ECB Coaches Association links Hitting the Seam 39 | Page 5

“It is about creating a bridge that can
bring those players and their community
to wider cricket.”
For a topic that some fear is a minefield of
political correctness and delicacy, Gulfraz Riaz
and Mohammed Arif are in a frank and, frankly,
buoyant mood when we meet at the National
Cricket Performance Centre in early June.
They have plenty of cause to be merry of course,
with the hard work both put in to shaping the
South Asian strategy increasingly becoming a
reality, little more than a month after its
high-profile launch.
Gulfraz, the National Asian Cricket Council
Chairman and adviser on the strategy, is
particularly keen for this not to be seen as
the actions of a sport scrambling around for a
foothold in the crowded sporting market.
“Let’s face it,” he states, matter-of-factly, “the
opportunities for cricket are huge.
“If we went to the RFU or LTA and said ‘we’ve
identified 35% of your sporting constituents’
they’d bite your hands off. For cricket, that’s the
South Asian community, so to engage with them
can only be positive for cricket as a whole.”
Equally embedded in the strategy is Mohammed,
the ECB’s National Growth Manager for Diverse
Communities. He sees the actions of the strategy
as the sum of its parts, not merely more players,
fans and coaches from South Asian communities
but a shot in the arm for the sport as a whole.
“We want this to engage more people with the
sport in innovative ways, creating fun, short,
social, safe forms of cricket - connecting from
grass roots to elite.
“Diverse communities means a mix of all faiths
and cultures being united through the common
identity of cricket, understanding where they
identify and why. For example, the South Asian
community stretches from Indian and Pakistani
to Afghan and Bengali. We look at how you bring
those groups together with African-Caribbean,
White-British and other communities in the UK.”
The research behind the strategy points to five
key objectives, of which coaching and workforce
is one, and, says Mohammed, “a very interesting
one at that.
“In many ways it exemplifies the approach behind
the whole strategy: that we want to integrate not
segregate, we want to find a solution for cricket,
not just for South Asian players.
“It is about creating a bridge that can bring those
players and their community to wider cricket.
There’s an awareness issue that exists within
large parts of the South Asian community, where
they imagine that putting on a coaching tracksuit
indicates the end of their playing days. Having
role models while you’re still playing, that show
how coaches can in fact be everybody, is very
important. Similarly, there is a lack of awareness
of how you get on to the coaching ladder, and of
what the cost and course structure is.”
Taking up the issue of where coaching currently
stands in some South Asian communities,
Mohammed explains that there can be a lack
of knowledge around “how coaching can be
sensitive to different people’s needs and cultures.
“I find people thinking about, ‘What’s the value of
a coach’ and asking, ‘Where do I go now?’
“Once coaching is there, the South Asian
community has shown a large willingness to
embrace and use it. However, there is a lack of
what we call ‘reflective coaches’. There is an
average of around 5% of coaches coming from a
BAME background and therefore matching the
Fertile Ground
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