Local cricket: Award-winning coach says cricket moves from one force to another in Liverpool

Cricket in Liverpool is on the rise, according to an award-winning coach tasked with bringing the next generation through.

Luke Skilbeck, who coaches juniors at Alder CC in West Derby and works with Academy North, has been selected as Lancashires ’young coach of the year.

And the 24-year-old, named in honor of the back of Wavertree’s mainstay Phill OBrien, has seen enthusiastic young people this year.

There are now really talented young people in Liverpool, he said.

Usually cricket in Liverpool is only so healthy at the moment.

Look at Liverpool CC, Wavertree, Sefton Park – they’ve all had a huge number of kids, and they’re expanding.

I think that in this respect, too, there was a rise in having more children. It’s just so positive – it belongs to all the clubs and many volunteers, but it was great to get the award and this recognition.

Leppää was shocked last year by club legend Mike Dunn, 76, who had led the club’s junior coaching for many years.

Skilbeck said: He was great for the club, especially the junior part.

So there was a lot of uncertainty this summer.

However, we used All Stars and Dynamos, which really helped us get more interaction with the kids – and a few of them continued the hardball stuff.

So we wanted to rebuild the junior section and improve the number of our past figures.

Those numbers have been impressive. Last year, Skilbeck calculates, according to standard warnings, that about 15 to 20 young people attended Tuesday night’s sessions.

This year he has seen as many as 64.

The numbers dropped slightly during the summer holidays and so on, he added. But so many kids wanted to come back and ask if there was anything there in the winter.

Ask any junior coach and they will tell you that the biggest problem is the drop. Kids hit their teens in the late to late and cricket – for some people – loses their appeal.

Competition is critical – to get on the path to a cricket life, talented young people who want to play must have a team and structure around them.

We really didn’t have enough for the Alder team this year, Skilbeck said. So we joined old Xaveria.

We joined all our hardball teams together to make sure the kids got more cricket games because we realized we couldn’t put it on ourselves.

So next year’s plan is to make sure we get more kids to the U9 festivals and organize our own hardball teams, especially by looking at a few U11 races from Dynamo.

It will take a few years to build, but junior teams are at all levels, so kids get plenty of opportunities for competitive cricket.

Cricket, of course, has returned to high-profile free television this year for a hundred. Opinions are likely to always be divided on the merits of a new competition – packaging, new teams, impact on the county game, little regulation, crunches, etc. – but almost everyone agrees that it is a good thing for a sport to have a higher profile.

I think Sata has been great, Skilbeck said.

People who hadn’t watched cricket before always talked about it, they came down and said they were a hundred in the game. It’s been great to capture children’s attention and get more families into the game.

Everyone was talking about it – even people who said they didn’t like it said they didn’t like it while they were still watching the games.

It’s been fantastic – many kids loved it especially when they were All Stars and Dynamos.

Skilbeck – once Ben Stokes ’former club, Cockermouth in Cumbria – added that they would like to see children get a chance to play the form they saw on TV and added: It’s a great way to get kids to cricket.

As we age, some sort of U13 and U15 age by adding 20 extra balls to make it a T20 would be a way to give kids a slightly longer game.

It’s about balancing to make sure kids enjoy cricket – because it can sometimes be a long game.