Last month Headingley got a new cricket venue. It doesn’t have a lot in common with the long-established and much more famous one down the road – this one tends to be drier, warmer and significantly more attractive to young people. In October a similar venue arrived in Bristol, both just a couple of miles and a world away from the County Ground. They are the most recently opened branches of Sixes, something of a bar/restaurant/cricket medley. If WG Grace would struggle to recognise the game people are playing there, for many it is already more familiar than the version that requires good weather, outdoor space, pads, patience and a modicum of sobriety.
Four years after the first one opened its doors there are 18 across the UK, another 20-30 planned in this country, satellites in the Caribbean and the USA, something in the region of 1,500 franchise requests (mainly from the US) clogging their in-tray, the current and former England internationals Ben Stokes, Stuart Broad, Jofra Archer and Andrew Strauss have all invested and the CEO, Calum Mackinnon, claims: “More people now play in Sixes in the UK than actually play the sport of cricket.” Resistance is futile.
It would be romantic to imagine that Sixes came out of someone’s love of the game and a desire to spread the word. Instead it was created by two Scots who had barely looked at a bat let alone picked one up, and fuelled the rapid spread of so-called competitive socialising.
A potted history: the bowling and cocktails bar All Star Lanes launched in London in 2006, then the table tennis venue Bounce six years later. The entrepreneur Adam Breeden was behind them both, and he kept going. “I thought, if you can do it with ping pong, you can do it with other sport,” he said. The darts bar Flight Club followed in 2018, then mini golf’s Puttshack in 2018 and F1 Arcade in 2022.
All of this had not gone unnoticed, and it was in late 2019 that Mackinnon and Andy Waugh, owners of the Scottish restaurant Mac & Wild, decided to join the fray – with a “virtual hunting and whisky bar concept” called Smoky Barrels. There was something of a backlash, with Peta declaring that “with boundless opportunities for amusement, it’s near psychopathic to get a thrill from gunning down other living beings, even in a virtual world”. Then Covid hit; neither Mac & Wild nor Smoky Barrels survived, and as Mackinnon describes it: “We literally were like: ‘Shit, what do we do now?’ And Andy had a great idea.”
Waugh takes up the story. “We did a lot of research on what hadn’t been done. Because we’d seen Flight Club doing the darts and Puttshack was doing putting,” he says. “So the obvious next sport to bring into a bar was fishing.”
Fishing turned out to be, for now, dead in the water, and cricket was next on the list. “We went and found this training technology and we contacted them, and me and Andy had a hit,” says Mackinnon. “We’d never played cricket before, and we went into this cage and we were like: ‘Wow, this is actually really fun. Imagine if you could do this with five pints, a great atmosphere and good food.’”
On a chilly early afternoon last week, I had my first go. You see a bowler approach on a screen in front of you, out of which an orange, plastic and mostly harmless ball appears at the appropriate moment. There are spinners and seamers. The ball actually spins. There are three game modes – including a Hundred version created in partnership with the England and Wales Cricket Board – and six difficulty levels. Runs are scored by hitting the ball into panels positioned around a netted “cage”. Waugh, who I sense has had quite a lot of practice, gleefully thrashed the ball around on the professional setting – “It’s all about offensive, attacking cricket,” he says. I flailed clumsily on amateur. The experience was both quite fun and a little dispiriting, though a few friends, a couple of drinks and a decent pizza would probably have dulled the pain a bit.
It certainly seems a popular recipe, and Sixes’ customer base – 54% in their 20s, 35% female – are exactly the kind of people actual cricket would like to get their hooks into. The question is, will anyone make the transition? “I think me and Andy are almost the perfect example of that,” says Mackinnon. “We’re two Scots that never played or watched cricket in their lives and ended up founding Sixes – and now we love going to cricket games. We attend a lot of matches now and love it. We went to Lord’s when we had Mac & Wild and I don’t think we actually watched one minute of cricket, we were just in the bar the whole time. We just didn’t really appreciate it, didn’t know what was going on. I’d say we’re quite big fans now.”
There has already been one recruit, though it will be a while before we find out how significant it might be. Having honed his skills at Sixes, Mackinnon’s nine-year-old son, Casper, has been asked to trial for Surrey. “He came to our head office meeting a couple of weeks ago and he played the entire head office and absolutely annihilated all of us,” Mackinnon says. “He’s so lucky, he’s had thousands of hours in these nets.”
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