Announcing the awards, Ossie Wheatley, chairman of the Cricket Foundation, who reconstituted last year to distribute a portion of the Board's central income for youth development, said: ``The long-promised restructuring of cricket in England and Wales is under way. This is the first time cricket has acted in a corporate way.''
Yesterday's awards use up virtually all of the Foundation's available money. Originally a small-time charity, their aim was changed when Brian Downing, the chairman of the Board's marketing arm, suggested that part of the televi- sion income -rising to almost #18 million in 1998, close to 12 times what it was 10 years ago -should be hived off to the Foundation as a means of funding youth development in a properly planned and accountable way.
The counties agreed to forego #2.2 million last year and this, together with more than #300,000 of the #800,000 reserves from the former charity, was distributed yesterday after applications from all the 38 county boards. There will be further awards each year. The counties have guaranteed at least #1.9 million to the Foundation in each of the next two years, but they need to extend that amount if the days when every schoolboy in the land was introduced to cricket are to return.
The money will be spent on development officers and on training and educating coaches. Hitherto, the ef- forts of the National Cricket Association have been concentrated on participation: of a total school population offi- cially as high as 10 million, one million primary and half a million secondary boys and a significant number of girls play cricket.
Yorkshire, appropriately because of size and crick- et tradition, won the biggest county award, #132,121, with Middlesex, Lancashire, Kent and Essex also convinc- ing the trustees of the Foundation that they should receive in excess of #100,000.
Awards for the Minor Counties were even, averaging around #40,000, but Wheatley sounded a warning note to delegates from all the 39 award recipients: ``These are not grants, with no strings attached. This is directed development money. We expect results from it.
``We are not as good as we should be at cricket as the only country with a fully professional structure. The emphasis of this spending is on quality, not quantity. We want to focus on 12 to 17-year-olds. After that development be- comes a matter for the first-class counties, which is another story.''
The money will be spent on development officers and on training and educating coaches. Hitherto, the ef- forts of the National Cricket Association have been concentrated on participation: of a total school population offi- cially as high as 10 million, one million primary and half a million secondary boys and a significant number of girls play cricket. But there is still room for much greater co-operation between the schools and the clubs with junior sections.
The additional grant announced by the Foundation yesterday was to Durham University, one of whose former stu- dents, the Lancashire, Durham and England batsman Graeme Fowler, is expected to be announced tomorrow as the director of a centre of excellence.
The scheme was outlined in The Daily Telegraph last year, but funding difficulties have delayed its introduction. A sum of #45,000 is being granted by the Foundation for the next three years to allow students already studying for academic degrees to ``follow a structured programme of additional cricket modules.''
One of Fowler's first duties may be more basic: to improve a relatively weak fixture list for a team with a number of players already contracted to first-class counties.