by Tim Wigmore
The macro prospects were also suddenly improved. In July 2006, the ICC’s development programme finally obtained significant secure funding, the full members agreeing to allocate associate members six per cent off the top of revenues, in addition to their quarter share of dividend distributions. A new multi-divisional global tournament cycle, the World Cricket League, provided an avenue to more money and improved opposition.
‘All of a sudden there was something to play for,’ recalls Rarua Dikana, then PNG’s captain, who was appointed its first high performance manager. To operate under this new dispensation, Nades decided, it would be necessary to succeed Satchell with an outsider – someone free of the history, personal and familial ties in which Cricket PNG was trussed. His choice was a bright and personable Australian youth ambassador, Andrew Knott, who had been working as a volunteer in Samoa at the South Pacific Games in September 2007. With money from the Brian Bell Company and in-kind support from Hebou Constructions, a new headquarters, Cricket Haus, was erected at Amini Park for Knott and a small staff.
Yet nothing could have prepared Knott for the challenges of PNG. The Amini Park and Colts grounds were in poor shape, strewn with garbage, from broken glass to used condoms; neighbouring Ken Lifu Reserve was worse, having been churned into a bog by locals using it for driving practice. The precincts by now were also seething with squatters: Knott retained one named Luke at K50 a month to act as an intermediary with the rest, and found him very helpful, even inviting him to the staff Christmas Party at a Chinese restaurant.
‘You have never seen a man pile his plate so high with food,’ Knott recalls. ‘Then he tells us very proudly that he’s a Seventh Day Adventist and doesn’t eat pork. We didn’t have the heart to tell him that he had about half a pig on his plate.’
But a day at Cricket Haus could be scary, especially the three hours without electricity because of the local utility’s practice of ‘load shedding’, and also throw up startling problems. On one occasion, Luke visited Knott about a personal matter. In the course of an altercation, his mother had killed a man by hitting him with a watering can; this man’s wantoks were now threatening to raise hell at Amini Park unless they received compensatory ‘payback’. Unsure if the ICC had intended its annual grant be spent this way, Knott made the restitution.
Knott drew on the laconicism and resilience of his staff: then Dikana and his two development officers, Lakani Oaha and John Ovia. Nothing much fazed them. One afternoon, Knott and Dikana were talking at Cricket Haus when gunshots rang out, and a group of felons began sprinting across Amini Park with police in hot pursuit. They watched in fascinated silence as the police caught their quarry up and began absolutely leathering them with their batons. Knott paled at the brutality, but found his colleague unmoved. ‘They’ll cop it worse at the station,’ said Dikana simply, and resumed reviewing the high-performance programme.
This, Knott realised, was what you had to do – just get on with things. He introduced policies for training, selection and touring. He implemented a rebranding with a competition to devise new names for the national teams, and persuaded South Pacific Breweries to sponsor a new domestic competition, the SP Supa Series (2). The Brian Bell Company paid for two young players, Assad Vala and Willie Gavera, to play in Townsville in 2007/08 with Wanderers, the club best known for discovering Mitchell Johnson.
There was a limit, however, and Knott encountered one in December 2008 when PNG was rocked by a shocking crime. Sir George Constantinou, principal of Hebou Constructions, was carjacked in the Moresby suburb of Gerehu and stoned to death. As the PNG government exacted bloody reprisals and the Australian government issued travel warnings recommending ‘a high degree of caution’ in view of ‘high levels of serious crime’, Knott felt the ever-present ‘mood of paranoia’ in the expatriate community intensify. ‘It [Constantinou’s death] was one of the reasons why I felt it was time to move on,’ Knott recalls. ‘You can’t help but feel as though you’re playing a game of chance and your number will come up at some stage.’
The replacement he helped recruit, Australian Bill Leane, remembers his introductory visit for its atmosphere of lockdown, ‘Knotty had done a great job, and a ton of groundwork that gave the ICC confidence in dealing with us. But he was shit-scared. I could see it. He was surrounded by squatters, and it had gotten to the point where he couldn’t even walk the facility.’ Leane wasn’t going to put up with that, and he didn’t.
