The Great Pyramids of the West Midlands

 

The Great Pyramids of the West Midlands 

Many people year after year fly to Egypt to see the great pyramids of Giza, a man made wonder attracting people from around the world they mesmerized explorers promoting a boom in Egyptology in academia and Victoria high society.

But another great pyramid exists out there in the cricketing world and this one is a little bit more modern. Formed over years during the late 90’s early 00’s the Birmingham League Pyramid has grown to become one of the top competitions in amateur cricket in the country.

Before I get into the stats about this subject I thought I would explain what prompted me to write it. Moving around the country and therefore, playing cricket in various leagues I had always assumed (incorrectly) that counties have “the” league. My experience of cricket in the West Midlands and then moving down to Kent was that of giant all encompassing county leagues, but then I moved to Yorkshire which has a confusing array of overlapping league borders and teams moving out of one and into another on a yearly basis, this also means that although there is an overall knock out competition at the end of the season it is never 100% who the best team in the county is in my opinion.

 

The Stats

Before drawing some conclusions, I wanted to lay out the stats for various leagues I know about, one thing I have thought of is what is the best of the best? Does league size necessarily create the best standards? Does a bigger pyramid have more clout in terms of picking up young talent?

The way I have looked at leagues is by using the number of divisions within each of my given areas and then looked at how they feed to an ECB Premier League. What I have not done is account for regionalisation in the pure numbers (although I will speak about later) and I haven’t counted if divisions are 10,12 or another odd number of teams, I am already spending far to much of my time on Play Cricket week in week out so that’s possibly for another day.

 

So lets start with the big one –

  • The West Midlands Pyramid encompasses Worcestershire (plus some clubs in Herefordshire) 18 divisions, Shropshire 9 divisions, South Staffordshire 10 divisions and Warwickshire 20 divisions into a singular 2 division premier league for only first teams.
    • This means that one ECB Premier league is the culmination of 59 divisions of cricket overall, this means that there is little to no room for comparison to other leagues in your local area, an obvious top level is created for everyone to see. One interesting thing is many clubs from this pyramid have reached the final of the National 20/20 plate for teams not in an ECB Premier League a testament of how strong the teams are who are not even in the top level in this part of the world. The other teams who have reached the finals of this competition are Ackworth and Farnsfield who I have played against in my time and can vouch for these club’s ambitions but it’s interesting how the plate specifically is very West Midlands teams heavy.
  •  The South East is a very different world of cricket, 4,5,6 teams is just not unusual and the booming population means that I don’t believe cricket is more popular than other parts of the country but just there are more people, the numbers of divisions for these leagues bare this out.
    • Sussex is 38 divisions of cricket culminating into on Premier League, I noted regionalisation starts very early in this set up meaning that again only the very best travel the longer distances but are rewarded by playing against the very best.
    • Surrey has 39 divisions of cricket but again only a small number of divisions are county wide regionalisation starts early on.
    • Kent has 31 divisions with a surprisingly high number of county wide divisions with 6, I remember long old trips from Southeast London to the Thanet Coast back when I played in this area.
  • The last two are interesting because the Kent Village league remains independent and so do two Surrey Leagues: Surrey Downs and I’Anson Leagues, I think in theory that Surrey could creep up to West Midlands numbers should these hypothetically merge one day.
  • These massive county league systems provide benefits as they have one general committee; fixtures are planned centrally without ground shared between several leagues and buying power of balls and sponsors is increased.
  • So now we move onto Yorkshire, I have looked to quantify all the divisions of cricket I could find right down to the very rogue addition of the Langbaurgh League with its solitary division of cricket. In Yorkshire my rough maths produced 91 divisions of cricket overall with the largest league being the North Yorkshire League with 22 divisions of cricket. What interests me here is with the reclassification of the Huddersfield League there are 5 ECB Premier Leagues, this thin spread plus leagues such as the Aire Wharfe choosing not to entertain this classification means that I think in this area it is hard to say weather the best really does play the best often enough. 
    • Travel is such an interesting point now playing in South Yorkshire people refer to clubs “miles away” as maybe an hour’s drive, which to those of us who have gone from the Black Country to Herefordshire or South London to Folkestone is nothing.
Initial Thoughts 

One questions I thought of is shouldn’t here be a minimum number of divisions of cricket beneath an ECB Premier League for it to be classified as such? In the examples shows the largest structure has 59 divisions leading to one premier and the smallest has 5 divisions leading to the league classified in the same way, Yorkshire’s current system averaged out is 18.2 divisions of cricket per ECB Premier League.

