It’s never been so hard to run a cricket club. There are committee meetings, ECB Clubmark applications, constitution reviews, nets to book, teams to arrange, fixtures to find, teas to make, players to recruit, funds to raise, safeguarding, ground hire, risk management, general ground and clubhouse maintenance, DBS-checks, equipment orders, marketing, data protection, tax issues, payrolls… the list goes on. Sometimes you have to remind yourself that this is a recreational pursuit.

“There’s far too much red tape, paperwork and organising in cricket,” says Paul Blackwell, committee member of Rickmansworth CC and the Hertfordshire Cricket League. “We’re making it hard for people to join in and for clubs to exist.”

Club cricket is scrapping to stay relevant in an ever-changing world, and the people entrusted with sustaining our game – those who work tirelessly for nothing – need our help. Is the current weight of paperwork, monetisation, and legal back-covering making the role untenable? Is Clubmark status really so desirable? Is a lack of fresh-faced volunteers holding grassroots cricket back from kicking on into the modern world? These answers could influence whether a club – or even a league – wins its fight for survival.

The ECB appears to agree. Matt Dwyer, ECB’s director of growth and participation, is eager to provide adequate digital support through PlayCricket.com, with phased enhancements to be released over the next two seasons. He believes this will help clubs facilitate communications and payments, and centralise general administration. The ECB has already started to integrate online payments into the portal and will market it more rigorously next year. For Brown, this can’t come soon enough, but centralising such systems is bad news for rival cricket technology companies; CricHQ, for instance, went into receivership last month. Slate, the match fee app, will be watching developments with interest.

The ECB has acknowledged club cricket’s admin issue for some time. “What I observed early on was a lot of bureaucracy that didn’t need to be there,” says Dwyer. “We’ve now gone fully online with regards to safeguarding, which makes the process for clubs a whole lot easier. So we need to ensure there are basic administration elements that keep people away from the risks associated with it but also eliminating some of the red tape. You’ve got to get the balance right between minimising risk to our players – and to our clubs.”

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Volunteer-shy league organisations are also close to melting point. At the start of last season, Rob Richtering, the general secretary of Yorkshire Premier League North, claimed that the administrative burden had become worse than ever. “Last year we had an unprecedented amount of disciplinary issues to deal with, and 2016 was a terrible year for discipline. We had to deal with everything from sex offenders to people playing under pseudo names. The general one is dissent to umpires. We had one issue that must have taken 70-80 hours to deal with because it involved other leagues. It was a nightmare. Discipline, complaints and protests take up 80 per cent of our time. There seems to be people complaining about anything these days, but they do in life – it just reflects society.

That’s because no one young ever volunteers for decision making positions…

— Market Deeping CC ? (@Deepingcc) October 22, 2017

“With club secretaries, the turnover is massive. In the past, a club secretary would be there for 20, 30, 40 years. You’ve got to look after the administrator. There’s a massive effort to recruit more players and increase participation, which is fantastic, but sometimes you feel the administrators are forgotten. That’s my massive worry.”

While generally upbeat about the game’s prospects, Richtering is perturbed by the retirement of several influential secretaries in neighbouring leagues and senses a tipping point in the landscape. “I think there’ll be less leagues because there’s a lack of people to run them. I can see that happening already in Yorkshire, and I think it will happen faster than people think. In some leagues, one man does everything. What happens if he leaves? In five years’ time, I think there’ll be half the leagues there are now, certainly in Yorkshire. They’ll have to pull in all their resources.”

Club cricket doesn’t know whether it’s dividing or uniting. The gap between big and small clubs is set to widen, yet an increase in both club and league mergers is also likely. An influx of new volunteers is crucial, not only to ease the pressure on the faithful few, but to induce fresh ideas. Cricket may have more rival leisure outlets than ever, but the club cricketer – and therefore club cricket itself – can only be protected once we’ve looked after the administrator.