by Tim Wigmore
So with signs this year that Nepal are finally addressing the constraints that have held their development back, what does the future hold? Pubudu Dassanayake outlined his vision to me, ‘The NPL was a great concept to raise interest across the country. It had problems, but for a first attempt it went well. Soon there will be a three-day regional tournament and a structured, six-month cricket season. There is no doubt that the World Twenty20 has seen a significant boost in player numbers at all levels.’
The disaster of the World Cup qualifier demonstrated that for all the forward strides they had made, the team were still vulnerable to age-old flaws: not winning when under pressure and being overly reliant on key players. If they can clinch must-win games, then the financial incentives of the HPP and the profile of ODI cricket will provide the resources and impetus to further progress.
This is required to continue the domestic reforms set out by Dassanayake and begun by the formation of the NPL. If cricket becomes a viable career for young players like Kanishka Chaugai, the talent base will widen. However, in the short term they are too dependent on the form of a few stars, and a bad day in the field can consign them to yet another frustrating setback. They are at a fascinating juncture in their history.
Just as the ICC gave them a lifeline in creating an extended World Twenty20, Nepal may yet get another helping hand from the arbiters of the sport. The signs are that the all-powerful ICC chairman, Narayanaswami Srinivasan, will demand a greater emphasis on indigenous talent in the development programme. It is said he wants the leading associates to have all the ingredients to make cricket a part of the sporting and cultural psyche of their country. How this wish will be translated into structural reform is yet to be seen.
What is clear is that Nepal has a native population increasingly obsessed with the sport and a clutch of players with the talent to prosper on the world stage. If cricket ever opens its doors, Nepal will be better placed than many of their associate peers to thrive in the brave new world.
Cricket’s
Golden Ticket?
China by Sahil Dutta
JIANG Shuyao was achieving something that seemed impossible: he was playing international cricket in China. It was the opening fixture of the 2010 Asian Games and China faced Malaysia in the south-eastern city of Guangzhou. The past five years had all been about this tournament, this match. The entire stadium had been constructed for it.
This was a chance for China to showcase its fledgling cricketing ability on a world stage. The only kind of stage that media officers, government ministers and private investors would notice. It didn’t really matter that Asia’s leading cricket country – India – weren’t involved; the Asian Games had medals. Cricket’s ICC global events – the World Twenty20, Champions Trophy and World Cup – were, of course, harder to reach. Jiang, China’s best batsman, made six and Malaysia won easily.
Jiang only discovered cricket in 2008. If it wasn’t exactly familiar by 2010, back then it was a total mystery. He did not even know the game existed. But Jiang’s school teacher had returned from an ICC-funded training course needing to prove the time off was worth it. The teacher held one session and Jiang had found his game.
Taking better to cricket than most, his interest in the sport was also pragmatic: he needed the course credits. Finding himself naturally able to bat and field well, he found the training rewarding. He practised every day at university for an hour and a half, mostly fielding drills and the basics of technique. A month in, Rashid Khan, China’s coach, visited the school, saw Jiang play and put him in the national squad.
He was suddenly a national athlete but in an obscure sport. By his own admission he was still learning the most basic principles of the game. Not that many were convinced. Basketball, people know and love to play; soccer, people know and love to watch. Even golf was known for its connections to wealthy businessmen, but cricket – banqui (‘bat-ball’) – was niche. When, four years later, cricket had allowed Jiang to travel the world, to live in England and to make a life for himself through playing and teaching, friends were envious. In 2008 they were just confused.
The 2010 Asian Games were supposed to launch China’s journey to global cricketing prowess. If it seemed far-fetched, it was not necessarily impossible. China confounds expectations. It is the world’s manufacturing workshop; but has a bigger service economy than any other. It has six megacities – each exceeding 10 million people; but 700m live as peasant farmers in the countryside. Its authoritarian government has developed a unique brand of dictatorial capitalism; but there are more worker protests than in most other countries. It is a ‘developing’ nation, but with an average GDP growth rate of ten per cent a year over the last decade. It has a 150-year history of cricket, but barely anyone has heard of the sport.