Few conversations with anyone involved in cricket in Papua New Guinea last five minutes without mention of Bill Leane. He is a divisive figure, although rather than causing some to love him and some to hate him, he usually leaves people doing both. That was probably bound to happen. For all its sanguinary eruptions of violence, PNG is bound by social structures of suffocating tightness: there is always a reason not to do something, because it has always been done some other way, or because of who might be offended by a change. Leane had no patience with these customs.
The standard exchange about Leane will begin with a complaint, that Bill didn’t understand this, or didn’t listen to that, or that he was rude, or impetuous, or cavalier. Equally you never leave a conversation without the admission he accomplished what had hitherto appeared impossible.
Leane came to Cricket PNG from the Australian Cricketers’ Association where he’d been commercial manager for two years, after a long career in retail, and an even longer one as a fierce competitor in grassroots cricket and football. His most conspicuous work at the ACA had been building its Masters cricket tour for past players: as a result, he had a Filofax full of cricket contacts all over the world. First priority was a proper coach, as near to full-time as possible.
‘I could see that the players weren’t lazy; they worked hard,’ he recalls. ‘But they only worked hard so far as they could see. They were visual learners. They followed examples. It was pretty clear written programmes and processes were a bit pointless for them; they needed leadership and mentoring.’
One candidate stood out. ‘Andy Bichel was perfect. He’s just a great bloke. He engages people. He shows you how. He also had a story: he’d been Australia’s 12th man more often than anyone else. He was all about the team. Plus he had a profile, which was something you could sell.’ Already bowling coach at the Chennai Super Kings and only available 65 days a year, Bichel was an expensive investment; Leane paid him more than he paid himself. But he proved worth every Kina, making friends everywhere. He stayed while in Moresby in Hebou’s Airways Hotel, PNG’s finest, where the restaurant maitre’d still wears the national shirt that Bichel gave him.
Over the years, the experiences of John Ovia and Chris Amini notwithstanding, PNG had benefited relatively little from its proximity to Australia. Leane was resolved that that should change. In December 2009, Bichel welcomed Michael Kasprowicz, Damien Martyn, Greg Matthews, Greg Blewett, Andrew Symonds and Jimmy Maher for the inaugural Legends Bash, sponsored in the name of the ‘Don’t Drink and Drive’ campaign by Pacific MMI Insurance.
Cricket PNG had not had known such publicity for ten years, since Allan Border’s flying visit. The games were covered by EMTV locally, by Foxtel in Australia, and won an ICC award for best marketing and media event outside the full members.
Leane was also adamant that the traffic should be two ways. He expanded the Brian Bell-sponsored scholarship programme, placing a score of young hopefuls with Melbourne clubs where he had contacts: they were billeted with families, paid in modest allowances and public transport vouchers enabling them to practise twice a week among themselves at the Maddocks Indoor Cricket Centre in Blackburn. He then tapped the same clubs to donate gear, which Maddocks staff loaded into one and a half containers for shipment by freight forwarder from Brisbane.
Leane’s greatest coup was to introduce a turf wicket table to Amini Park – a task in which he enlisted an invaluable ally. From Wellington in NSW, Mitch Lutschini opened the bowling in the early 1980s for Sydney in NSW grade cricket; his sister Marie also played eight T
ests for Australia. Thirty years ago he accepted a diesel engineering apprenticeship in PNG and joined Hebou, where he grew ever more senior and ever more adept at getting things done. Asked to describe himself, he says simply, ‘I fix things.’
As Leane had cricket contacts in Australia, Lutschini had professional and political contacts in PNG, in abundance. Lutschini is too full of bonhomie to muse aloud on his motives, but his passion for cricket in PNG, to provide an opportunity for cricketers to make something of themselves, seems to come from a deeply personal place. Sir George Constantinou’s murder hit him doubly hard. Not only had Lutschini regarded the Hebou patriarch as a surrogate father, but his own life had been scarred many years earlier by the carjacking death of his first wife, pregnant with their third child.
