Cage Cricket
Cage cricket
From Street to Elite
Like many Club members, one of the pleasures of our bi-annual meetings is the opportunity to walk the historic Broadhalfpenny Down, ringed by trees, farmers’ fields and the ancient Hampshire countryside.
It’s perhaps a special pleasure for someone like me who has lived and worked his whole life surrounded by the streets of Portsmouth and London – the two most densely populated cities in the UK. But I was lucky as a young man that my school Portsmouth Grammar was the main Portsmouth cricket school – at a time when most schoolboys did play cricket. Since the war, Mike Barnard, Richard McIlwaine, David Rock and Jon Ayling are the four Portsmouth-born ‘Old Portmuthians’ who have played first-class cricket for Hampshire.
Two other ‘Pompey’ boys have represented the county since the war – Neil McCorkell, who we toasted when he celebrated his 100th birthday last spring and Lawrie Prittipaul who played during the years when Hampshire left their traditional grounds and moved to the (then) Rose Bowl. Lawrie, like the four men above, attended a fee-paying school and sadly, Neil McCorkell, wicketkeeper and opening bat is the last Portsmouth-born state school educated cricketer to represent the county – and he retired more than half-a-century ago!
The Hampshire side of 2012 won two trophies for the first time in its history including as many as eight players produced through their junior ranks but in more than 80 years since Neil McCorkell made his debut, while players have come from Gosport, Fareham, Basingstoke, Winchester the Isle of Wight and Southampton, few have arrived from inner city Portsmouth. In addition, the days of Portsmouth club sides competing with the best in the region have disappeared. There is no Portsmouth (or Southampton) based club in the top two divisions of the Southern League.
There may be all kinds of reasons for this decline – having taught in local comprehensives, I suspect aspiration is a bigger local issue than ability – but too few ‘Pompey’ youngsters enjoy sustained experience of cricket as a sporting option. Whatever the reasons, Prittipaul is spearheading a way to encourage local youngsters (boys and girls) to enjoy cricket through a new game called ‘Cage Cricket’ – and he is hoping to unearth the next McCorkell.
Cage Cricket is a version of the game that resembles an outdoor and broadly inner-city version of indoor cricket. It is, if you like, a structured form of the street cricket that produced many fine players in the years before the motor-car rendered this a hazardous activity.
Before any purists among you cry ‘no ball’ let me stress that as Hampshire’s Hon Archivist I bow to no-one in my commitment to the history and traditions of our great game but the waste of potential talent in inner cities is a tragedy and if the Olympic legacy is to mean anything it must embrace every opportunity in every sport. I believe that Cage Cricket does that and its philosophy of “From Street to Elite” stresses that there is an aspiration to support the best Cage Cricketers to move towards the traditional forms of the game.
Cage Cricket, developed a few miles south of Hambledon, was formally launched on Tuesday 12 June 2012 at the Houses of Parliament. Sir Ian Botham and Rod Bransgrove (Chairman, Hampshire Cricket) were among those who supported the launch in person while many cricket people, MPs and others came to watch and participate. The event was covered on BBC’s South Today, Sky Sports News and a BBC news item featuring Sir Ian and Crispin Blunt MP is available at:
Cage Cricket is a continuous, intense form of the game, played in multiple use cages that function equally for basketball, tennis and other hard surface sports. Batsmen are required to attack but with careful control of shots – out of the net scores nothing. Every player bats, bowls and fields and of equal importance, every player umpires and scores. For young people this provides invaluable social and sporting experiences.
The Westminster launch is evidence of the ambition of this project and there is now a Cage at Hampshire’s Ageas Bowl, which is in constant use on match days. Cage Cricket was conceived in Portsmouth’s inner-city Somerstown and developed nearby in Landport but the Portsmouth pioneers hope to spread it far beyond Portsea Island. It is a wonderful opportunity to provide an exciting experience for all our boys and girls – and incidentally, if, like me, you feel you might be too old for the traditional form of the game, you might enjoy this version – it’s an intense workout but there’s little running required!
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