China’s men’s side didn’t win a game in the 2010 Asian Games and in 22 matches in their entire history, they have won just three. A record that is only superior to Burma and Brunei. China’s women’s team are much more successful, winning 27 of their 42 matches and twice reaching the final of the Asia Cup (an associate and affiliate tournament), but they remain in the game’s lowest echelons.
In a land of development miracles cricket is struggling to make even the slightest inroad. Jiang Shuyao was at university when he played cricket for China. After he graduates he hopes to get a post teaching cricket. Despite being the best native cricketer in the land for a long time, there is no guarantee he’ll be able to play regularly once his studies are over.
On 28 August 2008 the Shanghai World Financial Centre officially opened. It’s the kind of glass-and-steel behemoth replicated across many of the world’s financial districts, and hosts the global corporations that 21st-century capitalism revolves around. Its 101 stories climb 492 metres, making it, at the time of completion, the world’s second-tallest building. A generation ago, the site was unrecognisable from how it looks today. Its development is a crude symbol of modern China’s ambition and potential.
A ten-minute drive from there, over the river and smack in the middle of the main city, is the People’s Square. It’s a vast clearing, as common a part of Soviet architecture as skyscrapers are capitalist. But 156 years ago the space was home to racecourses, a nine-hole golf course, a hockey club and the Shanghai Cricket Club (SCC). The SCC was for colonial weekend cricketers, but its playing fields were, as one historian put it, ‘as large as the Kennington Oval’, with a turf wicket to match any in the English motherland. It was here that China’s cricket story began.
The club’s inaugural game was against a team of officers from HMS Highflyer – visiting from Hong Kong – in 1868. These ‘interport’ matches, which also included the Singapore Cricket Club, were regular fixtures for almost 100 years. Such corners of a foreign field were by and large Brit-only affairs and no record of any native Chinese player in these games exists.
In Hong Kong some native clubs did develop, in mainland China they were unheard of. It’s hardly surprising, then, that in the 1949 Revolution the ground and the club were lost. Cricket had rarely hidden its avowedly colonial connection and in China, unlike India, independent rulers were far less romanced by English pursuits. If cricket were bigger by the time of the Cultural Revolution, it would have been banned. As it was, there was no need.
During that time the only sports that flourished were those Mao Zedong supported: ping pong and basketball. It was not until Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s eventual successor as leader of the country, took over in 1978 that things began to change. His gradual reforms signalled a thawing of Chinese attitudes towards the capitalist West, and allowed the first cricket in any organised form to return.
In 1983 St George’s, a team from Hong Kong, made the first cricket tour since the Second World War to China, playing three matches against Peking Cricket Club. Hosted at the Peking Gymnasium on a matting pitch laid in the middle of a football field, it was hardly a glamorous return for the sport.
Eleven years later another Hong Kong-based team made a more
significant visit. Craigengower CC wanted to celebrate the centenary of Shanghai Cricket Club. The latter had been refounded by a group of a dozen or so English, Australian and South African expats working in Shanghai and missing the sport. They had contacts in the Shanghai Sports Federation who allowed a series of games against Craigengower to take place.
The tourists overwhelmed their hosts on the field but the series did cause something of a stir. It was covered by the world’s media and, more intriguingly, featured on Saturday-night TV news on China’s Channel Eight and broadcast throughout the country.
It was through these informal links, especially with Hong Kong Cricket Club, that the first contemporary attempts to develop cricket in China began. Hong Kong until 1997 was still a British outpost, and cricket had a much firmer footing in the country. The colonial teams of the 19th century had morphed into expat clubs in the 20th century and one team – the Chinese Dragons – was established purely for native Chinese. The Dragons, supported by HKCC, helped create the Shanghai Sixes tournament in 1994. It was the lesser-known cousin to the sixes tournament in Hong Kong which began two years before.