In the last five years, Hebou has turned into Cricket PNG’s first K1m sponsor, including backing for the national championships, the Hebou Shield, held from May to July. But Lutschini’s support has been deeper and broader. He has been the solicitous voice on the phone in times of trouble; he has been the shrewd interpreter of local customs; one senses he has been a secret source of authority too. Joining Lutschini in the airway’s private Havanaba one evening, I found him deep in conversation with a nuggety figure in an open-neck shirt who looked vaguely familiar. ‘Meet the prime minister of PNG,’ said Lutschini casually.
The challenge of finally introducing turf cricket to PNG more than a decade after it had been promised required that Amini Park at last be secured. First, the title had to be sorted out, by a byzantine legal process that finally brought a halt to opportunist petitioners at Cricket Haus claiming to be traditional owners of the land. Second, the area needed to be purged of its unruly inhabitants, whose drinking sessions and pitched battles with improvised weapons on the oval had now reached epic proportions: one, reported in the 2012 edition of Wisden, involved as many as 400 combatants.
Again, Leane explored legal remedies, this time to no avail. At last, Lutschini suggested the old-fashioned remedy of ‘smoking them out’. In short, this involved Hebou setting fire to the derelict Boroko Sports Club where most of the squatters were congregated, having them arrested as they emerged, then bulldozing the charred remains into the ground. As soon as this process was complete, Lutschini deployed earthmoving equipment to ring the ground with two-metre moats and two-metre fences topped with barbed wire. The ubiquitous Luke was offered the run of the old curator’s house in return for becoming the resident security chief, a duty he performs to this day with utmost vigilance and a gleaming PNG pocket knife.
Early in 2010, Leane and Lutschini then flew to Brisbane to learn about turf wickets. They met former Gabba curator Kevin Mitchell Snr for tuition. They visited Jimboomba Turf to discuss grasses, choosing a couch known to flourish in tropical Darwin. Cultivated in Beaudesert, the turf was moistened, palletised and flown to Moresby by Air Niugini, where a former golf course designer, Josh Hanrahan, supervised its installation.
Hebou provided a road roller to flatten the surface, and dammed the nearby creek so that water could be drawn by a bore pump. The donation of a ride-on mower allowed them to retire the old Victas on which they had previously relied to keep the out field in check; within twelve weeks, Papua New Guinea was playing an Australian indigenous team on a surface that visiting umpire Bruce Oxenford deemed ‘world-class’. ‘We never dreamed of having turf,’ says Chris Amini. ‘Bill just bulldozed through. He was a bulldozer. A big one.’
A year after Leane’s arriving, Cricket Haus was a busy place, utes constantly coming and going, disgorging cricketers for regular practices, dispersing cricketers to run a fast-growing programme of junior cricket instruction, Schools Kriket, sponsored by BSP Bank. Many of these cricketers were now employees of Cricket PNG itself, and thus lifted a little above the ruck in a country where paid employment is exceptional.
Nobody would be busier than Leane, one minute descending from the ride-on mower to oversee fielding drills, next minute putting on a tie to meet a sponsor or conferring with the five regional managers he appointed to begin covering the country beyond Moresby and the south-east coast. He could be a hard man to work with; stories are legion of his sometimes explosive temper. He had limited patience with administrative chores like reports, budgets, paperwork and board relations, and ever-diminishing time – which is why he hired Greg Campbell.
A bustling and bouncy right-arm quick, Greg Campbell would have played more than four Tests for Australia in 1989/90 but for incurable damage to his left knee. He narrates the end of his career wryly. He and his Tasmanian team-mate David Boon were admitted for operations by the same surgeon and were lying in adjacent beds when they received their post-operative prognoses. ‘You’re fine,’ the surgeon said to Boon, then turned to Campbell. ‘You, I couldn’t do anything for.’
And that, in those days, was that. Campbell relocated to the Gold Coast, drifted in and out of coaching, then into a series of mid-level managerial jobs to which he struggled to warm, finally running one of a chain of café cum carwashes owned by Ian Healy. He missed cricket, still felt he had something to offer, and his wife urged him to offer it, but he faced a common dilemma. ‘When I applied for jobs, I’d be rejected for lacking experience,’ he recalls. ‘But how was I to get experience if I couldn’t get a job?’ Leane’s invitation to become Cricket PNG’s operations manager seemed to offer that experience; it almost lasted one day.
