Second XI
Author: Tim Wigmore; Peter Miller; Gideon Foreword Haigh
Date: 2014-01-19 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: History
Description: As the world's second most popular sport, cricket is much richer and more diverse than many realize. Globally, passionate players give up holidays, time with loved ones, and hard-earned money to achieve the extraordinary and play for their country. Afghanistan, whose captain grew up on a refugee camp, will play in the 2015 World Cup not just in spite of the Taliban, but partly because of them. In Ireland, cricket has reawakened after a century of dormancy—but can they achieve their aim of Test cricket and end the player drain to England? These tales resonate far beyond cricket, touching on war

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2015

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© Tim Wigmore and Peter Miller, 2015

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Gideon Haigh

The World Cup Standard-Bearers

Afghanistan by Tim Wigmore

Ireland by Tim Wigmore

UAE by Peter Miller

Scotland by Tim Wigmore

The Forgotten Associates

The Netherlands by Peter Miller

Kenya by Tim Wigmore

Local Dreams

PNG by Gideon Haigh

Nepal by Tim Brooks

Cricket’s Golden Ticket?

China by Sahil Dutta

USA by Peter Miller

Bibliography

Photographs

Brief author biographies

Tim Wigmore writes on cricket for The Daily Telegraph, ESPNCricinfo, The Cricketer and The Nightwatchman, and is also a contributing writer for The New Statesman. In 2013, he was highly commended for the Ian Wooldridge Young Sports Writer of the year award and in 2014 he was specially commended for the Young County Journalist award.

Peter Miller is a freelance cricket writer, blogger and podcaster. He writes on the international and domestic game for ESPNCricinfo, AllOutCricket, The Cricketer and Cricket365. He makes regular appearances to discuss cricket on BBC Radio Wales and produces and presents the Geek & Friends Cricket podcast.

Gideon Haigh is widely recognised as one of the world’s finest cricket journalists. He has written or edited more than 20 books on cricket, including the critically acclaimed On Warne. In 2012, he addressed the tenth Bradman Oration in Melbourne.

Sahil Dutta is a former assistant editor for ESPNCricinfo, and writes regularly for The Cricketer. He was part of the research team for the forthcoming cricket documentary Death of a Gentleman and is currently an ERSC/DTC-funded graduate researcher in International Political Economy at the University of Sussex.

Tim Brooks is a cricket writer and commentator specialising in the global development of the game. He is a regular contributor to Wisden, All Out Cricket and The Nightwatchman, and has worked as a development consultant for ICC Europe. He is Head of Cricket for Quipu TV, leading live coverage of the World T20 Qualifier, ICC regional tournaments and bilateral series.

Acknowledgements

A NUMBER of people have been incredibly generous with their time and insights in helping this project get off the ground. What follows is a list of those who have helped by chapter. But before, we would like to say particular thanks for their help in the entire project to Gideon Haigh, for his generosity and support and a superb foreword; Barry Chambers, for so kindly giving free access to his superb collection of photographs; Fay Lomas, Richard Wigmore, Brian Miller, Jonathan Lindsell, James Fitzgerald, S.B. Tang, Andrew Nixon, Nicholas Sharland, Tom Moore, Ross Lawson, Lindsay du Plessis, Jack Sheldon and Vithushan Ehantharajah for their proofreading and ideas; and Jarrod Kimber for suggesting that we approach Pitch Publishing with the idea.

In no particular order, we would particularly like to thank the following names, in addition to a small number of people who spoke only on the condition of anonymity.

While we have only included portraits of ten countries, we stuck with the name of The Second XI: like all good second elevens, we have turned up with ten.

Afghanistan

Dr Noor Mohammad, Kabir Khan, Raaes Ahmadzai, Taj Malik, Paul Radley, Diana Barakzai, Mohammad Nabi, John Stephenson, Leslie Knott, Peter Oborne and Timothy Albone.

China

Jessie Levene, Matt Smith, Jon Newton, Aminul Islam, Shariah Khan, Zhang Tian, Jiang Shuyao, Kevin Styles, Scott Brown, Song Ying Chun, Mike Gatting, Mei Chun Hua, Ge Tao, John Cribbin, Morgan Buckley and Graham Earnshaw.

Ireland

Adrian Birrell, Barry Chambers, Will Porterfield, Warren Deutrom, Ed Joyce, Kevin O’Brien, Niall O’Brien, Eoin Morgan, Ger Siggins, Paul Rouse, Douglas Goodwin, Alec O’Riordan, Kyle McCallan, John Mooney, Tim Murtagh, Simranjit Singh, Brían O’Rourke, Alan Lewis, Andre Botha, George Dockrell, Nick Royle, James Fitzgerald, Richard Gillis, Ryan Bailey and Justin Smyth.

Kenya

Steve Tikolo, Aasif Karim, Jackie Janmohamed, David Waters, Sharad Ghai, Martin Suji, Collins Obuya, Tanmay Mishra, Maurice Odumbe, Martin Williamson and Rakep Patel.

