THE cries of excitement rang out from the tight little school playground on a chilly afternoon in Ladbroke Grove, West London. Amazingly, a game of cricket was being played by the fifth form of Oxford Gardens Primary School. And, despite the temperature, the children were loving it.

A ten-year-old girl lashed out with the blue plastic bat and hit the tennis ball farther and higher than seemed possible. Several kids ran to fetch it, quickly returning it to keep things moving. The session, supervised by Ray Tudor, brother of Alex, the England cricketer, lasted an hour, and at the end, the children wore an exhilarated, if weary, look.

As recently as the late 1980s, such a scene would have been hard to find in inner London state primary schools. At the end of that decade, a survey revealed an alarming disappearance of cricket from the sports curriculum. Thanks largely to the ludicrous insistence by the Inner London Education Authority that competitive sport was bad for children, cricket had been largely phased out. By 1989, only 24 of 800 primary schools in the 17 inner London boroughs were teaching even the most simplified form of the game. Thanks to sterling work from Capital Kids Cricket, a registered charity, more than 700 of them are back playing cricket.

Two well-meaning Yorkshiremen living in London — Bill Greaves and Haydn Turner — were appalled by the 1980s decline and set up Capital Kids Cricket (CKC), aided by large financial backers in the Foundation for Sport & the Arts and the Lord’s Taverners.

Initially, CKC approached the schools, offering both equipment and coaches, but before long it was the schools who made contact. For ten years after its establishment in 1989, CKC aimed to spread the cricketing gospel to the primaries only.

Realising that the majority of converts to the game were then lost at their secondary schools, CKC then began to target them. So far, 50 out of 250 secondaries in the region have been brought into the fold and an inaugural under-13 tournament was staged at Lord’s last April.

Encouragingly, teachers, whose interest in cricket had lain dormant, have been coaxed into asssisting. “In almost every case, volunteers have been found within the teaching staff to keep cricket practice and training sessions going, once the initial equipment and coaching skills have been introduced,” Turner said.

Tudor, who coaches at 15 schools each week, earned praise from Lisa Rautenbach, a Form 5 teacher at Oxford Gardens. “Ray really gets them motivated and is very good at managing them,” she said. “They realise that he is increasing their skills. The game is so nice and simple and it makes them disciplined. They keep banging on about it all week. One girl who normally drops out of organised sport heard how much fun the others had the first time Ray came and got involved the second time.”

CKC, though, has become a victim of its own success, having to fund, as it does, not just separate programmes for secondary and primary school children but also provide more grass facilities at a time of fast-disappearing school playing fields.

The McC and four metropolitan counties, Surrey, Middlesex, Kent and Essex, all provide operational help, but CKC desperately needs more financial back-up. Turner and Greaves are hoping to attract sponsorship from the corporate sector, whose involvment has been small as yet.