MCC Foundation expands circus ability to realize lords dreams | My Client Center

None of them ever saw the place exactly the same as on Monday, when the MCC Foundation hosts the finals of its first national concentration. There were two matches, one between the Bradford and Cotswolds girls teams, the other between the boys of Slough and Manchester. The players were all state schoolchildren, under the age of 15, the spectators were all families and coaches. English women have been struggling for years to get games in the Lords, current international players have never played a match there and a few days ago a group of happy schoolchildren were there.

Maybe you need to know part of history to understand how big this is, says Isa Guha, a former English cricketer and now a commentator and presenter. When you look at these girls from Bradford walking to the Long Room, when for nearly 200 years women were not allowed into the pavilion.

MCC used the game. Until 1989, their chairs also served as the legitimate chairman of the ICC. Sometimes it feels like the club has lost its empire and is looking for a role. Foundation seems to be closest to finding it. It supports foreign projects in Lebanon and Nepal, but does most of its work at home, and has a network of 65 hubs for nearly 3,000 state schoolchildren, mostly in poor areas. The director of the foundations is Sarah Fane, who has previously led Afghanistan connections and built schools (and cricket pitches) in Afghanistan.

Of all the obstacles the women’s game faced and continues to face in Afghanistan, Fane says from her experience that people fully believed it could be a game for them, they never questioned how disadvantaged they were and from whatever background. from. They took the bat and they played. I don’t think it’s the same in the UK.

Guha says: When I go to places like India and Australia, everyone knows what cricket is. In England, you don’t have to go far outside your circle of friends to find out pretty quickly that cricket isn’t everyone’s radar. Guha got to cricket through his brother. In order to play at school, she had to form her own girl team.

In the box next door, I spoke to Cordelia Griffith, who plays in Middlesex and Manchester Originals. He is the only child of Frank Griffith who spent nearly a decade in Derbyshire. She was the only female player of the school year and played on the all-boys team. Some of my female friends would have liked to try it, but it would have been nicer to play with other girls like you can on MCC hubs.

The purpose of the central project is to open the path to the game for people who are not in a private school, who do not have parents, who play or cannot or do not want to join local clubs.

Mark Roach, CEO of the Berkshire Cricket Foundation, was there to watch Slough. Seventy percent of that side doesn’t play any club cricket, he says. There’s one club in the Slough district, and not in the Reading district at all, so you have a quarter of a million people in one club.

Roach has worked in the sport for the best part of 20 years. When the central project was proposed, we were not quite sure what to do with it. Now, I’m not sure how marriage will work without it, it has become an integral part of what we do.

Underlying everything and everything else in English cricket is a hundred, a competition with a similar goal, on a larger scale. Everyone I spoke to swore by it, Griffith who played in it, Guha who introduced it, Roach who watched it.

Getting it on terrestrial television was huge, Roach says. I took the kids who aren’t interested in cricket to Ageas, and they came off right by the buzz. Its beauty is that there was a hundred game on TV the next day and they could buy Match Attax cards from the store, watch the clips online and they will bite it.

This game tried to achieve a hundred, bringing it to people who do not practice cricket.

Guha says: The biggest thing now is to build a connection between the hundred and the rest of our country’s cricket. How do you capitalize on this interest and get people to want it back?

The foundation is already planning 10 new centers, all for girls, everyone dreaming of Lords, who will finally start to look like a home for all English cricketers.