The Cricketer Touring Special 2024

Touring Special 2024

Canterbury Academy

Triumph in Spain

Australia’s Crusaders

Conquer Europe

Touring with a Smile

TOP 10 TOUR TIPS!

It’s not just cricket

Travelling to the subcontinent, Caribbean or Antipodes to play cricket is the dream of most professional cricketers, let alone school children and club players. And yet – as we continue to emerge from the pandemic – boarding a plane to take amateur teams to far flung fields is an increasingly common way to kickstart a season.

Yes, in large part this is to get game time into the muscles and expose players to different conditions and tracks. But for most school masters and coaches, there are grander aims at the heart of such tours.

Ian McGowan is director of cricket at Merchant Taylors' School, which features in the list of top 100 Senior Schools in The Cricketer’s Schools Guide 2024. Dubai and Antigua are among destinations for their most recent tours, giving players of all levels – not just their elite cricketers – the “chance to get them to fall in love with the sport that they’re playing through touring.”

As well as promoting the experience of facing different sorts of on-pitch challenges, the importance of personal development is equally paramount. “We try and use it as an opportunity to learn about different cultures away from home and to get involved with those cultures as much as we can. That’s fascinating for our boys.

“The boys become a bit more self-aware. They have to look after themselves; they have to mix with boys they wouldn’t normally mix with.”

For the young people at Merchant Taylors’, that’s a combination of considering the environmental impact of their trip and taking invaluable school equipment out and fundraising for local charities, all the way to quad bike adventures and water park visits. Cultural excursions are also an integral part, with plans to squeeze in a visit to the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi next year.

“We spent time learning about Antigua & Barbuda as islands and had awesome opportunities for the boys to speak on national radio. We actually got three of them speaking on national TV on Good Morning Antigua!” said McGowan.

“There are those sorts of opportunities that presented themselves out there that just wouldn’t have been presented in the UK. They had to lean on what they’ve been taught at school and the experiences they had… it was great to see how they coped under unusual circumstances.

“It’s not just the cricket you play, it’s the life experiences and standing on your own two feet,” concurs former Kent captain Dave Fulton. Outside of his duties as a Sky Sports News broadcaster, he coaches at The Canterbury Academy (alongside director of

Cricket tours are about much more than wickets and runs – personal development and cultural experiences are just as important, writes Adam Marshall

Merchant Taylors’ School on tour in Abu Dhabi; meeting Rahkeem Cornwall in Barbados

cricket Phil Relf). They have won the last two iterations of The Cricketer Schools 100 that takes place each Easter at the Desert Springs Resort in Spain.

Fulton was exposed to touring from an early age himself, visiting New Zealand and Singapore as a 15-year-old with Kent Schools Cricket Association. “I was very wet behind the ears, very naive… but you grow up on tours like that.”

As well as individual personal development, travelling as a group in such close quarters is a unique environment to meld the squad. “What we’ve prided ourselves on as a school is that real togetherness, and bonding that group as a unit… we really try to build that identity,” says Fulton. “The being together, the rooming together, the eating together in the evenings – all of those experiences bring you closer as a group. It bonds that team a little bit closer.”

Depending on the timing of your tour, though, these trips are also a fantastic way to prepare for the new season. Getting away from the cold, drizzly UK spring for a few days to somewhere that guarantees clear, warm weather can really give the girls and boys a head start.

“To get outdoor practice in March or April was absolutely key to hitting the ground running when we got back, and we certainly found we had an advantage over other schools that we played against early season that hadn’t been away,” says Fulton. “And we also did it in a way where we weren’t ever going out there to win the competition, but for us it was just making sure that everybody got opportunity.

“So we rotated everybody around - gave everybody game time - making sure there would be no one in those touring parties that didn’t get a fair crack of the whip.”

Top tips to tourists

From their own experiences taking teams on tour, we asked Ian and Dave how to get the most out of your time away:

BELOW

Cricket

• Get together before the tour: Both in a cricketing and social setting, you’ll have an opportunity to answer any pre-tour anxieties and get an idea of the group dynamic

• Set expectations early: Let the players know the personal standards you expect from them, including any ground rules, preparation and how they carry themselves on and off the pitch

• Sort your staffing: As well as cricket-focused coaches and experienced tour leaders, adding a responsible adult coming with a more pastoral approach will improve the tourists’ enjoyment of the trip

• Work closely with the travel agent: Make sure that they understand what you want to get from the trip and maintain regular communication so that they can sort out any issues that arise while away

• Competition is key: Be honest with the tour organiser on the quality of the teams you’re taking out – truly competitive fixtures and a mix of wins and losses will benefit the players in the long run

ABOVE David Fulton and The Canterbury Academy; Merchant Taylors’ School in Barbados

at Desert Springs

THE CRICKETER SCHOOLS 100-BALL CHALLENGE

UK schools’ premier 1st XI pre‑season tournament

DESERT SPRINGS RESORT, ANDALUCIA,

High-octane 100-ball tournament played in 2024 Easter holidays

Fantastic pre-season training opportunity

Access to world-class practice facilities as used by the England Test and ODI Team

Each team to play a minimum of five matches

Luxury resort accommodation set around swimming pools and landscaped gardens

Full board catering service from award-winning restaurants

Cost per player €740. Price includes full board accommodation, access to cricket facilities, swimming pool and gym. To enter, teams are required to pay a deposit of €2,590.

