Guest Blog: Baby-Faced Broad is the perfect role model

Stuart Broad, not content with sending mothers everywhere into raptures, is to turn his attention to their cricket-playing sons. This ‘nice-looking young man’, as my gooey-eyed mater insists on calling him, is the ECB’s top choice to front a campaign against abuse in recreational and youth cricket.

Broad is ‘just the sort of role model we need’, according to an ECB official, echoing my mother’s view that Broad is indeed ‘a man you’d be happy for your daughter to bring home’.

While Broad clearly holds some sort of hypnotic power over womankind, whether he can exert his influence over the present generation of unruly young cricketers remains to be seen. Abuse is now widespread in the modern game, both at professional, amateur and youth level. While instances of abuse or dissent amongst international cricketers are justifiably clamped down upon, in village or youth cricket umpires have little power to punish offenders.

For example, last season my local side was forced to lodge an official complaint against another village team, after the sledging in a rather high-spirited game began to feel more like racial abuse. After a lengthy, bureaucratic and time-consuming process the offenders were eventually punished, but during the game itself the umpires had been powerless to halt the abuse. Admittedly this is anecdotal evidence, but the word on the street is that this sort of thing, despite ‘not really being cricket’, is becoming increasingly common, particularly among younger teams. Clearly umpires need more power to stop such behaviour in its tracks.

The ECB’s solution, The Guardian reports, is that ‘this summer a system of yellow cards is being secretly trialled at three private schools’. (Quite how this trial can be said to be secret, now that its existence has been publicised in a national newspaper, is a question that the article does not get round to addressing.)

Personally, I find the whole yellow card idea quite ridiculous. Just imagine the scenes that could be taking place on a public school playing field near you this summer:

‘Oh I say, how’s that, umpire?’
‘Not out.’
‘But I jolly well heard a nick.’
‘You may well have done, young Faux-Bowyer. But what matters in this case is that I did not. The decision remains not out, and nothing you can do or say shall induce me to raise my finger.’
‘You absolute rotter!’
‘That, young man, is dissent. You have just earned yourself a yellow card, not to mention a week of detentions.’

All this seems a far cry from the cosy fictional world of everyone’s favourite public schoolboy cricketer, J C T Jennings. (If you’ve never heard of him, then I apologise. You must have suffered a terribly deprived childhood.) I seem to recall Jennings and Darbishire receiving nothing more than a mild ticking off after cutting Latin in order to watch a local game. These days their actions would no doubt earn them both a red card and a three-match suspension.

Now, I know the Jennings stories weren’t actually real, but nevertheless I still believe that there was indeed a time, probably nestled somewhere between the two world wars, when boys knew how to behave, and such things as yellow cards were considered unseemly. Whatever happened to The Spirit of Cricket? I just pray that Stuart Broad can resuscitate it before it is too late.

If standards of behaviour have indeed so degenerated that a system of yellow cards is deemed necessary, then cricket will truly have sunk to a new low. Why, we’ll be little better than footballers! I’m pinning my hopes on baby-faced Broad. That nice young man may well turn out to be a Jennings for our time.