'Others did less but got more': England's lost generation of black cricketers

A few weeks ago Mark Nelson picked up an old scorecard, a memento from a Test he played for England Under-19s against India back in 2006. It was a good one, worth keeping. He had made 43 in the first innings and 103 in the second, had opened the bowling and taken two for 80. As he showed it to his girlfriend, he ran his finger down the list of his teammates’ names and told her: “It’s weird, but most of these guys are still playing.” Four of them – Moeen Ali, Steven Finn, Adil Rashid and Adam Lyth – became Test cricketers, five more had long county careers, the 10th was forced out of the game by a bad injury. And then there was him. At the age of 33, Nelson is working in consumer affairs for the National House Building Council.

Northamptonshire released Nelson in 2009. He still doesn’t really understand why. Just the previous year he had been the 12th man for England’s A team. He remembers a conversation he had with his England Under-19 coach at the time. “It’s unbelievable,” the coach told him, “how can you go from playing for England one year to not having a county team the next?”

“I look back on it and I ask: ‘Should I have done more?’” Nelson says. “I think I did everything I could. But I can’t have, because if I had, surely they would have given me a contract? Then you look at some of the players who did get signed, you see their record and you think: ‘What’s the difference between me and him? I’ve got a better record, so why did he get more opportunities than me?’ And then it comes back to this: is there another reason?”

Nelson is unsure. “It would be easy to draw the conclusion that it was race. It could have been. I don’t know, I don’t know. But it’s one of those things that to my last day I’ll think: ‘Well, why not?’”

Nelson isn’t the only one asking.

There are all sorts of reasons why a cricketer might not go on to succeed in county cricket – talent, attitude, work ethic and luck. Talk to county coaches and players, and they will tell you it’s a hit-and-miss business, that just because someone got picked for England Under-19s doesn’t mean they will make it as a professional. But it does mean that, at one time, good judges believed they could. Back in the 2000s, the England setup saw that potential in three black players. There was Nelson, from Milton Keynes, Chris Thompson, from south London, and James Pearson, from Bristol.

If you haven’t heard of them, it’s because in the end they played only 16 first-class games between them. That doesn’t make them unique, but it does make them unusual. Look at the men they played with in their last matches for England Under‑19s. The other 10 in Nelson’s team played an average of 98 first-class games each, while he played seven. The other 10 in Thompson’s played an average of 104, while he played one. The other 10 in Pearson’s played an average of 118, while he played eight.

Recent research by Leeds Beckett University showed that there were only nine black male cricketers on the county circuit last year. In 1995, there were 33. If we want to begin to understand the barriers that have faced young black players in English cricket, these three stories seem like a good place to start. Only, it is not easy listening.

It’s 2005, Gloucestershire are playing a county game, and James Pearson is walking out to bat. “And a well-known batsman says to me: ‘Oh, I didn’t know Michael Carberry plays for Gloucestershire.’” Pearson is black, and left-handed, he thinks to himself: “You would never say that to a white man.” 2006, a game at Trent Bridge, and Nelson has hit three boundaries in a row. “I went for a fourth, missed it, and the bowler said to me: ‘All you lot play the same.’” 2002, Thompson is playing a charity game at the Bunbury festival. “This guy drops the catch and everyone starts laughing, and he turns to me and says: ‘You look like you’ve just come from robbing a car, I better mind my stereo.’”

It certainly wasn’t widespread, but it wasn’t rare either. “I was kind of prepared for it,” says Pearson, “as sad as it sounds, my parents prepared me for it, they said: ‘You’re in England, this is how it is, you’re not going to be accepted by everybody because you’re black, but it doesn’t stop you doing what you want to do in life.’ I’ve been getting it since I was at school.” Pearson remembers walking into the Gloucestershire changing room “and it was: ‘Oh JP, what are you doing here, you coming to sell some crack?’ Little comments like that. I’d walk in and it would be all Ali G rhetoric, like: ‘JP, yo, yo, yo.’” Nelson says at Northants: “I used to walk in and people used to talk to me in a Jamaican accent. Or people would talk to me in some kind of London slang, call me ‘bruv’ and all this other nonsense.”

