Is the Barmy Army still barmy?

Back in the day, the Barmy Army was just that, a bunch of English lads getting drunk at the cricket. Today it’s the Barmy Army.com and moving rapidly away from that.

It was named the Barmy Army for fun by the cricket commentators and local press and consisted mostly of a mix of beery football fans, irritatingly wealthy students on a ‘year out’, and older county cricket fans on organised tours with ex-players.

The celebration started in Australia in the late 1980s and today it’s a registered company that turns over quite a few quid, a hundred grand in the bank and sells everything from T-Shirts to expensive all-inclusive trips to follow England abroad.

The T-Shirts are sourced locally so we won’t go into the mark-up (and how much the kids were paid to make them in India or Sri Lanka etc). Those Barmy trips are not cheap, charging up to three grand for a hotel only on some packages on The Ashes tour. I looked at going to Barbados with them for the first Test of England’s winter tour and was amazed to see prices over £4000 for ten days in Barbados. I debated this price on their Twitter feed and they quickly blocked me.

The Barmy Army is a very different beast to when I followed England abroad. In those days you booked a flight from a bucket shop, tipped up at the nearest backpacker’s hostel, cracked a local beer and made friends very quickly.

I wouldn’t say I was one of the founders of it but I was backpacking following England for ten years back then and one of the regulars in those hostels full of England fans. I helped to organize cricket and football games against the locals to get to know them and we would help fans to get to and from the matches.

At the 1992 World Cup in Australia we were at the after party on Finals Day when England lost to Pakistan in the MCG in front of 90,000, a then world record crowd, and witnessed Gladstone Small doing the ‘Gladstone Small’ on the hotel table with a bottle of rum and some very questionable behavior from South African Robin Smith towards the winners on the other table.

Back then it was an adventure and about travelling and staying out there for as long as possible, where ever there may be, getting jobs here or there or just cleaning the hostel or working the bar for free accommodation.

In South Africa, in 1995-96, we had an unofficial Barmy Army hostel in Green Point, Cape Town. It was just brilliant fun and South Africa had just started playing Test cricket back then and the country was in transformation.

Sadly, crime has taken over the country now and the whites are leaving which means it will be like Zimbabwe twenty years from now and so dangerous to tour. Seven international players and 54 sports journalists were mugged there in the 1990s alone. Today the Barmy Army crowd are tucked away in nice hotels and ferried to the grounds in likewise minibuses. The heart and soul has gone.

Today the Barmy Army are very corporate in their mission statement. They even tried to drop the Flag of St. George from their ‘official logo’, even though the Barmy Army are known for exactly that flag. The Barmy Army bought in a new managing director called Chris Millard who said in a statement on the group’s website:

“The St George’s Cross has been on our logo for 25 years, it’s loved by many, but we’re trying to move towards a new era and we think that, with a tidy-up of our logo and a refresh of our structure, we can start to make cricket more accessible for everyone. We’ve given this a great deal of thought and have ultimately decided it’s time for a fresh look to modernize and move the Barmy Army company forward to keep pace with the digital age...”.

I’m not quite sure why the flag had to go in the digital age but you sense they would quite like to drop the ‘laddish’ image of the Barmy Army (the barmy bit) and the connotations the English flag has with the far right so to attract a more discerning middle-class paying clientele for their holiday packages.

You have to admit England football fans abroad are an ugly bunch. Will they drop the Army bit as it upsets the countries they visit over colonialism? Are we near a Barmy Army Cruise, perhaps?

Maybe ‘glamping’ tours (glamorous camping) on the grass verges of the world’s great cricket grounds? Yutes at the SCG should rile the locals! Some of the beer-bellied builders from Birmingham and tattooed mechanics from Romford are still dotted in the crowd in the Caribbean but it's mostly an older blue-chip pension crowd on those Barmy tours these days. Pinot Grigio, not Tooheys, the preferred tipple in the bleachers.