by Tim Wigmore
Cox, now the South Australian Cricket Association’s director of cricket, was airing an idea he had for an Adelaide premier league pooling the talents of local grade cricket into four zonal teams, also competing with an XI from the Northern Territory; he was negotiating with the Australian Capital Territory to be the sixth team. Dighton, a well-travelled international coach with stints behind him in Canada and the Netherlands, had just been in PNG for the fourth Legends Bash, and mentioned the talent on display.
When the ACT decided against joining the premier league, Cox revisited the conversation. ‘We wanted a team of players who weren’t in our talent pool; weren’t in any Australian talent pool,’ says Cox. ‘And PNG certainly weren’t.’ The league opens the possibility of a PNG player being picked up in the Big Bash League by the Adelaide Strikers, and in doing so becoming to cricket as the Melbourne Storm’s Marcus Bai has been to PNG rugby league: likeliest candidate is Vala, a 26-year-old left-hander, who trained last summer with the Brisbane Heat.
That still leaves international competition, just adequate for present purposes, but really of insufficient frequency and intensity to advance players to the next level. PNG last played anything other than Twenty20 against another country more than a year ago. With Amini Park their country’s only turf wicket table, PNG’s cricketers still grow up with hard-wicket habits; fearless horizontal bat hitters flourish; aspiring spinners do not. Fielding is a strong suit: uneven, unkempt outfields conduce to quicksilver reflexes.
But PNG’s aspirations to play more in Asia, and perhaps even join the ICC’s Asia development region, will be restricted by their home conditions. Amini Park, moreover, is in constant demand, not only for cricket but for Australian rules, and where their seasons overlap the custom is simply to roll the pitch as soon as football ceases to rub out the stop marks for cricket the next day – a rather more relaxed attitude to curation than other countries are used to.
And attitude generally is what it will probably all come down to. Ultimately, PNG’s future will be shaped by its national players. And that in its way is the puzzle’s missing piece. To repeat, PNG is a country of many different crickets. What Cricket PNG and the ICC are seeking to foster is another form of the game – the cricket that aspires to being a truly global sport, with an expanding elite level and healthy commercial undergirding. They are like the missionaries of a century ago, evangelists for an imported sporting culture remote from previous experience which may or may not take root.
Leane and Campbell have found life amid the pre-existing culture both frustrating and fascinating. Leane recalls a comment made to him by another local sports administrator soon after he arrived – that in PNG, it was being picked and ‘getting on the plane’ that mattered, not any success that might follow. That had a host of entailments.
Selection had always been a vexed issue in PNG. ‘It was one thing I could never unpick,’ admits Andrew Knott. ‘I couldn’t speak motu or pidgin. There was never a lot of expertise around choosing teams: they had really been picking their wantoks forever and a day.’
Leane tried. When he learned that selectors usually made their choices from information they received from others, he sacked them, appointing a new panel led by former captain Api Leka which he bound to attend games. That had its own implications, for Leka’s daughter Lisa is a national player, and married to Chris Amini. But it did introduce a more robust sense of competition for places.
Leane wanted also to regularize behaviour on tours. Just before he arrived, PNG participated in the World Cricket League Division Three in Buenos Aires. Reviewing the visit, Leane learned that the majority of the players were in the habit of gorging themselves at breakfast and lunch, which were provided, and eating nothing in the evening so as to save their modest allowances for distribution among their wantoks.
What satisfied their familial obligations was detrimental to their cricket, and in this event tiny differences had counted: a single heavy defeat by Afghanistan cost PNG their chance to advance to the ICC World Cup qualifier. That was it, said Leane: allowances were out, and communal evening meals were in, the message being that good cricket required good preparation.
Another step followed a chance glimpse in the street of a woman wearing a PNG national team uniform, evidently borrowed from a player. That was it, said Leane again: uniforms were to be returned to Cricket PNG after use. Respect for and pride in the colours was not negotiable. To instill it further, he traversed the annals of the national team allocating numbers to all past and present players, who each received a specially-made ‘baggy black’.
