by Tim Wigmore
‘I think it’s good to support the higher-performing countries,’ said Cribbin. ‘We’ve seen fruits of that because we’ve got four of the six associate spots in the World Twenty20. That success allows these countries themselves to generate more funding. But if we want to grow the game we need to develop grassroots cricket too. There are tough decisions to make but that doesn’t mean we can forget the countries like Burma and China.’
Perhaps, but Shahriar Khan, ACC spokesman, seemed to better reflect the organisation’s position, ‘With China, you can lead a horse to the water. You can’t make it drink. We’ve led them to water, a lot of water is available. It’s now up to them. The countries that haven’t achieved [like China] may find themselves in a more unfortunate position than they have been in the past.’
The ACC’s future in China is in question but its 2005 push did sow the seeds of progress in the women’s game, and the ACC can at least claim to support one of China cricket’s most vibrant enthusiasts, Aminul Islam.
Aminul is a phenomenon. He had spent his entire professional career dreaming of and working towards 10 November 2000. Finally, aged 32, he was playing for Bangladesh in their inaugural Test, against India, in Dhaka. Bangladesh was already cricket-crazy, and in a country that struggles for any particular geopolitical significance, this was a historic day. With Bangladesh batting first, Aminul resisted from the first morning through much of the second day, batting for 535 minutes and facing 379 balls to make 145. In doing so he joined Australian Charles Bannerman and Zimbabwe’s Dave Houghton as the only players to make centuries in their nation’s first Test.
Having started so late, and battling injury, his career was never really going to progress. Though he was to play another 12 Tests and 39 ODIs – and captain his country in the 1999 World Cup – it was that debut innings that defined him as a player. ‘I had tears in my eyes after the century,’ he later said. ‘I had never thought I would score a century. For it to be against India and in our first Test was phenomenal.’
Bangladesh’s first Test centurion is now fluent in Mandarin. As the ACC’s development officer he is pretty much the most important cricketing institution in China, and almost certainly the best resourced. Little about his workaday batting style hinted at the bright-eyed, humorous coach he was to become. Having been a long-serving Bangladesh player before they had been granted Test status he had lived through and embodied one development success already.
It was that interest in cricket beneath the elite level that took Aminul on his strange journey to the middle kingdom when his playing career finished. And a more prosaic need to find a job. Having retired he was living in Australia and keen on coaching. He had heard from the ICC that opportunities might be more forthcoming outside of the main cricketing countries with China, especially, in need of guidance.
In China there was none of the cultural affinity to cricket that drove progress in Bangladesh. Having led one country’s rise to the top level this was an altogether different challenge for Aminul.
‘I still remember my first programme,’ he said. ‘I had prepared by reading a book called Think Like the Chinese. I went to a school in Shawan in Sichuan province and was told by one of the CCA officials, “Aminul, welcome to China. We want to play cricket in our own way with our own culture. Don’t try and implement anything [from above]. We have a 5,000-year old culture.” I was very impressed by this idea of wanting to establish their own culture for the game.’
He now leads the life of a missionary, wandering from town to town trying to spread cricket’s gospel. ‘The overall advantage of China is that people are very, very disciplined. They come on time, they line up in single file, the only thing missing was a cricket culture. We need to do that more. But China is a very big country and it is not possible in the next three years to cover the whole country. Some of the cities are bigger than all of Sri Lanka and Bangladesh put together. So we want to introduce the game more widely but it is hard.’
In 2014 he signed a three-year extension to his contract and plans to stay in China as long as the ACC can keep him. But his impact is hamstrung by another aspect of the Big Three’s impoverished attitude to development: Olympic participation.
“Olympic status would make all the difference in China.” – Zhang Tian, CCA.
“It makes no financial sense.” – Giles Clarke, ECB.
Few things capture China’s ferociously-organised ambition better than the Olympics; and few things signal cricket’s shrivelled ambition better than the Olympics. The issue is the nexus of the story of cricket’s faltering Chinese dream. Sport in China is about medals and since Great Britain beat France to Olympic gold in 1900, cricket has not once featured in the event. Simply, the established nations would rather stuff their pockets than grow the game. Olympic inclusion requires clearing space in an already-congested fixture list, most feasibly by replacing the World Twenty20 tournament with an Olympic version, and that would come at an up-front cost.
As one ICC source put it, ‘The television rights you get from the IOC [International Olympic Committee] is bugger-all compared to what a World Twenty20 would be. [Even] the cumulative total of all the National Olympic Committees elements together… against the broadcast rights for the World Twenty20 the ICC…doesn’t stack up. So there would be a short-term financial loss.’
In the long term the sport would gain, but that’s something no board wants to consider. As such Olympic inclusion is something that’s continually raised, discussed and dismissed. The former IOC president Jacques Rogge was keen to push cricket’s case for inclusion in the 2020 Games when an ICC survey found that 90 per cent of members supported the idea of inclusion. All of them were ignored.
