An Unlikely Comeback: The Return of West Coast Cricket

A little over a decade ago, West Coast were a Hawke Cup team. It’s fair to say, though, they were struggling.

They’d become the whipping boys of Zone 3, where opponents went in with the aim of ensuring the quickest and cleanest outright win in the shortest possible time. Cricket on the Coast had become desperately uncompetitive, and their withdrawal from competition was the only sensible outcome.

Until recently, it seemed as though the region had been left to grow moss and follow the likes of Rangitikei and Southern Hawke’s Bay into the dustbin of history. Seemingly not even an afterthought for the cricketing powers-that-be, West Coast were a non-thought.

There were those passionate volunteers who tried to do their bit to keep the game alive, but from the outside it appeared cricket there had simply fallen off a cliff.

There are signs appearing, though, that hint at the beginnings of change. A rep team exists, albeit for the slim scope of their annual one-day contest against Buller, and participation numbers compare well with their Westport neighbours.

To find out where West Coast cricket sits, The Hawke Cup Report spoke with West Coast board president, and Aussie doctor, Brendan Marshall.

In the president’s seat since late 2016, Marshall has a clear and pragmatic vision combined with a strong personal passion for the game. Marshall is a busy man, Chief Medical Officer for the West Coast region and facing many of the same issues in his day job as with his cricket: a lack of resourcing and a lack of understanding from the seats of power rank chief amongst them.

“I've by-and-large felt supported, and felt that they support a lot of what we do – and the funding still comes.

“But I think it's a massive overlap with my work. I'm a rural doctor, and they talk about urban narcissism and urban bias. It's a concept out of Scandinavia.

“And I don't think there's any doubt that the world according to the big associations is that the game thrives on the basis of [the metros] and that's where the funding should go.”

As Marshall says, you have to “work a lot harder to get small associations running,” while the majority of the funding goes to the larger regions or metros that don’t actually need as high a level of investment to keep ticking. Marshall’s comparison is that a kid in Christchurch can “walk a hundred metres down the road, catch a bus, and watch a game. Kids on the coast never ever see those people, which completely takes out that opportunity and flow-on effect of meeting and watching those stars.”

Interestingly, Marshall doesn’t talk ill of Canterbury Cricket or New Zealand Cricket – even when invited to speak off-the-record. Where some might see the big bodies not looking after the small districts, Marshall instead takes the big-picture view and sees it through their eyes.

He does feel, though, that the top-down approach isn’t working.

“I think the one size fits all, which is inevitably what happens when too much of the thinking is centred in Auckland and then in Christchurch for us, just doesn't work. To make the game appeal to country kids and to keep the game thriving in rural areas, you do need a bit of a dedicated approach. And without a doubt, we've lacked that to some extent.

“It is a little bit of a trickle down and you just do a smaller amount of the same and that'll work. It's not quite working for us, without a doubt.”

Circumstances are certainly different: West Coast stretches through the Grey and Westland Districts, centred around Greymouth and Hokitika. The population base is a little more than available to Buller, but still leaves them one of the smallest DAs. Between West Coast and Buller, as Marshall puts it, "you've essentially got two associations with 30,000 people spread up a 600 kilometre strip."

In the end, though, little of our chat focused on what Canterbury or New Zealand Cricket are – or aren’t – doing. Marshall puts his focus on what is in front of him. Perhaps a part of that is that coming from Queensland, he doesn’t have any deep-seated biases around local cricketing politics.

He does, though, give significant credit to Canterbury Country. Under the shared governance and administration services model Canterbury currently operates, Country’s General Manager Peter Devlin also performs that role for West Coast. As Marshall says, there are large governance requirements that come from above for small associations, and “we just couldn’t get all of that done.”

“What that's allowed us is to get the funding, and opportunities for both kids and women cricketers. We've got our first girl’s team ever to contest both an age-group tournament and at the youth level. And then a high school team from Grey High played over in the Gillette Cup. And that's a first for us.”

And to go with Devlin’s efforts in governance, it’s clear when speaking to Country’s Cricket Manager Tim Gruijters that he has a passion to help West Coast in a cricketing sense too.

It ends up being a recurring theme throughout the chat with Marshall – things Country have done to assist, with no direct benefit for themselves, including finding room for Coast age-group players when Coast haven’t had the numbers to form their own side.

To take a moment’s liberty here, it’s great to hear of such a level of camaraderie between DAs and the custodianship Country are displaying as a big player in the region. Credit has to go to individuals like Devlin and Gruijters who see the bigger picture.

But for the West Coast themselves, and how they’re looking to build cricket up in the region, Marshall takes the view that participation is the critical factor. Where that means changing up the norm, they’ve been prepared to do so.

“We've concentrated on that adult male Twenty20. And then the primary slowly grew as we got more coaches involved, we've got some girls cricket going.

“That's the base story, that we just really grew from a grassroots perspective of wanting to provide a format that suited people. So we targeted Sunday afternoons, we targeted Twenty20. And that meant anyone from sort of 15-year-olds getting big enough to 50-year-olds who sort of forgotten their ability. And that truly is the demographic.

“We've got a whole team of Indian players who are hospital workers. Between them, a squad of 15 to 16. A lot of the hokey teams are aligned to rugby clubs, in a good way. And they're talented sports people who played cricket as juniors. And it's good way for those teams to be involved.

“But that's probably the other thing that's worth saying that I think is a real challenge for sport everywhere is this idea of clubs have so much culpability.

“So we've essentially become the West Coast Cricket Club and everyone else who plays is a team. So we carry whatever it be, the risk or the other dilemmas like that in that one year, there's a team and the next the organizers moved away. But it does provide us some flexibility. And I think that model works pretty well for us.”

Remarkably, from the days of having some ramshackle Last Man Stands as the only cricket left in the region, they now have around 150 senior cricketers. Add to that a full youth girl’s team, and around two or three primary teams in the 10- to 13-year-old age-group, with another 25-30 players in the age-group below.

With a heavy focus on ensuring this is a sustainable level of participation, Marshall reiterates several times through our chat that looking towards Hawke Cup entry “isn’t really a short term goal, it isn’t even really a focus.”

While he sees the necessity of it as a level of cricket to aspire to for the better cricketers in the region – and he identifies a few young players as prospects good enough to sharpen their teeth on that stage – he doesn’t want to jump the gun and throw a team under the bus before they’re ready.

“The answer to your question is just really trying to see where the sweet spot is between getting to a point where we can play and compete, versus just entering before we're ready and turning a whole heap of people off it.”

There are other options – Nik Cumming, a former West Coast board president and rep player, was part of the Buller squad that won in 2016. While the suggestion of whether a full merger is on the cards is rebuffed – “Those who've been here a lot longer would answer black and white to that one, that there's no chance” – Marshall does envision the prospect of working together a little more.

One concern on a full merger would be the risk of funding being halved. Marshall’s view is more around a combined representative side. To “allow the young guys as they come through and those in their twenties who want to play a bit of Hawke Cup to at least have the chance to trial.”

But while there’s no “Hawke Cup by 20-Something” slogan, and plenty does sit up in the air, Marshall does admit “I’ve really got one eye on that.”