Pearson and Thompson both played for black club teams but Nelson never did. “In England, nine times out of 10 you’re going to be the only black person at the ground,” Nelson says. “And it almost just becomes something you come to expect. That’s what’s disappointing looking back, comments like those became normal.” He doesn’t think his teammates were being racist, or even malicious. But he does think some of them didn’t understand “how it feels to have 20 people laughing at a joke made at one person’s expense when that one person is already in the minority”.

“I don’t want to make it sound like there are a lot of racists in the game, because there aren’t,” Nelson says, “but there are a lot of people who don’t understand what it feels like to be the only black person in a situation and have someone say: ‘You know how to steal a car,’ or: ‘You can rap, can’t you?’ You can’t react to it, because if you do, people say: ‘Why are you being so sensitive? It’s just a joke.’”

He remembers a game where the other team had a player from Barbados. “I didn’t get any runs, but he did. And when I went out to field their team was shouting: ‘Our one is better than yours,’ and you’ve got 20 people laughing, do I laugh? Or do I look like the angry black man?

“I look back on it now and I wish I had told people: ‘Look, you might think that’s funny, but it’s not funny, I don’t like it, it makes me feel this big.’”

Thompson’s experiences are different. He grew up opposite the Oval. He was a bowler, one of the quickest in the country for his age, and he could bat, too. When he got into the Surrey youth setup they couldn’t keep him away from the place. “I was the annoying kid who wouldn’t move, I would stay and help out the cleaners just because I wanted to be in the ground,” he says. There were times the groundsman had to kick him out because he wanted to lock up, and even then Thompson would beg him for an extra 20 minutes in the nets. When he wasn’t there, he was at the local basketball court, playing, or training, till one or two in the morning, or he was out running along the river, Vauxhall Bridge to Waterloo Bridge and back.

When Surrey’s second XI needed an opener in an emergency, Thompson put his hand up. When Surrey needed a 12th man to field at short leg for the first team, Thompson put his hand up. “But the whole time I felt like I was on borrowed time.”

One day, one of the coaches took him aside and told him: “‘Basically I think you should go elsewhere and look for a career.’ Only he wasn’t so blunt as that, the way he said it was more like: ‘Look at Carl Greenidge, look at Michael Carberry. They were here, now they’re not here and they’re doing really well …’” Both Carberry and Greenidge had been at Surrey and then moved on to other clubs. Thompson still didn’t get it. “OK,” Thompson replied, “why are you telling me?”

In his next game, Thompson got 186 for the second XI against Glamorgan at the Oval, and followed it up, soon after, with back-to-back fifties against Yorkshire. By now he was attracting interest from England Under-19s. He and a few other Surrey players got invited for a trial. Thompson got in, no one else did. “Now, if I don’t have a county contract but I’m playing for England, that would look very odd, so Surrey were like: ‘OK we’ve got to offer you a summer deal.’ It was for three months. One of the players who failed the same trial got three years. “But I didn’t mind because I was so excited. I was living my best life.”

Thompson played 19 games for England Under-19s. He shared a room with Moeen , who remembers him as “a very good player, very solid off the front foot, quite attacking, drove the ball nicely, and when he made hundreds they tended to be big ones”.

After playing at Surrey over three seasons, from 2004 to 2006, he was let go the same summer he finished playing for England. He played second XI cricket for three counties and one first-class game, for Leicestershire, as a late replacement for a sick batsman. Later he went back to Surrey for 10 second XI games in 2012. In the end he went to play club cricket in Jamaica, and when that didn’t work out, he drifted out of professional cricket. These days he runs a music production business, Broadway Entertainment, and drums for Aswad.

“I never looked at it as a racial thing,” Thompson says. “People used to say that to me: ‘Surrey is racist, don’t got to Surrey,’ and I was like: ‘Nah, whatever man, these guys are my friends.’” Later, after he had stopped playing, he went along to a group meeting run by the England and Wales Cricket Board. “And at the end of it a man from the ECB came up to me and said: ‘I’ve been looking for you.’” They spoke about what the board could do to get more black players in the game. “And the man explained: ‘I’ve checked out your stats, I’ve spoken to your coaches, and players you played with. I can tell you the reason you weren’t signed wasn’t that you weren’t good enough, but because of the colour of your skin.’”