Sometimes Leane’s determination to professionalise PNG was carried to a fault. When PNG visited Dubai to tackle World Cricket League Division Two, it brought Leane, Campbell, Bichel, batting coach Andrew Cavill, bowling coach Ray Bright and a strength and conditioning coach. It was more attention than the players ever had, and at first left them feeling overwhelmed. ‘There was information coming from everywhere,’ recalls Chris Amini. ‘It was too much for some players to absorb.’
The team redeemed a poor start by winning a third-place playoff, thereby qualifying for a $US700,000 two-year high-performance grant from the ICC, but gaining no additional fixtures – a good result just short of great. And in some respects, PNG remain in search of their breakthrough win.
Running Cricket PNG, Campbell reports, has pastoral as well as professional elements. Nineteen senior men, ten rookies and ten senior women are contracted on sums between K120 and K250 a month. But the choice between the calls of sport and of family is no contest.
A year ago, Campbell lost one of his squad’s most valuable batsmen, Kila Pala, who top-scored in that aforementioned record against New Caledonia, because his father had decided it was time for him to return to Hanuabada to work. Campbell visited the father to plead for the young man’s cricket career, but to no avail. Sport? What kind of ‘job’ was that? Wantok networks impose heavy and ineluctable obligations. Not so long ago, Campbell wanted to give one of his staff a raise. The man pleaded otherwise: if it was known he had more money, wantoks would materialise to importune their share.
The fluidity of property extends further, to a mainly harmless, scarcely malicious but seemingly irreducible problem with petty theft, from petrol being siphoned from cars to blades being detached from the ride-on mower. ‘One thing you have to understand about PNG, Campbo,’ Dikana warned Campbell when he arrived. ‘Daytime is for sleeping; nighttime is for stealing.’
Individuals tend not to think through the implications of taking something because in their daily lives there usually aren’t. PNG still has a law criminalising sorcery; somewhat different concepts of personal property should not perhaps surprise us. And, well, we have a few strange habits ourselves. Ovia and I were chatting in the ute one day when he turned to me with great earnestness. ‘You know, I read that the man in charge of the Australian cricket team, he is a rugby player,’ he said. ‘Why is that?’ Trying to explain Pat Howard to John Ovia: some of cricket’s cultural gaps are simply unbridgeable.
When we returned to Cricket Haus, I took in again its most striking feature, which is a doorway on the first floor, perhaps five metres in the air, that simply leads into space. ‘There was a fire escape there,’ Campbell explains. ‘But we decided it would simply be quicker to jump.’ Nobody had bothered to cordon it off or post a warning sign; instead it yawned, almost inviting you to walk through it. A metaphor for its cricketers’ steps into the unknown, perhaps? While the development programme has provided them with a beckoning portal, the leap still requires courage.
(1) Most renowned of all local variants became the elaborate and riotous games played between village teams numbering as many as 60 players on the Trobriand Islands, off New Guinea’s eastern tip, the game having been introduced there by a Methodist contemporary of Abel’s, William Gilmore, as an alternative to ritual warfare. Ceremony takes precedence over scoring: the home team always wins, and always hosts the post-match feast. The accent instead
is on display, dancing and chanting – think of it as PNG’s version of the IPL. It reached a worldwide audience thanks to the power of media too. Cambridge anthropologist Jerry Leach’s Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response to Colonialism (1976) is among the most famous of all ethnographic films.
(2) PNG’s senior men’s team is now known as the Barramundis, a local sea bass, and the senior women’s team the Lewas, pidgin for heart. The other men’s teams are respectively the Under-19 Garamuts (a local percussion drum), the Under-17 Geckos (a local lizard) and the Under-15s Rokroks (frog in pidgin).
Nepal by Tim Brooks
SOCIAL media has given cricket a platform outside the Test-playing countries. It has raised interest, profile and understanding to a new audience. These instant images can endure, inspire and alter perceptions far more than a magazine feature or blog post.