For its part the ICC last explored Olympic inclusion in 2013 with its executive board fielding reports from member nations. It duly decided that cricket was better off alone with the ICC’s president Mustafa Kamal explaining that cricket’s value would be ‘diluted’. ‘Football sends B, C or D teams to Olympics,’ he said. ‘So what will we gain by sending B, C or D team from cricket? Cricket has a legacy, it has importance.’
While that may be true for England or Australia, it is difficult to imagine any of the associate nations turning down the chance of global competition. Even Test nations like Pakistan and Bangladesh, who struggle for success in summer Olympics, may want a shot at glory. Yet under the ICC’s current leadership, these countries won’t get the chance. ‘Previous governors have been able to have a different view on [Olympic inclusion],’ said the ICC source. ‘But the short-term financial desires of the current governors probably rule [against] the argument.’
Mike Gatting, the one-time England captain and rebel tourist, is the ECB’s development officer and gives the clearest insight into their muddled thinking on the matter. Gatting is also something of an enthusiast for cricket in China. He is a patron of the Hong Kong Cricket Club and in 2014 was president of MCC. He used his position to arrange the tour for China’s women’s cricketers to England and the MCC fixture at Lord’s, but with his ECB hat on he is adamant that Olympic status is simply not necessary.
‘Cricket has flourished over many years without being in the Olympics. If you took two to five weeks out of cricket in the UK [every four years] you’d lose an awful lot,’ he said. ‘You lose exclusivity when you’re selling TV rights because it would have to go on terrestrial sport. In an eight-year contract for ICC world events would you get the same cash if for two of those years you had nonexclusive rights? No you would not.’
The argument is that an Olympic Twenty20 tournament would eat into the value of the ICC’s World Twenty20 and is unviable as a result. Yet this needn’t be the case. Other sports have shown that an Olympic tournament integrated into a balanced schedule can help enhance the value of world championships. The ECB, meanwhile, told the ICC executive board in 2014 that Olympic status would cost it £160m. It is a laughable claim based on the idea that a two-week Olympic event would tank an entire four-Test English summer seri
es. It wouldn’t. The 2013 Champions Trophy in England, for example, lasted for 15 days and didn’t cost the ECB a single Test.
If anything, Olympic status would actually increase cricket’s overall budget. There is IOC funding of $15m–$20m made available every Olympic Games and Olympic Solidarity funding of $4m–$6m a year for participating countries to tap in to.
In addition, once a sport gains Olympic status, governments pay more attention. This is emphatically the case in China. The CCA’s deputy general secretary Zhang Tian has said as much as $20m a year could pour into cricket from central and local governments if cricket became an Olympic sport. For most countries, the case for inclusion is obvious. But in cricket, where governing power is entirely concentrated in three nations, most countries are irrelevant.
It is more straightforward for other sports. Rugby sevens will make its Olympic debut in Rio 2016. A marginal sport in most of the world, its Olympic presence means China takes rugby seriously. Since obtaining Olympic status rugby sevens is now included in the national games. As such every province will field a men’s and women’s team who will be professionally trained for the biannual tournament.
Money from the government’s vast national coffers will ensure the machinery of the state is geared to producing Olympic-standard competitors. It is expected that 10,000 people will be playing a high standard of rugby sevens regularly at Chinese universities by the end of 2014, and that number is expected to swell as the Olympic Games draw nearer.
For Morgan Buckley, development manager for the International Rugby Board (IRB), the Olympics is too obvious an opportunity to overlook. ‘It opens doors,’ he said. ‘If you are an Olympic sport and the Chinese government are behind you, you have credibility, it’s easy to get into schools and that’s why our teams have been able to go into schools and access many different areas.’
Already there is a national academy for rugby sevens in Beijing, and China Agricultural University is the home base for the national team which recruits from all over the country. Both the women’s and men’s teams train regularly, attend overseas tours and, increasingly, win games.
Unlike in cricket, where the bottom-rung teams are rarely given a platform to play with the best, China are included in the IRB sevens tournaments. The women’s team have finished third in the Hong Kong Sevens, a year after China hosted the final round of the 2013/14 event in Guangzhou. The men, again, have further to go but finished fifth out of 12 teams in the Asia Sevens in 2012 and are expected to improve.
‘There are so many similarities between rugby and cricket in China,’ Zhang has said in the past. Having seen how rugby has progressed in China since its Olympic inclusion Zhang said, ‘The same could happen for cricket.’
For the missionaries trying to spread cricket in China the frustration is palpable. ‘The moment you flick that switch and grant cricket Olympic status, it’s on,’ said Jon Newton. ‘If it doesn’t happen, cricket will never develop in China. If it does, cricket will definitely take off. It’s as straightforward as that.’
Olympic status would free countries like China from the stranglehold of ICC funding. With more money coming from a greater range of sources it might be that associates especially, who make up the majority of the ICC’s membership but hold so little sway over how the game is run, could consider better ways to organise themselves. Rather than waiting on the ICC they could organise their own tournaments and develop their own funding streams, as the Asian Cricket Council did.
