I asked my old school friend Grant Gordon if he wanted to shadow me for a day to see what a “day in the life” at Twenty20 Community Cricket looked like. New parents often ask me if I do this full-time. Hopefully this gives an idea!
 

It’s 6:38am at Stoneleigh station, near Epsom, and I have barely sat down in Darren’s car before he launches into cricket chat. I have been up and travelling since before 5 and feel wretched; Darren is sparkling already, and as he drives, he talks me through the day ahead. I dutifully reach for my notebook and start blearily scribbling notes.

“I woke up to 23 WhatsApp messages - questions about All Stars in Ripley, parents with issues about the various matches on today, a few drop outs, Old Woking Cricket Club want to get hold of me, and Epsom & Ewell FC - I’m the Operations Director there - want to talk about new matchday camera technology we’re trialling. Oh, and a guy in Cyprus has messaged me wanting to know more about the Walking Cricket Association.”

We pull into a nearby golf club where Darren spends 6 or 7 early mornings a week working through his To Do list. It’s a friendly suburban complex - there is a Crazy Golf course and above the bar is an Escape Room. Best of all there is a Par 3 course which Darren says I can use at 10 when he zips to the dentist. 10am feels like a very very long way away.

Darren orders two double pots of tea for us, and two ‘19th Hole’ mega breakfasts. A scattering of golfers are munching their pre-round scrambled egg and bacon butties, while Darren has his laptop out and has pulled up his Master Spreadsheet. This is a vast Excel document with eye-watering amounts of data compressed onto it: budgets, player stats, coach availability, fixtures. This is the very heart of Twenty20 Community Cricket. I hope he’s backed it up somewhere.

Darren is very interested in the enquiry from Cyprus. He is one of the founders of Walking Cricket in the UK and 6 weeks ago established The Walking Cricket Association (read more) to centralise and promote the game. There are around 40,000 British ex-pats living on the island, many of them over 55 and presumably some of these must be cricket fans. Darren’s correspondent has founded the island’s first Walking Cricket team and is now looking for Darren for support, and to link up with his growing pan-European network of Walking Cricket clubs. Darren tells me that this year’s walking cricket European Cup is in Vienna but is excited by the possibility of getting teams out to Cyprus for an event. He emails with this suggestion.

Suddenly an error message flashes up on his screen - there’s a small glitch on the company’s website, so he contacts the web providers in India to try and sort it asap.

As we eat our 19th Hole breakfasts, Darren keeps talking cricket at me. He flicks through the Sports sections of the Telegraph and the BBC picking up cricket stories. He tells me that England star Alice Capsey (who has hit 80 against New Zealand) and Surrey fast bowler Charlotte Lambert had both crossed his coaching path over the last 19 years. As he talks, he is replying to WhatsApps and emails as they ‘ping’ in. Darren’s parallel thinking settings are on max. The fry up has settled in nicely and after this busy morning I am ready for a snooze. Darren, however, has been filled with even more energy. I look at the time: it’s only 8am. The day has barely started.

Parents start deluging his inbox about the matches later. ”This is always the busiest time of the day as parents have just dropped off their kids at school and message me with any issues or queries before work.” Some players are last minute dropouts, needing Darren to rejig the teams and see if replacements are available.

He reads match reports from his network of coaches, posts on social media and receives an email from a parent saying that his son can’t find his cricket trousers, does Darren have a spare pair for tonight? The first stage of his ‘Search for a State School Superstar’ event is happening at the weekend - 80 kids have signed up and parents want more info, so there is much admin to do about that. Then Dave calls.

Dave is the company’s Operations Manager handling HR, coach management and logistics. Darren has the ideas and the overview, Dave organises. He is Peter Taylor to Darren’s Brian Clough.

And the phone buzzes every minute, and the emails keep pinging. A parent whose mother is in India wants to know whether she can watch her grandson’s matches. All Twenty20 Academy games are live streamed and available to view in the archive so links and viewing tips are sent through.

Darren updates the scoring app with last night’s numbers; a young fast bowler has sprained her ankle and can’t play later; the video analytics people for the football want to talk detail; someone has got in touch regarding car parking issues and Darren is her local councillor so can he sort please? Darren also looks through options for new travel sponsors. He wants a company to put together travel packages for the European cricket tournaments he organises, with a view to channeling the money back into European cricket development - like the new tournament in Estonia he has arranged for this coming autumn.

