In part one of our investigation into club cricket last month we looked at playing numbers, formats, facilities, volunteers and cost. We considered the dilemma of overseas pros and homegrown players moving clubs for a few quid.
Solid investment, or a waste?
Nothing is more likely to get a side’s goat when they rock up to play rivals who have invested in an overseas player with fi rst-class or fi rst-grade experience, and the destiny of the match seems to rest entirely on whether they can get him out.
But if you are lucky enough to be a club with a good overseas player, the benefi ts are obvious. An almost guaranteed source of runs and wickets – even if he bowls fairly fi lthy seamers or offi es and would never be thrown the ball back home – perhaps a Level 3 coach, and a great tutor to inspire the developing players. And many clubs – especially in the north and Scotland – would argue that inspirational overseas pros have been part of league cricket since the days of Learie Constantine. It is rarely as simple as it was back then. At the time of writing there are no fewer than eight different designations of what constitutes an overseas player in England and Wales. A whole agency industry exists around it.
Alarms bells rang for many clubs when Sawbridgeworth CC in Hertfordshire were slapped with a £14,403 tax bill following an investigation by HM Revenue & Customs in 2013. The majority of the money was unpaid tax on pay for bar staff and tax on accommodation expenses for overseas players. Clubs who are Community Amateur Sports Clubs are exempt from paying corporation tax on profi ts below £30,000. Sawbridgeworth survived as a club, but they have since suffered two successive relegations in the Herts League and narrowly avoided a third in 2019. The ECB say that, in 2018, 850 clubs registered overseas players who had to enter the country that year expressly to play cricket. That fi gure is said to have gone down in 2019, as tightened visa criteria issued by the Home Offi ce either prevented clubs from bringing players in, or deterred them from thinking about it. “I’m sure clubs are more cautious about getting overseas players now, because ultimately the chairman will be landed with a £20,000 fi ne if there are irregularities – and he or she would be personally liable,” says Simon Prodger, managing director of the National Cricket Conference, who helped present the ECB case to the Home Offi ce.
“That has to be partly because we have a government trying to reduce the incentive for people to come over and earn. None of this has really been down to the ECB. I think the ECB have been vigorously defending the position of cricket.” For clubs wishing to bring in a fi rst-class cricketer as their overseas player, there seems now only one categorically safe route – the Tier 5 Player/Coach visa. It is the only type of overseas engagement allowing a professional cricketer to both play and coach at the club for money and undertake “supplementary employment”.
In September 2016, the ECB were advised that players on the Standard Visitor Visa, Non-Visa National or the Tier 5 Youth Mobility Scheme who did not hold a UK, EU or EEA passport could play only as an amateur – that is to say “a person who engages in a sport or creative activity solely for personal enjoyment and who is not seeking to derive a living from the activity”. The complication being that those who have been on a ‘player pathway’ in their home country – representing their state, province or territory at under-17 level or higher, paid or unpaid – were deemed to be pros. This landed Frinton-on-Sea in hot water in 2017. The case of Blake Reed, a 22-year-old Australian who had played six times for Western Australia Under-19s in 2013, turned into a cause célèbre as friction erupted between the club and Two Counties League over his registration under the Tier 5 Youth Mobility Scheme. After the case, the ECB met with the Home Offi ce and a compromise was reached: those on Tier 5 YMS have to serve a cooling-off period of four years after being on the pathway before being considered an amateur again. It may have persuaded some clubs to move away from second-tier Australians or Kiwis, and towards Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh or South Africa, who might be cheaper but have fi rst-class experience.
An equally safe route is those players – often Australian, Kiwi or South African – with British or EU passports. An ancestry visa allowed Tom Plant, a former South Australia batsman, to help Ealing, one of the biggest clubs in the country, win the Middlesex League.
In 2017 Mitch O’Connor, a 33-year-old Australian with a Swedish passport playing for the Sweden national team, was being fl own in from Stockholm on weekends to play for New Farnley in the Bradford League. But the rules don’t always tally between county and club cricket – where leagues may have stringent rules which clubs have to satisfy. The North Staffs & South Cheshire League became embroiled in a legal dispute with Burslem in 2018 over the eligibility of Jim Allenby, eventually settled out of court before the parties locked horns at Cambridge Crown Court.
Allenby, Perth-born but a UK passport holder, played for Glamorgan and Somerset as a homegrown player, and was qualifi ed for England. Yet the NSSCL ruled that Allenby should have been registered as an overseas player in their league, as he had not spent the requisite 210 days in the UK in a year. Burslem were docked 71 points – everything they banked in the matches he played – and relegated. This was because he had played in the same team as the club’s permitted registered overseas player. In theory, the guidelines mean any British citizen born outside of the UK who spends the winter months out of the country, for work or recreational purposes, could be forced to register as an overseas player.
It could well be that the overseas debate clouds the real issue, which is homegrown players moving around the club scene for a few quid. Such players are never marked on a team card, but virtually every clubbie in the land will know of a player constantly on the move, perhaps playing Minor Counties cricket, and good enough to demand payment – whether offi cial or unoffi cial. It seems a consequence of the increasingly competitive environment encouraged by Premier Leagues and promotion/relegation. It is a subject more whispered about than addressed openly, since clubs do not want to be labelled as the type who shell out money to remain competitive. When clubs announce signings as if they were a professional football club unveiling a transfer, it rather gives the game away, though. Other teams use it as a motivational factor when coming up such clubs.
Nick Gandon, chairman of Hoddesdon Town and a founder of Chance to Shine, is among those who believes the market entering club cricket does little more than harm: “We need to discourage recreational clubs from mimicking football’s brown-envelope culture. Paying hasbeens and wannabes to play recreational cricket is absurd and an abject waste of hard-earned cash. It destabilises clubs, undermines loyalty and is unsustainable.” John Evans, chairman of West of England Premier League club Frocester, is one of several offi cials who feels rivals are dragging their best players away: “More players are being paid to play, and young players we develop are being enticed by clubs who can pay them.” My own childhood club, Bedford Town, folded in 2006 because the outlay on paying players in the 1st XI, some who travelled from quite far afi eld and had no prior connection with the club, was crippling the club’s fi nances. Senior fi gures felt it was necessary in order to ensure staying in the Northamptonshire Premier League. The club reformed through its thriving junior section, is now back on its feet and competing in its old leagues, though not at the high level it once did.
Ultimately, if a club provides a friendly but competitive atmosphere, it should guard against the temptation of moving for money – in most circumstances. “There’s lots of competition locally,” says Ian Brown, captain of Houghton Main, who play in the second tier in South Yorkshire and reached the National Village Cup fi nal this year. Two of their players, Biswick Kapala and Imran Khan, came to the country as refugees. “One of the things is that clubs steal from other clubs. You’ve got to look after your players when you’ve got your captain’s hat on. You have to treat them right and be ambitious as a club. We’ve got some good cricket brains and a lot of young players in their early twenties with lots of potential in front of them. “There will be a lot of clubs in the division above who are in our players’ ears saying ‘why don’t you test yourself in the ECB Premier League?’” Ultimately, there may not be a practical or legal way of monitoring how and if cricket clubs pay their players. As Prodger says: “I don’t think there’s a satisfactory way to police what clubs pay their players, and I think the ECB may well share that view.”