FORMER WORLD Cup winner Ebony Rainford-Brent talks to Wisden Cricket Monthly about her brainchild, the African-Caribbean Engagement [ACE] programme, which she hopes can transform the chances for inner-city black cricketers

What is ACE and why has it come about?

It’s an independent charity, with a simple ambition: we want to re-engage the African-Caribbean community. Black people represent less than one per cent of the recreational game and it’s all going backwards. Sport England has come in massively to help us, giving us over £500k to be able to make a difference over the next three years, and the ECB have helped us too with funding. We’re starting in London and Birmingham, with a vision to be in five key cities. 

What does the programme look like in real terms?

There’s a community element, so we’ll be going into targeted areas, and carrying out school sessions too. One thing we’re still developing is talent identification. We’re looking for three characteristics that you can’t teach: pace, power, and hand-eye coordination. We’re carrying out some metrics to look at the baseline level for kids’ sporting performance at a certain age, and we’ll be running tests to find kids who register high on these levels.

What happens next?

They will then be plucked into a development structure, given the equivalent of a ‘golden ticket’, and the chance to make it into the ACE academy. We want to be more like football, the way they go hunting for talent. An example: we’ve been speaking to some estates which would have 4,000 residents onsite with a multi-use games area, and about 1,000 kids. So we invite some kids down to get some t-shirts and pick up some free gear, but we put that lens of talent ID on them to find the best talents, pull them out, and try and accelerate their development.

Is one of the biggest challenges trying to overturn the perception in certain communities that cricket is not a game for them? 

I’m going to use my own example here. I had no experience of cricket. I come from a Jamaican background but I thought cricket was crap. And the person who introduced me to the game made it fun and relatable to me. The first time I hit a ball, my whole impression changed. It shouldn’t be a hard sell. It’s the most primitive game. If you say, whack this as hard as you can, throw it as hard as you can, or try and spin it as hard as you can, that’s as simple as it gets. We’ve over-engineered our game to make it seem more complex than it is. What ACE did last summer [2020] was to break down some of the myths. I thought that the black community wasn’t interested, and that’s a shift. The amount of calls and emails we got from parents, teachers, schools, church leaders, saying that they want to be reconnected with the game.

Speaking to Alex Tudor, one of ACE’s ambassadors, he said that while it was a great initiative, it shouldn’t have fallen to you to set it up.

I ran out of patience. I hit that point. But what I would say is that there’s now a willingness from people in positions of power, people like Ian Whatmore, Tom Harrison and Sanjay Patel at the ECB, and they want do something. It’s important that we bring this conversation forward to bring everybody together. I wish it had been done earlier, but equally I do appreciate that using our faces and voices – myself, Tudes, Mark Butcher – will help to drive it.

What constitutes success?

Personally I want to see mini Sophia Dunkleys and Alex Tudors running around at the top end of the game in county cricket and it being more representative of society. But what that success stems from is what we really need to be about – providing opportunities for communities, with more people playing, and more filtering into our wider game, into administration, into the media, into all levels of our game. 

To buy Wisden Cricket Monthly: https://wisden.com/shop/wisden-cricket-monthly-issue-41