The famous tumbling slip catch in the 2007 World Cup by the Bermudan Dwayne Leverock is one of the most watched cricket clips on YouTube. A recent image had a similar impact: a crowd of 10,000 gathered in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, to watch Nepal face Hong Kong in the 2014 World Twenty20.
It was 16 March 2014 and Nepal were making their debut at a showcase global cricket event. It was an instant, invigorating glimpse into a largely unknown country where cricket is an all-consuming passion. Few could have failed to be moved by the joyous celebrations that greeted Nepal’s 80-run victory, or been curious as to the cricketing future of a nation in which the sport resonates so deeply.
In many associate and affiliate nations, progress has been contingent on the performances and legacy of expatriates, or those who have qualified courtesy of an ancestral passport. Nepal is a different and therefore intriguing case. Beyond the ten Test-playing nations, cricket is seldom an integral part of the national psyche. In Nepal, it is fast surpassing football in popularity. The sight of the enthusiastic crowds gathered in Kathmandu provides some evidence of cricket’s enormous popular appeal.
There are other, subtler signs emerging: captain and star all-rounder Paras Khadka is a national icon, a celebrity who is feted everywhere he goes by awestruck fans. What greater compliment can there be in this digital age than having a host of zealous fans opening fake Facebook and Twitter accounts in your name? In this sense, Khadka is closer to David Beckham or Sachin Tendulkar, than he is to fellow associate cricketers.
So if cricket is the national sport of a doting populace and players have the profile of pop stars, why is Nepal not one of the leading cricket nations in the world?
Cricket was brought to Nepal in the 1920s by the ruling Rana dynasty. They had learned the game at English or Indian public schools; theirs was not a gift for the many, but the privileged pursuit of the few. The only pitches were within palace grounds and for decades, the game remained a courtly curiosity. Cricket, along with other Western imports, was jealously guarded by the elite as a symbol of their status.
For much of the 20th century Nepal was an insular and isolated nation. Cricket was played behind palace walls, and with the prohibition of foreign newspapers and radio, a population consisting largely of poor tenant farmers had no opportunity to hear of – let alone play – the game. In 1946, the Cricket Association of Nepal (CAN) became Nepal’s first national cricket organisation. Its objective was simply to run a game for the country’s elite.
After the Second World War, Nepal began if not to embrace the modern world, then at least to accept its presence. The Rana dynasty was overthrown and the country slowly opened up to outside influences. In a country where society was still feudal, even this gradual rate of change represented a significant cultural shift. Access presented opportunity, and many Indian traders settled in the expanding urban centres. In the context of demographic and cultural mobility, cricket slowly broke free from the confines of the aristocracy.
Fifteen years after its creation CAN became part of the National Sports Council, a body that offered funding and influence, but also forced cricket to defer to a political master. The introduction of limited-overs cricket, which was born when the Gillette Cup was first played in England in 1963, provided a financial lifeline for cricket in the entertainment age.
The establishment of an associate member category beneath the Test nations in 1965 held promise for Nepal but, from the outset, CAN’s ambitions were resolutely parochial, and its role was limited to arranging occasional fixtures for clubs in Kathmandu. Cricket in Nepal was a largely uncoordinated affair, and football remained the sport of choice for the masses.
Indeed, it wasn’t until 1988 that CAN applied for, and was granted, affiliate status.
During the 1990s, Nepal modernised and grew in confidence as a national communications network transformed the country. Cricket was a key beneficiary: emboldened, CAN became more outward-looking and ambitious, establishing regional tournaments and introducing cricket to schools. This programme reached out to a population who took cricket to their hearts, spreading its reach far beyond its traditional centres in Kathmandu and Kiritpur.
If anything it was too successful, with demand for cricket quickly outstripping the supply of facilities and infrastructure. CAN had created an appetite for cricket that it could not hope to satisfy. It has been playing catch-up ever since, being chided and derided in the process. The gulf between ambition and reality has been the defining theme of Nepalese cricket.
