Despite England’s first Ashes Test victory in Australia since the 2010/11 tour ‘down under’, English cricket - and the playing style known as ‘Bazball’ in particular - has come under increasingly hostile scrutiny.
This is nothing new of course. English cricket’s habitual failures when results, as far as public interest is concerned, really matter have long resulted in administrative and journalistic navel-gazing without ever, it seems, getting to the root of the problem.
In recent years, this introspection has largely focussed upon racism, following Azeem Rafiq’s campaign for accountability that led to a DCMS enquiry and, ultimately, the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) in 2023, which investigated all forms of discrimination.
For an all too brief period the ICEC Report engendered discussions that placed social class - as yet, not a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010 - at their heart. While encouraging, these discussions soon petered out and left the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to make largely scrutiny-free decisions in response.
While it is too early to assess the true outcomes of changes made since the ICEC Report was published (to the talent pathway, for instance), it is objectively true that the ECB’s previous ‘reforms’ and ‘action plans’ have achieved little to address discrimination in cricket. Indeed, the elitism that has marked the game’s development since the mid-nineteenth century has become greater over recent decades.
In this regard, the recruitment process that led to Bazball proves illuminating. For the ECB, despite a vow to immediately adopt the ‘Rooney Rule’, which guarantees at least one qualified Black or South Asian candidate is interviewed, for any England coaching position as part of their South Asian Action Plan (2018), has failed to deliver on its promises. Leaving aside the ECB filling the post of elite performance pathway coach, in 2021, without ever advertising the role, Sir Andrew Strauss’ - then interim director of men’s cricket - appointment of his friend Rob Key, and his subsequent appointment of his close friend Brendon McCullum is the embodiment of ‘jobs for the boys’.
The fact is, English cricket is run by, and in the interests of, the privately educated and repeated Ashes failures should be examined, and solutions found, in this context. It is no historical accident that cricket is elitist. Unlike football, which became ‘the people’s game’ thanks to overtly meritocratic competitive structures (first, the FA Cup and then, most importantly, the Football League), cricket’s administration and playing structures - that ultimately form English cricket’s culture - have been designed to hinder competition and, in turn, exclude the working classes as players and spectators.
If the exclusion of others is the true, and rather mean, ’spirit’ of English cricket at the so-called ‘first-class’ level, the ECB, like the MCC and the Test and County Cricket Board (TCCB) before it, are all too successful in this endeavour despite many (both paid and unpaid), at the recreational coalface, working hard to achieve the ECB’s stated aim of making cricket the UK’s ‘most inclusive sport’.
And yet, matters keep getting worse with the Sutton Trust’s Elitist Britain Report (2025) revealing that, 59 per cent of men’s first-class cricketers (a rise of 16 per cent since their last report of 2019), and 50 per cent of women (a rise of 15 per cent) attended an independent (fee paying) school. Indeed, the Sutton Trust cited cricket (and journalism) as the British institutions having the most significant increases.
Conversely, the percentage of politicians who attended private schools is declining. But the extent this demographic change will influence policy decisions is, on current form, highly debatable. Nevertheless, it seems clear, if English cricket is a guide, that many of the professions (or institutions) examined by the Sutton Trust are incapable of reforming themselves.
Broader issues, such as the selling off of state school playing fields over numerous decades, are undoubtedly contributory factors beyond the ECB’s control. And yet, the ‘behavioural changes’, and ‘clear set of values’, called for by the authors of the ICEC Report are, from an institutional perspective, hard to encourage, and all but impossible to police, as long as the ECB remains a limited company, receiving millions of pounds of public money, to which freedom of information requests do not apply.
Ultimately, any ECB strategy to deal with discrimination or inequality, no matter how well intended, will fail as long as they continue to ‘misalign’ with an administrative and structural culture specifically designed to privilege white middle class men.
It falls, as the Sutton Trust wish, upon the government to follow through in implementing the ‘socio-economic duty’ set out in the Equality Act (2010) and force the ECB to act or, if necessary, withhold public money until they do.
While such a path is not applicable to all professions and institutions dominated by the privately educated in the UK, the performance of the England team is a warning for civil society as a whole. For if the UK is to ‘remain’ a vibrant, creative, and globally competitive country it can no longer afford to allow seven per cent of the population to dominate social, economic, political, and cultural life.
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