Over the Pennines there has been the creation of the Northern Pyramid League a bold attempt to bring leagues together to possibly replicate the type of structure now found in the Southeast this has 18 divisions. But again, I did some digging into the numbers; if you include the North Staffs South Cheshire league there are 81 Divisions of cricket in the Northwest which contains 5 ECB Premier Leagues thus producing an even smaller ratio of 16.2 divisions per ECB Premier League. This area again contains The Lancashire League who like the example in Yorkshire decided to not be an ECB Premier League.

I haven’t gone through every league pyramid in the UK, maybe one day I will I am aware of leagues in Herts, Essex and Middlesex with large pyramids and how South Wales has merged it’s major leagues into an all-encompassing ECB Premier League.

Evaluation of what this means for cricket in regions.

We all know through many well documented examples the plight of state school kids v those at private schools when it comes to cricket progression into the professional game. Many barriers cannot be changed by league restructures but I do think more areas where there really is “the best v the best” helps to create a level of league cricket that has kudos and is full of ex or current pros. Having large leagues or systems with so many divisions behind you means that good young players competing at this level are the very top in their area. I also thing there is a more nuanced thing here coaches from certain areas or parts of the county saying “well he/she is only doing that in xxx league” provincial or historic connections breed this thinking, you don’t have this problem in the West Midlands or Surrey everyone knows there is only one top league.

 

How does it help down the levels?

For people like me who never reach to top and am certainly not going to trouble those there now, you might ask why does this matter? But I think there are advantages. The all-encompassing league means you have better buying power for things like balls instead of little purchases massive baulk buys of better equipment can be done. Sponsors join something encompassing a massive area with a reach to 1000’s of people each week.

The key point in many examples outside Yorkshire and the Northwest is that travelling long distances is only reserved for those at the very top, regionalisation begins quickly in many of the structures mentioned, but give the money it costs just to sustain your place in an ECB Premier League, the cost of travelling would be factored in by those at the very top.

Bigger leagues also bring much more variety, I find small geography leagues a bit of a drag, playing the same people at the same grounds year on year. In large leagues teams climb and fall and although an occasional long journey is required there was more variety, new grounds to tick off and for those geography people out there changing from different catchments, landscapes or geology in bigger leagues meant you coped with totally different pitches and styles of play, games out on the Chalk or London Clay where totally different now in South Yorkshire there is a slight changes from Sheffield to Doncaster’s Sandstone but we miss out on the Chalk pitches of East Yorkshire which in another system would likely be in the same league structure.

Not pointing fingers

What I am not doing here is throwing one league under the bus and saying its poor or good, I am trying to point out the massive inconsistencies as to what a “Premier” league looks like and how the underneath structures differ massively between parts of the UK. Just because a league has a much smaller number of divisions doesn’t mean it top level is weaker than a giant league from the South but in terms of noticing talent to someone from outside looking in playing in a division atop a 39 division league as opposed to an 8 division league will raise eyebrows and maybe calls for my idea of a minimum number of divisions to be given the classification.

For Yorkshire I did some “back of the fag packet” thinking of what maybe you could have, I came up with a three ECB Premier League system with South and West League of 33 divisions, Northwest/Central League of 22 divisions and a North and East League of 36 divisions. Maybe you could have a play-off with the Northeast Premier in a 4 club competition to decide who was the best? This is all rough and as I said the current leagues overlap boundaries with club adjacent to each other in different leagues so if for some reason someone did come in with a wrecking ball much more work would need to be done.

The Future 

I just thought this was interesting and whether there is something in this for the future, the creation of the Northern Pyramid and also the enveloping of Yorkshire Derbyshire League and Scarborough Beckett League in Yorkshire shows how some of this might happen by osmosis, economies of scale start to take over I wonder if in years to come both Yorkshire and the Northwest move closer to the West Midlands system without even realising.

 

I hope you have enjoyed this trip into leagues and their structures; I’ll be back next month with some more takes on the world of club cricket.

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