Nepal

Basant Regmi, Binod Das, Roy Dias, Shahriar Khan, Pubudu Dassanayake, Birat Raya, Surya Thapilya, Raees Ahmadzai, Devendra Subedi, Sharad Vesawkar and Barry Chambers.

Netherlands

Richard Cox, Peter Borren, Pieter Seelaar, Andre van Troost, Roland Lefebvre, Jacob-Jan Esmeijer, Bertus de Jong, Ole Mortensen, Harry Oltheten, Izzy Westbury, Tom Cooper and Nolan Clarke.

Scotland

Dougie Brown, Paul Collingwood, Roddy Smith, Bruce Patterson, Gordon Drummond, Jonathan Coates, Mike Stanger, Ben Fox, Majid Haq, Ryan Watson, Gavin Hamilton, Allan Massie, Alex Massie, Craig Wright, Andy Tennant, Calum MacLeod, Rob Taylor and Sai Majeed.

UAE

David East, Aaqib Javed, Will Kitchen, Alawi al Braik, Sultan Mohammad Zarawani, Kabir Khan, Khurram Khan and Paul Radley.

USA

Peter Della Penna, Jamie Harrison, Darren Beazley, Devanshu Mehta, Usman Shuja, Dr Tim Lockley and Subash Jayaraman.

Foreword by Gideon Haigh

SIR John Seeley famously remarked that the British conquered half the world in a fit of absent-mindedness. Something similar is true of the global spread of cricket – that is, it has tended to occur, steadily and stealthily, while most of the game’s administrators, participants and fans have been busy looking the other way.

That will carry through to 15 July 2015 when the vast bulk of the cricket world will be readying itself for another Ashes Test at Lord’s, with all the pomp, circumstance and self-congratulation that goes with it.

The 50th anniversary on that date of another event, actually at the self-same venue, will almost inevitably go unremarked – as, indeed, it largely did at the time. On 15 July 1965, representatives of England, Australia, West Indies, India, Pakistan and New Zealand met at Lord’s where they were brought to order by Marylebone Cricket Club president Richard Twining, an alumnus of Eton and Oxford, a Great War veteran.

Having arrived as members of the Imperial Cricket Conference, they disbanded as members of the International Cricket Conference, their membership expanded by three ‘associate members’ from outside the Commonwealth: Ceylon, Fiji and the United States.

This quiet and ever-so-slight lowering of a Union Jack produced no headlines or grand communiqués. You’ll find it recorded, rather sketchily, on pages 1001–02 and 1009 of the 1966 Wisden. But it has led in its way to this timely compilation, a warm and welcoming but realistic and unsentimental survey of what cricket has to show for half a century of ostensible internationalism.

It also rather set the scene for the ad-hocracy that was to follow. The election of Ceylon, Fiji and the United States, followed a year later by the inclusion of Denmark, the Netherlands, Bermuda and East Africa, was in terms of their hosting cricket that was ‘fully recognised and organised’.

Nowhere were these terms defined. No reports were solicited; no fact-finding missions were despatched. There was no strategic, commercial or even philanthropic purpose served, because membership conferred no benefit outside an entitlement to attend a meeting that didn’t really decide terribly much anyway. Imperial or International, the ICC was the loosest of confederations, a talking shop rather than a sports organisation, a concession to democracy by the Anglo-Australian duarchy.

It was only a decade after that initial decision that the ICC began issuing periodic reminders to itself of its official nomenclature, when it extended entry rights for the inaugural World Cup to two associate members.

In hindsight, the idea of a ‘World Cup’ in cricket in 1975 was the height of pretentious me-tooism. The 16 teams in soccer’s World Cup the year before had been sifted from 100 competitors playing 226 qualifying matches. The ICC, on not much more than a hunch, invited Sri Lanka and East Africa, and gave them three games each. But one must start somewhere, and in some ways the World Cup has remained a tournament disproportionately influenced by ‘minnows’, because the seeming tokenism of their presences has heightened the impact of their successes.

Sri Lanka beating India in 1979, Zimbabwe beating Australia in 1983 and England in 1992, Kenya beating West Indies in 1996, Bangladesh beating Pakistan in 1999, Kenya beating Sri Lanka in 2003, Ireland beating Pakistan and Bangladesh beating India in 2007, Ireland beating England in 2011: these are memories all the more vivid for the regular humdrum of World Cup preliminaries.

Hence also, perhaps, the ambivalence of full members about the advance of cricket’s junior members, given that it is almost always made manifest in one of them being beaten. That comes at a cost to pride, and these days to the exchequer. When the successes of Bangladesh and Ireland in the Caribbean eight years ago cost India and Pakistan their places in the Super 8s, the result was a sub-continental television switch-off that cost the game dearly. And while none but the ECB’s chairman, Giles Clarke, can say what he was thinking as Kevin O’Brien wellied 113 off 63 balls against England in Bangalore in March 2011, it’s a fair bet that it wasn’t, ‘Gosh, isn’t this a great night for cricket?’

