Yeah we’re all swimming against the tide. I’m not involved in football having been utterly crap at it even when I didn’t weigh three stone too much and have no knees. But even though that is supposed to be booming, most of the pitches in my old home town, that in my youth would be full of kids games every Saturday morning and men’s every Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning are barely used today. Except as dog toilets. Or housing.
I was asked a specific question on NE cricketers with test caps and I wouldn’t know where to start the research to answer it. So I’ll duck it not through lack of cohones but through lack of knowledge. While accepting that the gut feel is fewer back then.
That said, the fact you mention Stokes is telling. He’s a kiwi who grew up in Cumberland, not a North Easterner. He wasn’t lost to cricket because Cumberland didn’t play first class. Doesn’t even in fact have its own single county board anymore. England have had plenty of other players born in what we used to call Minor Counties including some if their greatest. So even that is not black and white.
