A cap-presentation speech is a tricky putt to hole. How to be encouraging without being bland; brief while still saying something worthwhile? And when the recipient is a player you don’t know well, the challenge is even greater.
But in mid-April it didn’t seem to dismay Durham’s Matthew Potts when giving Scott Boland his cap on the outfield at Edgbaston. The county’s heritage informed the team’s identity, he pointed out to the Australia Test bowler, before adding: “We’re working class, we’re tough guys.”
Toughness, of course, is something all counties’ first teams may believe they possess, but “working class” is a label few could claim without cracking an embarrassed grin.
Potts’s understanding of the term may not accord precisely with a sociologist’s definition. But he doesn’t resile from his view for one moment; indeed he is happy to justify it.
“Everybody pays good, hard-earned money to come and support us and this is a working-class region with a heritage in shipbuilding and other industries,” the 26-year-old England bowler says. “It’s a really special place and we want to give something back to the fans.”
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It is fair to point out that when Potts played against Pakistan in the second Test in Multan last month, he was the eighth member of that particular England team to have been educated, even if only in part, at a private school — the independent Argyle House School in Sunderland until he was 16. Yet when he returns to play for Durham next season he will be one of only six privately educated cricketers out of the 22 on the professional staff or in the academy who were born or raised in the North East.
Durham are bucking a concerning trend highlighted by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket last year, which pointed to “the prevalence of an elitist and exclusionary culture within English and Welsh cricket” and concluded that such a culture “is, in part, enforced through the dominance of private school networks within cricket’s talent pathway”.
It is hard to argue such dominance exists in Durham’s talent pathway, however, when Durham School is the only notable 11-18yrs private school in the county. The county’s academy, one of the most highly regarded in the country, is steeped in working-class roots and values.
“I look at some of the sides I played in and that working-class attitude was present,” Scott Borthwick, the Durham captain, says. “There were so many games when you’d have thought we couldn’t win but we just scrapped like mad and it was amazing what we could achieve.
“We’re working-class people who are doing all right in sport and Pottsy’s speech at Edgbaston was really impressive because he hit the nail on the head.”
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Borthwick’s early career illustrates how Durham’s cricketers develop the skills that ensure they attract the attention of the age-group coaches without the help of private education.
“I first played for Eppleton CC and I was cricket-daft, really,” he says. “I made my senior debut at the age of 12, I think, and that was in the second team, but I played every opportunity I could get. I went to Farringdon Community Sports College in Sunderland and we were quite a passionate cricketing school. We had a couple of teachers who were very keen and we were quite successful.
“We won a couple of trophies and we played at the Riverside, which is always a great experience when you’re a kid. There were occasions when I was almost dragged out of a class to play cricket. We played all our local games at Silksworth CC and sometimes we beat Durham School. It was almost unheard of for a state school to do that, so we had a couple of really special days out.
“Club cricket plays a massive part in the development of players and that’s where you learn. There used to be games every evening, especially if you were lucky enough to play at under-11, 13, 15 and 18 levels. You could be out of the house every night and then you were playing Saturday cricket as well. You get that cricket education from club games rather than by playing school matches.”
It should be stressed that not every Durham cricketer was as fortunate as Borthwick in attending a sports-focused school. A survey of the schools attended by the county’s players includes comprehensives, academies and Catholic high schools, but very few sports colleges. The former Durham and England opener Mark Stoneman, an alumnus of Whickham comprehensive in Newcastle, says he played only a couple of school games on artificial pitches but he believes club matches can be better for the development of young cricketers than a succession of schools fixtures.
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“I started when I was ten years old at the community winter nets,” Stoneman says. “From there I got put forward and it ended with me playing for Durham Schools, as it was at the time. That was supplemented with club cricket and a lot of cup-ties.
“There’s so much game time in the North East. If you come through a club system before the academy, then by the age of 14 or 15 you’re going to be playing against men who’ll be giving you no leeway and you get battle-hardened quite early.
“Private schools offer outstanding facilities and top-quality coaching but you see it delaying game management and game sense, whereas kids coming through the state-school system play so much club cricket that they become game smart.
“The level of competition and that northern mentality stands them in good stead and it will help Durham go from strength to strength.”
The quality and toughness of club cricket in the North East comes as scant surprise to those of us who still cover the recreational game. Chester-le-Street and South Northumberland CCs regularly appear in the latter stages of national knockout competitions — two of the many clubs in the region where young cricketers receive opportunities and learn some tough lessons.
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All of which is excellent news for John Windows, the astute and self-effacing director of Durham’s academy. Over the years, Windows has helped to develop a talent stream that is the envy of other counties and no one is better qualified to assess why Durham have always been different from other counties in their development of young cricketers.
“We haven’t got a lot of players,” he says. “All we do is play as hard as we can and we’ve had a bit of luck with players coming through. By the time they get to 16 or 17, we’ve got a collection of pretty good cricketers together. Ben Stokes came across from Cumbria at around that age.
“It was the vision of Don Robson [Durham’s legendary former chairman, who guided the club’s elevation to first-class status in 1992] that the county should have players coming through to play on the international stage and Geoff Cook [Durham’s former skipper and first-team coach] certainly saw the value of it and started the academy. It’s been central to the club right from the start.
“We do have independent schools in the area but the primary feeder into the talent pathway is the club system, which is massively competitive. And there’s a cricket club in the North East for every 4,000 people, whereas clubs in other areas, Birmingham, for example, are much scarcer. So you have to justify yourself against blokes who are trying their hardest to win. But if you’re good enough, you’re going to get a game.
“There isn’t loads of money around. There is wealth but there’s not the volume of the wealth you might find elsewhere. The lads that come into the system represent hardworking communities. That’s the beauty of the region.”
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It also, one might suggest, explains in part why Durham were able to cope with the ECB’s disciplinary demotion in 2016 and why the county prospered on their return to Division One this year, finishing fifth. Nor is there any sign that one of the most efficient conveyor belts in English cricket has suffered a malfunction. For that second Test in Multan, England’s entire seam-bowling attack — Potts, the captain Stokes and Brydon Carse — were Durham players.
“At 14 I had a choice between Lancashire and Durham and I chose Durham,” says Stanley McAlindon, a 20-year-old Cumbrian who joined the Riverside’s academy in 2020 and is now on a rookie contract. “I later played for Sacriston in the North East Premier League and that was good fun.
“It’s a team full of proper working-class lads because it’s in one of the old pit villages around Durham. In my first game, two of the Sacriston team almost had a fight on the pitch but the players were also very welcoming and that’s one of the things I’ve noticed in Durham. And there was certainly a change in standard from the Cumbria League. Club cricket is the backbone of what the game in Durham is about.”
