Why English club cricket is dying

Nobody really knows when Thixendale Cricket Club was formed. The best estimate is around 1950, the summer when those “two little friends of mine” Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine were bowling England to defeat.

Nestled in the tiny hamlet that gives the club its name, it has served generations of players in the idyllic Yorkshire Wolds but its future is now uncertain.

Despite the construction of a new timber pavilion five years ago, which at the cost of £64,000 replaced the old caravan used for a changing room, Thixendale CC folded halfway through last season joining the hundreds of other village and club teams disappearing from England’s summer game.

This week the England and Wales Cricket Board was forced to release early the findings of a survey of recreational cricketers which revealed that the number of players aged between 14 and 65 dropped from 908,000 in 2013 to 844,000 last summer, and five percent of matches were forfeited because at least one team was unable to pull together 11 players.
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