Central to the CCA’s plans now is the construction of a dedicated stadium in Beijing. ‘I want to build one, maybe even two, international cricket grounds in Beijing,’ Song Ying Chun told the India Today newspaper. ‘We have discussed this with the ACC, and they will give us technical support. Holding an international tournament in China is important to raise the profile of the game.’
Indeed, Javed Miandad, who at one time held a position of ‘cricketing ambassador’ to China, mooted the possibility of Pakistan playing their ‘home’ internationals in China. In 2010 he submitted a report to the Pakistan Cricket Board suggesting as much. It was never a serious prospect but Olympic status, and the money that comes with it, would make hosting associate cricket, at least, more possible. Cricket would also be included in the National Games, increasing the number of competitive games played in China.
Beyond the money is also the exposure of the game more broadly. ‘For that short period of time you have global coverage of your sporting activity,’ says Buckley. ‘Rugby will be on TV screens throughout the world.’
It’s crucial for lesser-known sports to get that coverage and what’s true for China is true for the Test nations too. Cricket is a marginal sport in half of the full member nations and, according to one Cricket Australia study, Olympic status would help boost its media profile. It’s undoubtedly the case that Olympic status would also heighten the status and resources of women’s and disabled cricket in full member nations.
It is only the comfortable myopia of cricket’s governing countries that holds back Olympic inclusion and the global development of the sport. The ECB and BCCI especially would rather stuff a schedule with repeated and arbitrary ODI series than widen the game’s reach.
It is revealing that the Mandarin word for ‘sport’ translates to ‘physical education’. There is no real tradition for recreational sport. As Scott Brown, who organised the fun-first Shanghai Sixes tournament, put it, ‘Sport in China is not about enjoyment. It is about medals.’
Olympic status would transform cricket’s prospects in China, but it does not necessarily follow that the top-down development that comes with government attention would foster any particular affection for cricket. China’s Olympic athletes lead gruelling and unstable lives in the pursuit of international success. Where medals are the only valid currency, the nearly-runs, who dedicate their lives to the government’s sports regime but don’t qualify for the tournament, get discarded in an instant. Though less intense, cricket is similar. Those who don’t play in the national squads don’t play much at all.
The CCA has stated its commitment to fostering the high-performance game but with the national team still so distant from even resembling top-level cricket many involved with the sport in China question whether more attention should be payed to grassroots instead. It is also doubtful whether the Taylorist-style planning lends itself to team sports.
As The Economist pointed out, Olympic athletes in China are more easily identified by the regime looking for simple signs like height or strength. That’s not as straightforward with cricket especially, but team sports more widely. Take football, for example. It is the most followed sport in China and there is a private-owned, though state supported, lucrative Premier League that attracts players from around the world. Yet despite love for watching the game, participation is very low and the Chinese national team have made no meaningful progress.
They do at least get the chance to qualify for the World Cup alongside the best teams – something that cricket refuses to make possible – and did play in the 2002 finals but have not qualified since.
Money has been thrown at the sport with international coaches being paid eye-watering sums and a state-of-the-art academy constructed. Yet the inability to translate grassroots interest in the sport to grassroots participation has made the national team a laughing stock. If there is a warning from soccer that Olympic participation and government money can’t be substituted for a genuine development plan, golf – a significantly less popular sport in China – shows a more viable route for cricket to take.
Golf is China’s fastest growing sport. Indeed one of the problems soccer faces is that space once cleared for soccer fields is quickly being converted into golf courses. Journalist Dan Washburn described how between 2005 and 2010 the number of Chinese golf courses tripled to over 600, despite the fact their construction has been notionally banned by the central government since 2004.
In 2005, Shanghai hosted the first professional international golf tou
rnament in China – attracting the best players in the world – and courses like Mission Hills in Shenzhen are among the biggest and best resourced anywhere. Golf’s popularity is exploding and its success has come from tying the sport to business culture and pitching golf as requisite for aspiring middle classes.
Quite what role the Multi-Ball Division of the government has had is unclear, as it has mainly been international sports businesses that have led the way establishing the game in China, but golf now taps into the Chinese market more effectively than most other sports precisely because of its international links.
The idea of sport as an entry point to foreign culture also underpinned cricket’s greatest development story. The Parsees who first played cricket seriously in Mumbai in the 1880s were drawn to the game’s association with English culture. A belief that cricket’s deeper ‘spirit’ would elevate them above native Hindus and Muslims was enough to sow the seeds for domestic cricket in India.
China, 100 years on, could opt for a similar route. There were close to 79,000 Chinese students in British universities in 2013 and there are even more currently studying in Australia and New Zealand. Ambitious parents from China’s emerging business elite are keen for their children to embrace Western education and culture. Cricket could provide a bridge. Jon Newton has watched more closely than most the fledgling development of recreational sport in China, and his business has tried to exploit sport’s potential. He sees cricket’s best hope, if it won’t adopt Olympic status, in linking it to foreigners and Western culture.
‘There is no league in China between schools or clubs or something for kids to play cricket on the weekend,’ he said. ‘They have the national championships once a year where they train for a month and play for a week or two, but that’s it. You’re never going to develop a talent base if you’re not playing every weekend in summer.’