On the morning Campbell arrived, he found Leane typically consumed by his daily tasks. There was nothing for him to do, nowhere even for him to sit. Leane looked up long enough to foreshadow dinner at the Port Moresby Yacht Club, then disappeared again; Campbell stood there in Cricket Haus, sweating, self-conscious. Dinner was late, terse, tense, and ended with Leane throwing him the keys to a unit, with the blithe advice that, oh, by the way, it had neither electricity nor bed linen.
Campbell lay on the couch in the darkness brooding on how he might convey his dissatisfaction, but no sooner had he opened his mouth the next morning than Leane jumped down his throat. ‘What are you worried about?’ he barked. ‘I can’t be running around making your bed for you. You’re a big boy. You can sort it out.’ Only the fact that he had so coveted a job in cricket kept Campbell from leaving by the next flight.
Over the next year, however, Campbell developed great admiration for his boss, who worked around the clock for little reward or recognition. PNG, there were regular reminders, was a dangerous place: in August 2011 another senior sports administrator, PNG football team manager Peter Meli, was stabbed to death. It wore one down, thought Campbell: it could make you cautious, but also impetuous, determined to plough on round, over and sometimes through obstacles. Things, including a big fenced court of artificial practice pitches, were inclined to cost too much – a problem exacerbated by escalating rates of inflation, fed by a new mining boom. But otherwise they took too long, and cricket in PNG had already done too much waiting.
‘Bill’s got a big heart, he’s passionate, and he gets the job done,’ says Campbell now. ‘He just wanted to succeed so badly….It’s true that he overspent, but the money was always coming. It just got spent before it arrived.’
For the last few months of Leane’s time in PNG, leading up to his departure not quite two years ago, his relations with chairman Nades were tense – entrepreneur Leane feeling restricted, accountant Nades feeling excluded. But by PNG standards, tensions in cricket have been mild indeed. Still by far the country’s biggest sport, rugby league has been rocked in recent years by crisis after crisis: feuds, scandals, governance splits, legal battles, corruption allegations. In less than three years, cricket had come further than any other sport in PNG – further, in fact, than most institutions.
Its reputation is now for professional management and positive thinking. ‘There are bigger sports in this country,’ says John Mogih, a teacher at Jubilee Secondary, a school in the BSP Cricket for Schools programme, which has now reached 125,000 students. ‘But apart from cricket, no other spo
rt has been interested in us. And cricket is a sport I admire, because it is very well run. It is putting our country on the map.’
How great a place it eventually occupies on the map is now interestingly poised. Sound administration, generous sponsors, growing participation numbers: these are necessary conditions of success but not sufficient.
Strategic dilemmas loom for cricket in PNG. Two are simply geographic. Cricket is still concentrated to New Guinea’s south and east, in the province encompassing Hanuabada known as Central. The day I visited John Mogih at Jubilee Secondary, he was still chuffed about a recent classroom discussion during a BSP Cricket For Schools session when a boy answered correctly a question about the name of England’s captain: the boy who answered Alastair Cook and who turned out to like watching cricket on television was from PNG’s remote Highlands, not traditionally a cricket stronghold.
Cricket’s identification with the coast, says Mogih, remains a handicap. ‘Children will still say to you, “I’m not from Central so I don’t play cricket.” They see it as a different culture.’ PNG Cricket now has ten regional managers, but they have huge territories to cover and there is a way to go before the game can truly be regarded as national.
PNG also suffers from where it sits in the world, grouped in with associate members of ICC’s East-Asia Pacific region, of which it is comfortably the strongest.
Trivia question: which country has compiled the highest international one-day score? Answer: PNG in making 572/7 in 50 overs against New Caledonia in the 2007 South Pacific Games, breaking their own record of 502/9 in the corresponding fixture four years earlier.
An established solution to the dearth of quality competition has been to place players with Australian clubs: another ten spent last summer spread among four clubs on Queensland’s Gold Coast, so as to be near new national coach Peter Anderson.
Another possibility has just emerged almost by accident, because of a conversation between two former Tasmanian team-mates of Campbell’s, Jamie Cox and Michael Dighton.