…and the benchmarks used to determine that demise should not be ignored as they offer significant substance to the debate.
For example, it has been well documented that clubs are losing lower teams and some of those that have been retained play so few matches that their status is seriously suspect.
Senior cricketers have been criticized for going out to graze too soon, and not putting anything back into the game they enjoyed for many years. This is difficult to quantify and may differ from club to club, but it is no illusion that there are fewer and fewer former players on the boundary these days, and even fewer playing down the teams.
Another barometer used frequently to demean the NCU is our failure to land an Irish Senior Cup victory. Website experts tell us we field weak teams, we aren’t motivated, and we spend too much time basking in former glory to focus on the immediate goals. Apparently we have a few good players, but we have no teams with enough talent or commitment to beat the Leinster teams, and we are even behind the North-West in the pecking order. One correspondent feels we shouldn’t even enter!
The NCU administration has also been described as a ‘mess’ and recent faut-paux have highlighted some glaring blunders, mostly by clubs, but it’s much easier to blame the union than get too abrasive against clubs where you might have a friend or two at base.
We also have a serious shortage of umpires and the problem is getting worse not better.
Then there’s the annual dinner and annual general meeting. The former is a pale shadow of previous dinners and now operates with about 30% attendance from its halcyon years, and some ‘senior’ clubs and most senior players don’t even take the trouble to attend the AGM.
Call it post-season winter blues or cricket-o-nomic meltdown but it has brought out many of the old sores, and there are plenty of critics out there busting to have a pot at the once invincible 122 years-old Northern Cricket Union.
But are we as bad as we seem?
After all, the Irish representative teams have plenty of our players starring within their ranks, and I’m told our best players are fitter and better than any that have gone before. We’ve won the ISC a few times in the past, but obviously history doesn’t mean too much to the current critics, and when we talk about overseas local players and biased umpiring, that’s sour grapes. Our best team of the modern era North Down has been mocked because they have lost so many ISC matches in the last 8 seasons, yet they have emphatically dominated NCU cricket and won the ISC three times. Bad team, surely not?
And then there is the serious decline in the numbers playing and the dropping of minor teams. But is this as bad as it seems because perhaps we’ve been fooling ourselves for too long that we have numbers that we don’t have, and that our members want Saturday cricket when most of them either want midweek shorter games, or shorter earlier Saturday matches? Perhaps it’s more a case of providing the right product than we have appreciated.
Problems are easy to identify and critics come aplenty in this age of armchair website experts, but the reality is that there is no quick fix to the NCU malaise and the first step in providing solutions is recognizing that there are problems. We must ignore the posturing of faceless critics and make critical appraisals at club level and then target key people who can help provide solutions. People like Andy Clement within the Development directorate, people like Ryan Haire and Ryan Eagleson and the development team for their hands-on support, people like Paddy O’Hara and John Boomer within the umpires association who could motivate and encourage aspiring umpires to join the code, people like Billy Dale and Vic Johns who have a passion and love of cricket that seems ageless, and people like Ivan McCombe, Paul Stafford, Wayne Horwood and Robin Haire, who have progressive, visionary views that have a major place in the future of NCU cricket and need to be harnessed within an effective medium that has influence and power.
Yes, perhaps we are in decline in some respects, but perhaps some of the solutions are looking us straight in the face?
Think not of what your union can do for you, but what you can do for your union?
Is that too much to ask from people who love their sport?
Clarence Hiles
Editor