Jokes have been made about the slope at Lord’s being nothing compared to grounds in the Himalayas. Indeed Michael Palin, a cricket devotee, illustrated this during a memorable scene in the BBC TV series Himalaya with Michael Palin. In 2009 a game played at the Everest Base Camp raised £250,000 for the Lord’s Taverners. The altitude was a giddy and world record-setting 5,165 metres, at the time the highest altitude match ever recorded.
This highlights a fundamental constraint: in a land full of peaks and valleys where flat ground is very much hard to come by, finding enough space for a cricket field is an extremely difficult task. Creating enough places for the growing numbers of Nepalese cricketers to play the sport is an even greater challenge. People need grounds in order to play, and if they cannot play cricket, they will quickly find another sport.
Cricket is also a sport that requires clement conditions. In Nepal, bitter winters are flanked by unforgiving autumns and wet springs. The window for a cricket season is limited to a few sunny summer months. Nepal is not a natural setting for cricket, however much its population may wish that were the case.
In spite of these constraints, the 1990s saw piecemeal progress. The national ground at Tribhuvan University was updated. Nepal gained a considerable increase in its ICC grant when it was elevated to associate status in 1996. Two years later, Nepal hosted its first international tournament, the ACC Trophy. It was the beginning of a building process in which most of its regional neighbours had a significant head start. Nepal’s inexperience showed as they failed to win a game.
In 2001, Roy Dias, the former Sri Lankan Test batsman known to his players as ‘The Godfather’, turned down more lucrative coaching offers from Test nations to take on the challenge of guiding Nepal up the cricketing echelons. His task was twofold: to develop young talent into consistent performers; and to provide them with an environment in which they could thrive. The former was to prove far easier than the latter.
The groundswell of interest in the game across the country produced many young, talented and eager players, but the limitations of the domestic structure made it difficult to identify and cultivate them. In each region, promising club players would be selected for their districts and, if good enough, to a regional squad from whom a group of 20 or so would be chosen for national trials in Kathmandu. Players had limited opportunities to shine, and the selection process favoured eye-catching one-off performances, rather than implementing a systematic assessment of potential.
Under Dias, Nepal soon gained an excellent reputation and record in age-group tournaments. With a generation of young players passionate about the game, it is not surprising tha
t Nepal outclassed nations where cricket had barely made a dent in the national psyche. This strength at age-group level led to famous full member scalps in South Africa, Pakistan and New Zealand. The fans assumed that once they graduated to the senior team, this golden generation would shine on the global stage. If only it were that simple. A lack of adequate infrastructure hampered further development and progression.
This was the challenge that defined Dias’s time at the helm. At senior level, Nepal lost much of the advantage from their indigenous cricket culture. Hong Kong and UAE selected experienced and confident expatriates, some of whom had played professionally in Test nations before emigrating to the country they now represented. Frustrated Nepalese fans have pointed an accusing finger at the legitimacy of associates whose success has been based on imported talent. This perhaps shows a misunderstanding of how emigration is a foundation of the economies of those countries; Nepal does not have a similar expat tradition.
With a ready supply of talent from age-group cricket, Nepal quickly surpassed weaker Asian teams like Oman and Qatar. On their day they could be ruthless: in 2003 they bowled out the Maldives for 30 runs. The following year, they needed only nine deliveries of their chase to defeat Iran. The biggest mismatch was against Myanmar in 2006. Nepal bowled them out for ten and then knocked off the winning runs from the second legitimate delivery of their chase. However, these scorecard curiosities say more about the range of ability among associates than about Nepal’s progress.
Dias used professionalism and technique to mould Nepal into a difficult side to beat. Nepal qualified for the inaugural Intercontinental Cup in 2004, a tournament that placed them among an elite group of associates being earmarked for potential elevation to the ultimate prize of full member status.