Quote:There is a crisis in recreational cricket in England and Wales. Everybody who plays the game has felt the storm building for years. The only surprise is that it has taken so long for the figures to show it.

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Amateur clubs are closing, many with more than a century of tradition, and the fear is that there are many more to follow. Merger chats are commonplace, finances are in the red, volunteers are thin on the ground and if, on Friday night, you are lucky enough to have 22 definite players (the 1st and 2nd teams having changed at least seven times since Tuesday) you can bet your mortgage that two of them will pull out on Saturday morning.

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Just imagine how bleak the figures would be without the injection of the estimated 30% of immigrants, largely from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, who are keeping the flame alive.

What is instructive perhaps is to reflect at the outset on the latest English tourism campaign which I happened to catch at Brussels railway station last month (the worst signposted rail station in the world - perhaps all those bureaucrats can come up with a solution).

"Come and see the gentlemen's game," it extolled, below a picture showing old white men stooped over stumps in an idyllic pastoral scene. You can't blame the ECB for the way the tourist board sells cricket but Miss Marple-style fantasies do not help. So let us consider instead the reality.

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Consider the figures facing the ECB. The 7% drop in players this year from 908,000 to 844,000 is disturbing enough, as is the fact that 5% of games were conceded - a figure which, if not stemmed almost instantly, could cause a downward spiral by bringing disillusionment among those who had made themselves available and then found their Saturday afternoon had become redundant. People do not like to buy into failure.

Dig deeper and the figures are even more worrying. There were only 247,000 "core" players in those 844,000 and even they are defined as people who would commit to 12 matches, roughly half the fixtures in an average league season. Nearly 600,000 were defined as "occasional" or "cameo" players who played a lot less.

Cameo players turn out occasionally and often bale out clubs who are grateful for their involvement. If you have 19 players on a Friday afternoon, it is no exaggeration to suggest that the poor sap charged with swelling it to 22 can send 30 text messages by Saturday lunchtime.