The tournament was a revelation. It ran for ten years and, according to its founder, was the biggest Sixes tournament in Asia. In the days before Twenty20, Sixes tournaments were the easiest way to sell cricket to the unfamiliar. Just like the early stages of the IPL, the Shanghai Sixes was also a neat earner for retired pros.
In these week-long parties of gala dinners, charity fundraisers and the occasional six-over bash, cricket found a glamorous footing in China. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s it was the best organised cricket in the country. ‘It started because basically a few guys who liked having a knockabout wanted to play cricket, but there weren’t enough of us so we kept it six a side,’ recalled Scott Brown, its creator.
Brown still lives in Shanghai, having grown up in New Zealand playing regional age-group cricket. He first went to China on a yearlong professional accounting post and is still there 17 years later. ‘Before I knew it I had got some sponsors involved and we had a budget. It was competitive, but never too serious and we made it charity focussed.’
Its charity status helped it fly below the radar of Chinese government authorities and meant current and former players from around the world could easily join in. Brown is every bit the bubbling entrepreneur and he recalled the line-ups he assembled with pride, ‘We had Both [Ian Botham], Viv Richards, Derek Underwood. Heals [Ian Healy], who came back six years running.’ At one stage Coca-Cola and New Zealand bank ANZ were lead sponsors. The tournament was backed by the ICC and Asian Cricket Council (ACC) with Brown and his team helping to forge cricket’s official development strategy in China.
Though the event declined as ICC attention turned to Twenty20, it helped raise the profile of Shanghai Cricket Club. Since the club’s refounding in 1994 the interport games have again become regular fixtures and the club is central to domestic cricket in the region.
Though dominated by foreigners working in Shanghai, it does now feature some native Chinese players. As China’s most international city with a significant expat community there are enough cricketers for seven clubs to field players across three divisions. The First Division plays 40-over cricket, the Second 30 and the Third Twenty20 cricket.
The SCC representative team that tours Hong Kong and Singapore, and hosts clubs from around the world, is selected from the best players in the First Division. The matches are played on all-weather pitches and, befitting the age, raise their own sponsorship, wear coloured clothing and have hard-hitting names: Bashers, Dragons, Hot Dogs. It is the most regular cricket played in the country – with matches every second Sunday through the summer – but receives no help from any of the game’s governing boards.
One of the key figures is Shanghai Dragons’ Jon Newton. He is a South African-born immigrant to China and founder of sports equipment and events company NForce. He is another of China’s cricketing missionaries obsessing over the progress of the sport.
Newton is president of the Shanghai Cricket League and is also part of the Shanghai Cricket Association (SCA), the only regional wing of the central government’s China Cricket Association (CCA). He is intent on bridging the expat and native game in China.
One experiment was small but noteworthy. NForce sponsored a high school team – covering ground hire and match fees – to enter the Second Division of the Shanghai league. It meant that through the entire summer they played competitive cricket twice a month. They were schoolboys, playing against men. ‘They got their arses handed to them on a plate,’ said Newton. ‘But when they played in the national schools championship, they smashed everyone.’ It shows what can be done.
Another plan involved sponsoring the best native Shanghai cricketers to play for First Division teams. The league is ICC-recognised (and key to China first obtaining affiliate status) so when Zhang Yufei, China’s vice-captain, carried his bat to make exactly 100 not out for the Shanghai Daredevils, he became the first native Chinese player in history to make a century.
Zhang’s cricketing talent has helped him spend summers in England. He played two seasons in London for the Capital Kids Cricket charity in 2012 and 2013. As Wisden records: In 2013 Zhang ‘transformed the campaign of Chinatown CC in the Victoria Park Community League. Zhang was their leading scorer as they embarked on an 11-game winning streak’.
Despite these successes and resources available, CCA officials are sometimes reluctant to partner with the foreign upstarts. NForce built an indoor sports arena where cricket, among other sports, was played through the winter.
