unaddressed.
He says: “There’s a structural discrimination here, you cannot climb the cricket pyramid as a club unless you are the benefit of a fortune of history, because the quality of your facilities are a limiting factor.
“I’m chairman of a cricket club and I’m horrified by that. I’d love to be involved in changing it.”
And Morris adds: “Everyone wants cricket to grow – it’s a question of how we do that.
“A lot of clubs are doing fantastic work with some great ideas – we just need to support them and help them out.”
With thanks to Tom Evans @ Merseyside Cricket Online (merseysidecricket.com)
