Summer Sports - Cricket
George Alexander
surfaces were at school and how much their quality shaped his early development in the sport, he says. At Cambridge, Ed’s achievements and drive to excel was further enhanced as he went on to rewrite the history books, scoring a century on his first-class debut for Cambridge, aged 18 years 9 months, to become the youngest-ever player to notch up that milestone. He was able to, once again, exploit some of the best sporting facilities and be exposed to an environment that has been the breeding ground for other cricketing greats.
Even at university though, it proved difficult to find the quality to match that at Tonbridge. “University cricket was very good, but you couldn’t always get grass nets to the standards we enjoyed at school,” he reveals. Cricket groundmen have recollected how cricketers ‘acted the diva’, slamming surfaces and demanding that staff do this or that with the pitch. Ed was most definitely not one of these - rather he grew up with a willingness to interact with turfcare professionals, again rooted in his early experiences of the professionalism of George Alexander, perhaps akin to our enduring memories of a school-teacher or lecturer whose own passion for their subject ignited our interest.
“I got to know George really well when I was a student,” Ed recalls. “We all did, to some extent. It was part and parcel of cricket at Tonbridge. I’d talk with him about how we wanted the wicket to play and what we were expecting from the weekend fixture. He was always willing and open to chat with us. He is an excellent groundsman.” “In all honesty, throughout my career, I always used to talk with the groundsman wherever I was playing - to see how they were setting up and just to interact really. It’s important to understand that side of things, even though I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject by any stretch.” He continues: “Growing up with such
excellent facilities does set the bar high though, and you soon learn what a high quality surface plays like. All the facilities at Tonbridge were brilliant, not just the cricket, the rugby pitches too; so flat you could use a spirit level,” he jokes.
64 PC JUNE/JULY 2012
The Tonbridge School outfield
Coming from a big teaching family, Ed has had the benefit of peering over both sides of the fence, with parents and grandparents working in state and private education.
He uses his “big sister” Rebecca to draw the comparison with those two worlds, comparing how she fared in sport to his own experiences. “Becky was a fiercely competitive sportsperson, so we both possessed the right ingredients to succeed in sport. She went to a Kent grammar school, I went to an independent school where my father taught - boys only. She went on to study English at Oxford, but did not play sport. Only later did I think of the reasons behind her fall-off in participation.
“In a sense, my sister and I were part of an accidental educational experiment. Take two children with similar genes and similar talent: send one to a state school and the other to an independent school. What happened to my sister’s sporting experience was that she ran out of opportunities - not completely, but significantly. What happened to my sporting experience was that I received the best sporting education money can buy. I played cricket for England. She didn’t play for any team, in any sport, ever again.” For the state sector, “resources will always pose their biggest problem, but I don't think it has always been that way. Both my grandfathers were headmasters in the state and private sector, and both knew the value that sport brought in schools and the importance of good surfaces. Sport helps develop a sense of identity. Eric Scarborough, my maternal grandfather, used to roll the wicket himself.”
Whilst Ed was “lucky” in that he was
exposed to such fine facilities during his schooldays, “I knew all to well the potential pitfalls of state sector sport, as I’d often hear from my parents and grandparents about what sport at state level has to contend with.” “There’s been a chunk of money
thrown at improving access in the state sector and a surge of spending under the Labour government, especially with the proliferation of synthetic surfaces in urban areas, which is great in improving
participation levels, but it does put those coming from particularly inner-city state schools at a disadvantage to those, like me, who had the luxury of immaculate grass provision.”
At school, “it was an age of ultra- specialisation, focusing in/narrowing down on certain sports,” Ed recalls. Compare that with today’s turfcare sector, he adds, where, especially in state sector schools, “it’s more about non- specialised facilities that cater for multisports.”
The Chance to Shine charity is one agency which has been instrumental in improving access to cricket in the state school system. A critical task, because “statistics show that some 90% of state school attendants have no access to cricket at all, which is a trend that needs to be addressed if we are to start seeing more elite players drawn from the state sector,” suggests Ed.
Ed looks back nearly fifty years to a watershed in cricket. 1966 began a state- school era of England captains with Brian Close and then Ray Illingworth. “In my time, the school system was the focus of development. The sport has shifted more to the club model, away from the schools’ model that I knew, which may explain to some extent the fall in elite cricketers coming from the state sector.” “Schools like Tonbridge will always have the wherewithal to offer top quality facilities, but I think it needs to be offered at a schools and club level. School can be an important breeding ground if provision is good.” And on that note he introduces a line or argument that I heard powerfully expressed last year by Alex Welsh of the London Playing Fields Association. “One of the big problems, where
cricket is concerned, is that pitches have, for far too long, been contracted out for maintenance. This would often be local authority and it would be a case of one man giving ten minutes a day to five schools. As we all know, a cricket pitch needs love, attention and time, which you really have to have someone permanently on board to work on it.” This exposure to high standards for some and not others has helped shape Ed’s reasoning for innate talent rather
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