At one stage 28 teams a week were playing indoor games and indoor nets were constructed for Shanghai cricket enthusiasts – foreign and native – to train. China’s national teams, and local schools teams, were offered free use of the facilities but, according to Newton, it was never taken up. ‘There are no other indoor nets in China,’ said Newton. ‘It was an opportunity lost.’
In 2013 the president of China, Xi Jinping, announced a new slogan for the nation: The ‘China dream’. If it lacked originality, it was certainly catchier than the ‘Scientific Development’ slogan it replaced. Befitting authoritarian stereotypes the slogan was dutifully repeated in Chinese media, and according to one BBC report, ‘dream walls’ went up in schools around the country and a folk song it inspired topped the charts.
The China dream is also the kind of optimistic phrase that entrepreneurs cling to. As Gideon Haigh wrote, organisations sound weighty when they said things like, ‘Of course, we’re looking at China.’
Cricket had its Chinese fantasy, replete with players, administrators and businessmen hoping that its vast economy was the pot of gold promised by Western business magazines. In 2006 Malcolm Speed, then the chief executive at the ICC, led a mission to China to discover cricket’s prospects in the region. It had been two years since the ICC had bestowed affiliate member status on China and Speed thought it time his organisation paid notice. He travelled alongside the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, Shaharyar Khan, and ICC development manager Matthew Kennedy, and was impressed with what he saw.
Speed returned home with hopes of ‘China playing India within my lifetime’. To make that a reality the ICC promised $5m to help China’s preparations for the Asian Games it was hosting in 2010. Speed’s visit and the immediate aftermath was a high-point for global interest in Chinese cricket. Even those involved now seem to recall the time with nostalgia. A year before the Chinese Cricket Association had been established – the ‘year zero’ for Chinese cricket as Wisden called it – and there was genuine momentum behind cricket’s expansion in the country.
Chinese Cricket Association is a title promising more than it delivers. For starters, it gives an impression of real organisation. The Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympics, for example, operates from a plush marble-floored skyscraper near the two main Olympic stadiums in Beijing and, by its own account, spent $1.61bn on the 2008 Games. Though a
tiny fraction of the size perhaps the CCA would also be a well-funded government division with five-year plans and professional staff.
Alas, the CCA is more of a two-man band operating out of a drab, grey anonymous building in downtown Beijing. It has two staff: a secretary general – Song Ying Chun – and a deputy general secretary – Zhang Tian.
I met both at Lord’s in July 2014 where China women were playing an invitation MCC XI, captained by Claire Taylor, as part of their preparation for the Asian Games happening in South Korea later in the year. As Mike Gatting’s guests at Lord’s they were wined and dined and keen to talk up China’s prospects.
Zhang is the backbone of official participation in cricket and had long been the CCA’s main spokesman. Zhang’s easy manner contrasted with his sharper boss. Song came to the CCA after overseeing the rise of golf and tennis in China. He brings renewed hope of a significant push for the game.
Neither Zhang nor Song were familiar with cricket before the CCA was established. And it wasn’t entirely clear that they were overly familiar with it now. It is understandable. Alongside cricket Zhang manages tennis, golf and handball as part of what was the ‘Small Balls’ division of the State Sport General Administration – China’s state sports ministry; basketball, volleyball and soccer were ‘Big Balls’. When the joke was made apparent to those in charge names were duly changed, with Zhang now working in the ‘Multi-Ball’ division.
When it was established the CCA set itself headline-grabbing ambitions: World Cup participation by 2019 and Test cricket by 2020. This was repeated unquestioningly across world media, with outlets as diverse as Forbes and the Cambridge Companion to Cricket salivating over the prospect of another Chinese miracle. The gradual creep of the game east was, it was promised, about to become a rush. To add to the ICC’s $5m promise (spread over a decade) the Asian Cricket Council (ACC) released $200,000 in development funds, Cricket Australia sent coaches, and the Pakistan Cricket Board sent equipment.