For more information, contact Jim Hindson: email jim.hindson@thecricketer.com or call 0203 198 1354

COST PER PLAYER

€740

On the Crusade

Cricket in continental Europe owes much to the greatest of all Australian touring clubs, writes James Coyne

Globalisation’s reputation has taken a bit of a battering since the 2008 economic crash. But it may well have been the greatest thing that ever happened to cricket in mainland Europe. Suddenly every major capital had a British, Australian or Asian expat desperate for a slice of home.

Among the first touring sides to truly understand this was Crusaders Australia. They are a wandering club from Melbourne, co-founded in the heat of the World Series Cricket upheaval in 1977 by Robert ‘Swan’ Richards – a cricket ‘nuffie’ who defies definition – to give promising young cricketers in Victoria the chance to learn from wise old heads in the Melbourne club scene.

The roll-call of Crusaders who have gone on to represent Australia is illustrious, and includes Damien Fleming, Paul Reiffel, Aaron Finch, Glenn Maxwell and, yes, Shane Warne, who played for them in 1989, in his St Kilda CC days. Noah Croes, who went on the 2015 Crusaders tour aged 15, is back-up wicketkeeper for the Netherlands’ World Cup squad.

As for Richards, a sequence of eight noughts in a row in club cricket earned him the nickname ‘Swan’ – as “Nobody had made ducks so graceful”.

So Swan he has been ever since, to everyone – even The Queen, who he knew quite well. He also got to know Don Bradman after dropping some equipment off at the Adelaide Oval in 1963.

After a troubled childhood, Swan began working in Barry Jarman’s sports shop as a 12-year-old, and rose up to become the only producer of handmade bats in all of Australia, famous for developing the Gray-Nicolls Scoop – the concave bat wielded by the likes of Barry Richards and Ian Chappell. In recent years Swan has worked with Cricket Australia on how to produce cheaper kit for children.

Barring Covid disruption, Crusaders – clad in blue and gold blazers, with a martlet on their crest – have been touring Britain and Ireland roughly every two years since 1995. They play at the great grounds in the land – the likes of Hambledon, but also the post-industrial and equally fascinating Bournville ground in the old chocolatier suburb of Birmingham.

The Queen preferred horseracing, but – assuming they were at Windsor Castle that day – she and the Duke of Edinburgh always found time to watch Crusaders when they visited Frogmore to play the Royal Household. This year’s tour was the first since The Queen’s death, but Crusaders were humbled that Prince Edward came to watch.

Australians are famously keen on travelling, and it was Crusaders who took the first tentative steps into European cricket when pockets opened up in the 1990s. Word was put out by Simone Gambino and Andrew Simpson-Parker of the Italian and Austrian cricket boards, and Richards answered. In 1999 Crusaders took advantage of the first cheap flights around Europe to tack on games in Vienna, Velden am Wörthersee, Florence and Milan.

Tour manager Ian Scholefield is Swan’s long-serving right-hand man: “We played at some great places in Italy, and some not so good. We flew into Milan and played somewhere near the airport, at a soccer ground, on a rolled-out synthetic mat. The pitch was diagonal and rectangular. A lot of our guys got hit. The walls were 10ft high with wire mesh.

“These days, Velden is a stunning ground, with a lovely pavilion. But when we first went over there, in 2001, there was nowhere to change. I remember changing in the cornfield, with our heads peeping over the farmer’s crops.

“In Russia in 2009 we turned up to a park in St Petersburg the day before our match against the British Embassy, and there were these two women hacking at the pitch with a motor mower.”

As you would expect from a team of serious Australian weekend cricketers, Crusaders play to win. But they manage to strike the right balance between winning and developing young cricketers – on both sides. This is the essence of touring Associate cricketing countries: knowing when to give it your all, and when to take on a missionary role by reversing the batting order, or throwing the ball to the occasional bowlers.

Back in 2011, Crusaders – fielding this writer as an English guest – pitched up at Benetton Treviso rugby club’s training ground, and were bundled out on coir matting imported from the subcontinent. Cue a stern talking-to on the team bus from Swan.

A Crusaders tour does not come cheap, but they have provided sponsored opportunities for underprivileged Australians. That 2011 party included Akat Mayoum, a South Sudanese immigrant who came to Melbourne aged nine, and discovered cricket at Sunshine Heights CC in the western suburbs. After his Crusaders tour, he became the first Sudanese Australian A-grade turf cricketer. He was also his club’s junior development officer, and now works as a housing services officer in Victoria.

Velden, in the shadow of the Karavanks mountain range in Austria, has a billiard-table outfield and a high-quality artificial wicket. Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz, near St Moritz in Switzerland’s Engadin Valley, has three pitches and a stunning vista.

“We have also played on a turf wicket in the Loire Valley,” says Scholefield. “We were under the impression that the only place you could find turf wickets on the continent was the Netherlands and Denmark. But there are surprises around every corner.”

JONATHAN CAMPION/CRUSADERS AUSTRALIA

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