Smash hit

A similar level of enthusiasm has been found for the “skills days” at Essex’s indoor centre in Chelmsford during the February half-term and over Easter. “Interest has been enormous,” a spokeswoman said. “Most of the days we have had to run a reserve list. Last year we were lucky if the classes were two-thirds full and some of them we had to cancel.”

On the northeastern edge of Essex, Abberton and District Cricket Club, a small team whose first XI play in the Marshall Hatchick Two Counties League third division, demonstrate the huge interest even at the lower levels of the game. Paul Johnson, the chairman, said that he has had about “40 per cent more people ringing up and wanting to get their kids involved”. There has been particular interest from children aged under 9 (or rather their parents), with numbers increasing from 25 last year to 40 this year.

Yet while parents may be doing the enthusiastic arranging, it seems unlikely that children will have to be dragged screaming to nets. When we spoke, Johnson’s sons, aged 10 and 7, were playing cricket in his garden. “This time of year they’d usually be playing football,” he said. “But now they both want to be Freddie and they want Woodworm bats (Andrew Flintoff’s manufacturer). My boys were brought up with Kookaburra bats, but this winter they have been nagging me for Woodworms.”

The pre-season Ashes effect has been seen by retailers. At the Dudley branch of Decathlon, the warehouse sports shop, near Birmingham, the range of equipment on sale demonstrates the enthusiasm for the game that started when England won the second Test at Edgbaston, 20 minutes down the road, in August.

“We’ve got extra equipment in this year to cope with demand,” Andy Croney, the manager of the team sports section, said. For the first three months of this year, sales of all cricket equipment increased by 44 per cent on 2005. Junior bats were up by 80 per cent and protection by 95 per cent.

Cricshop, the online retailer, has had a similar spike in sales, reporting an increase of 15 to 20 per cent in pre-publication orders of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, while the new England one-day shirt, which will be released on May 1, has been immensely popular, despite the country’s erratic one-day form. Cricshop had estimated 1,000 sales throughout the season, but within six weeks of customers being able to pre-order the shirt, 500 had been booked.

Even a DVD of England’s defeat in Pakistan before Christmas, entitled Inzamam’s Invincibles, has been a bestseller, although Cricshop concedes that most purchasers are Asian.

NOT everywhere has been touched by the boom. The new edition of Wisden reports that in Tenby, Pembrokeshire, an attempt to re-form a village club was abandoned when “only one elderly gentleman came forward”. And Alan Jones, the former head of PE at Chandler’s Ford school in Hampshire, which nurtured Chris Tremlett, the fringe England player, expressed his frustration at poor facilities stifling the game.

“Loads of children want to talk about the Ashes and to play the game,” he said. “But we have to play only away matches because the school has never had a grass pitch and the artificial one is deemed unsafe. We need to take advantage now of this enthusiasm for cricket.”

The sale of school playing fields and the decline of qualified coaches in schools is being countered by the Cricket Foundation’s Chance to Shine initiative, which is backed by the Government, Sport England and private donations. The programme, which partners successful clubs with schools in their area, ran a pilot scheme last year involving 12 clubs and 72 schools. This year that has increased to 100 clubs and 600 schools.

“There is no doubt that our task to reinvigorate cricket in schools has been made much easier by what happened last year,” Nick Gandon, the director of the Cricket Foundation, said. Leighton said that the relationship can be two-way. “Clubs can let schools use their pitches in the summer and schools can return the favour by letting clubs use their gyms in winter,” he said.

So the game is in rude health across the board seven months after the Ashes win. But as Leighton pointed out, there is always going to be one negative. “What we can’t sort out is the weather,” he said. “I’m sat here at Old Trafford and the rain is lashing down.”

• Additional reporting by Geoffrey Dean, Pat Gibson, Matthew Pryor, Ivo Tennant and John Westerby