Surrey to search for black cricket talent with numbers in ‘state of emergency’

Surrey have announced an initiative aimed at increasing cricket participation among the local black community, starting with a search for 12 talented youngsters to join a scholarship programme that will run alongside their academy.

The demographics of their home borough of Lambeth, where 24% of the overall population and 42% of 10- to 19-year-olds are black, are not reflected in their playing staff, a fact which has now prompted them to launch the African Caribbean Engagement Programme, which is being led by the former England international Ebony Rainford-Brent, now Surrey’s director of women’s cricket.

“In terms of cricket, participation in the black population has gone down, the numbers coming through the performance system are down, and it’s actually got to a state of emergency for us, especially where we are,” Rainford-Brent said. “It’s got to the point where we need to start addressing it. What we’re going to do is almost talent-hunt, really – see what’s out there, speak to all the local clubs, and give them every opportunity to make it, because if we don’t have role models coming from the community it’s not going to happen.”

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On Monday, Sport England published a report, Sport for All?, which examined ethnicity across sporting activities. They revealed while people of non-Chinese Asian backgrounds are significantly overrepresented in English cricket, providing 27.7% of adult participants from 6.5% of the population, the number of black adults involved in cricket was so small as to be statistically irrelevant. Meanwhile 5.2% of black children played cricket, compared with 13.1% of Asian children and 6.4% of white British children.

The ACE programme will start with two free open days – more may be scheduled if there is sufficient demand – during which coaches hope to identify six 11- to 14-year-olds and six 15- to 18-year-olds, of any gender, who will be offered scholarships entitling them to coaching, education, and grants for equipment and travel. Alongside this Surrey will offer community education and funding for grassroots clubs in the black community.

“Where we find talent in cricket is very different to where football, rugby and athletics look for talent,” says Rainford-Brent. “Those sports go out into communities to find talent, whereas if you look at how [cricket] talent is generally found it’s usually through private schools. We haven’t reached out as a sport, where football has, and rugby to an extent. You’d say we’re closer to rugby in terms of our makeup, history and background, but they’ve still broken those barriers down.”

Rainford-Brent’s own cricketing journey started in very similar circumstances to those she now hopes to create for others, at a one-off session offered by the charity Cricket for Change – which rebranded with a broadened focus as the Change Foundation in 2015. “The key was the opportunity,” she says. “If I never hit that ball on that day, and had just said, ‘No, I’ll try something else’, I wouldn’t have found a whole new path. I think a lot of people in the community want to engage. I think we’ve just got to go out and get them and I know from my own experience, because that is exactly how it happened for me.”