Thompson isn’t sure what to think. “I know I didn’t have an attitude problem. I know I worked hard. I know I got along with everybody, and I know that I didn’t get a fair crack compared to the others around me,” he says. “I know that others did less but got more.” One of Thompson’s Surrey coaches from the time remembered him as someone who simply didn’t have quite enough talent to make it at such a competitive club. Thompson disagrees.

Certainly, Surrey are a very different club these days. The change has been led by their director of women’s cricket, Ebony Rainford-Brent, who recently launched a pioneering African-Caribbean engagement programme. Their chief executive, Richard Gould, says: “It is very important that every organisation listen to these concerns, and I am grateful to Chris for speaking out about his experience. One of our most important roles as a club is to help young men and women to become the very best cricketers they can be. We actively encourage all. Everyone gets our best efforts.”

The ECB, too, says it wants to “urgently address” the lack of black cricketers in the English game, although it has yet to spell out how. Gloucestershire did not respond to a request for comment. Ray Payne, the chief executive of Northants, told us: “It was sad to read Mark Nelson’s comments. I can’t speak with first-hand knowledge of the club as it was over a decade ago. There has been an appreciable turnover of personnel since then, in terms of playing, coaching and administrative staff.

“What I do know for certain is that the club today is proud of its commitment to diversity and equality, and welcomes cricketers from all ethnic backgrounds and all nationalities to Wantage Road. Any form of racial stereotyping as described by Mark would be wholly unacceptable.”

Payne points out that Northants had been a cricketing home since the war for celebrated overseas players including Donald Ramsamooj, Bishan Bedi, Kapil Dev, Sir Curtly Ambrose, Jason Holder and Temba Bavuma, plus Les McFarlane, Devon Malcolm and Monty Panesar among English black, Asian and minority ethnic players.

“At Northants there’s no question I was stereotyped,” says Nelson. “I’d make a mistake, play a bad shot, and it wasn’t always that I got dropped for it, but it would definitely be a case of someone saying to me: ‘You can’t do that, you can’t always be that way, I know that’s how West Indians play.’ Bear in mind I was born in Milton Keynes. So you got labelled. Of course it’s not everyone, and I don’t even know if the people who do it realised what they are doing. But I’d say I was tarnished slightly, on the basis of my skin colour rather than my style of play.”

Nelson adds: “It does affect you, but because of how regular it was, and how isolated you become. Especially as I got older. It wouldn’t be fair to say it’s the reason why I’m not playing any more, but it definitely had an effect.”

It is important to understand exactly what Thompson, Nelson and Pearson are speaking out about. They are not talking about conscious prejudice, but about a climate in which the particular difficulties they faced were unappreciated, and went unaddressed. They are talking about feeling stereotyped by other players and coaches, and about feeling they weren’t allowed to make mistakes, or that they weren’t given the same leeway as some white players.

Pearson scored three fifties in his first 11 championship innings for Gloucestershire. When they released him in 2005, they told him it was because he had a bad attitude. He admits he could have worked harder. But he says it was the first time anyone from the club had mentioned it to him. These days, Pearson runs a large sales team for a software firm. He understands something about leadership and he is amazed no one from the club ever discussed it with him. “I definitely felt stereotyped,” he says. “Just an example, I’m someone who is quite sociable, quite talkative, quite jovial, and I find that for me, personally, in cricket that comes across as ‘he doesn’t take the game seriously, he’s a joker’. But if there are white players who are like that, who are maybe not performing, it’s more a case of: ‘Oh yeah, he’s good for the team, he has great banter, and it’s great for the culture.’”

When the Black Lives Matter movement started, Nelson says he didn’t really want to get involved. He saw some of the players taking a knee, and remembered things they had said to him in the past. “I wasn’t sure if this was going to be something that’s only lasted for a week or two. I’ve done that before. I did Kick Racism Out, I did Say No to Racism. So I was very reluctant at the time, but it seems that it’s starting to mean something at last.”

Thompson is less sure. “I try and put things to the back of my mind,” he says. “What can you do? If people don’t think they need to change, then there’s no point trying to fight.” Thompson’s kid plays, and he still can’t pass a cricket ground in summer without wanting to pick up his bat. He, Pearson, and Nelson all say how grateful they are for the opportunities the game gave them, and how much they still love it. Listening to them, you wonder how much it loved them back.