The golfers come and go with their sausage baps as we huddle in a corner talking cricket. Two more vats of tea arrive as Darren continues updating the Master Spreadsheet. He spends 90 minutes a day doing this, 7 days a week. Darren played for Surrey U-19s, alongside Mark Butcher and Adam Holliake, and was a really good spin bowler. But before he started his cricket coaching business in 2007, he had spent just over a decade working in the City as a Marketing Manager, then Risk Analyst. He thinks many of the skills he learned in that part of his life - spreadsheet analysis, budget handling, deal making, risk assessment, parallel thinking, advertising & promotion - transferred very successfully into Twenty20 Community Cricket. He does love the sound of leather on willow and the smell of freshly mown grass, but I feel that an update from Microsoft for his assets allocation tracking spreadsheet gets him almost equally excited. 

Suddenly it’s 10 o’clock and Darren’s long overdue dental appointment is looming. The last 3 and a half hours have flown by, and it’s been fun - for me and Darren. He is clearly doing a job he relishes. I head to the first tee of the Par 3 while Darren nervously confronts the dentist’s chair. As I knock a ball up and down the fairways, I reflect that there are nearly 400 young cricketers in the Twenty20 Community Cricket Academy and MCC Foundation program he manages, playing across 20 or so teams. So that’s about 350 sets of parents directly communicating with him with questions and concerns; all of whom are treated courteously and respectfully.

As I putt out for a disappointing 4 on the 9th hole, my phone vibrates with a message from Darren: “Back. Teeth miraculously fine, no further treatment. We need to go. Have to make extra stop so might miss lunch. Hope you’re not hungry.”

So, I hurry off the golf course and into his car which screeches away towards Darren’s house where we need to pick up some balls, shirts, and that spare pair of trousers for the fast bowler later.

It’s noon, it’s getting hot, and we pull out onto the A3. This road feels like the main artery of Darren’s business, and each day he drives up and down it travelling to games and meetings. Today we’re heading out to Camberley Cricket Club, nudged up against a three-border intersection between Surrey, Berkshire and Hampshire. This is the current frontier for Darren, and he tells me about plans to expand from his Surrey base into those other counties before the end of the current decade.

Camberley Cricket Club are running a tournament for U-13 schools girls’ teams. There are nine teams there with very keen participants and impressively committed teachers in a beautiful setting. Darren’s team of coaches are running net sessions to focus the girls’ skills. At prize giving the T20 coaches have nominated three girls to win part bursaries for the Academy, and all 90 girls go home with a flyer about further opportunities with the T20 Academy and MCC Foundation Guildford Hub.

In a break, Darren tells me that the guy from Cyprus has emailed again saying he has now joined the Walking Association and likes Darren’s idea of a potential summer cup in Cyprus. However, he points out how hot it can get in the summer (up to 42 degrees) and so the correct scheduling would be crucial.

It’s nearly 4pm, and we are both hot, dehydrated, and very hungry. So, we pull into the nearest McDonald’s and go large on everything so that we feel slightly sick. Darren points out that it’s nice to have half an hour to actually sit down to eat ‘dinner’ as normally he eats whatever he can grab on the move on the A3. I’ve ordered an extra-large strawberry milkshake for its sugar and mega-calories as my ultra early start is beginning to impact my energy levels. I have barely succeeded in sucking some of the thick gunk up the use-inappropriate straw when Darren says it’s time to go, and heads for the door. I wash the Quarter pounder grease off my hands, grab the milkshake and we’re off again on the A3…

…up to Tolworth in South London, for an under-13 boys’ match between Guildford and Leatherhead, two MCC Foundation teams. We’re much closer to central London than the Hampshire border now, but for a few hundred acres here there’s a suburban rural paradise accessible to all - Hogsmill Wood Nature Reserve, Knollmead Park, and numerous sports grounds surrounded by woodland. There’s even a sign to a farm.

The cricket standard on display in this game is extremely high. These are brilliant young cricketers. Darren tells me that he has taken the older MCC Foundation Guildford Girls’ teams to the last 4 Lord’s Finals, winning the last 3, but so far, the boys have not made it past the national semi-finals. I can sense an eagerness to put that right this year! We stay for a couple of hours chatting to the coaches and parents and watching the action. At 7pm Darren says it’s time to go.

I make it home by 10pm, shattered, not least because I’ve been carrying a golf bag across London transport. I collapse into bed and don’t wake up until 9am the next morning, conscious that Darren would have already been at his table in the golf club for two hours, drinking tea and responding to those pinging messages…