And the truth is that it’s the full members who have always held sway over the ambitions of associate members and affiliate members (a designation that has existed for the last 30 years to cover countries where the game is played ‘according to the Laws of Cricket’). They pay the bills and, for the foreseeable future, will continue to do so. That relationship was entrenched, in rather ironic fashion, by the election of Jagmohan Dalmiya from the Board of Control for Cricket in India as the first president of the ICC in July 1997.

While the votes of associates had been integral to Dalmiya’s successful campaigns to bring the World Cups of 1987 and 1996 to the sub-continent, the governance upheaval that resulted from his pitch for high office included the establishment of an executive board that curbed associate voting power. The quid pro quo was money – for the first time, actual dedicated cash money from the ICC for the reinforcement of the game at its frontiers, half the profits from the first ICC Knockout in October 1998 being set aside for the first two years of a ‘development programme’.

And while 17 years have elapsed, a great many of that programme’s rudiments survive, including the division of the world into five development regions: Africa, Asia, the Americas, East Asia-Pacific and Europe.

The monies available for development have expanded with each subsequent sale of the ICC’s commercial rights. More of it, too, has been pooled in the interest of providing regular competition and proper rankings, first trialled at the ICC Trophy in Toronto in July 2001, and fledged more fully with the commencement of the three-year, five-division Pepsi World Cricket League in January 2007.

But it’s been difficult throughout to obtain any sense of why administrators see this as gainful, or even if they do at all. Do they feel a deep and genuine enthusiasm for cricket’s flowering in previously foreign fields? Or does it simply please them, every so often, to parade as weighty men of affairs and of vision, before reverting to type as nationalist autocrats and bureaucrats?

This came into sharper focus with the root-and-branch restructure of the ICC plotted by the BCCI in cahoots with the ECB and Cricket Australia, and revealed by this ‘big three’ to the full membership in January 2014. Two years earlier, the executive board of the ICC had received, and rejected, an independent governance review that recommended a more active council and a funding model ‘based on need’.

The ‘big three’ presented, virtually as a fait accompli, a reconfiguration defining the ICC as a ‘members organisation’ with a funding model based on want – specifically the BCCI’s want for ‘hiring their team out to the ICC’ for global cricket events.

This involved lots of appeals to the efficacy of ‘market forces’, the necessity of ‘sustainable and transparent’ methods, and the importance of members ‘standing on their own feet economically’. ‘A lot of people criticise BCCI but look what they’ve achieved,’ claimed CA’s chairman, Wally Edwards. ‘If Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, West Indies and a few others could take a leaf out of their book, cricket would be better off.’

What did not cross his mind was the difficulty of being like India if your country was not, like, India, with a GDP grown six-fold in the last two decades.

Not that the full membership had much say but the ICC restructure was sold to them as a necessary placation of the BCCI whose financial impacts would be mitigated by a growth in the overall value of commercial rights; not that the associate and affiliate membership had any say but they were beguiled by the possibility of a Test match down the track if they could pick off the weakest of the existing ten.

‘A glittering prize!’ exclaimed Giles Clarke in Wisden. For someone who obtains it, perhaps, assuming it remains on offer, given that it’s being made available by an organisation that will shrink its next two World Cups to ten teams, and has scheduled all its major events in the big three for the next decade.

For all that, there’s seldom reason in cricket not to be hopeful, and one of the most entertaining, even enchanting aspects of the game’s second tier is how it defies ready calculation and whiteboard strategising.

Who would have predicted cricket in Afghanistan? Yet, as Tim Wigmore documents here, it simply forced the world to take notice. What about cricket in the US, with its sophisticated market and manifold advantages? Yet, as Peter Miller chronicles, it careens from crisis to crisis. What an unpredictable, uncontainable, wonderfully human game it is that flourishes in an environment of protracted war yet flounders amid freedom and plenty. And this book, put together on a shoestring by true cricket lovers, is a fitting tribute to how far a bit of absent-mindedness can get you.

The World Cup
Standard-Bearers

Afghanistan by
Tim Wigmore

GEORGE Orwell’s oft-quoted definition of serious sport – ‘War minus the shooting’ – does not apply to cricket in Afghanistan. When the national side qualified for the 2015 World Cup, the guns were not put away.

‘One of the army commanders came to congratulate the team,’ Dr Noor Muhammad, the chief executive of the Afghan Cricket Board, explained. ‘He told me that it was the first time that both the Taliban side and our side were shooting, but not at each other. There was shooting in the air to celebrate the success of the Afghanistan national team.’

Jubilant celebrations greeted the Afghan side who arrived at Kabul Airport and then boarded a coach through the city. ‘Everywhere the fans are shooting and flying Afghan flags to say “well played” – they were very happy. Everyone was shooting into the air,’ remembered captain Mohammad Nabi. Chants of ‘Afghanistan, zindabad!’ filled the air. ‘The supporters came to the airport. Whole roads were blocked and they took big security, the government.’ He had previously admitted, ‘We were a little fearful of a bomb blast.’

Hillary Clinton is among those who have praised the Afghan side. ‘I might suggest that if we are searching for a model of how to meet tough international challenges with skill, dedication and teamwork, we need only look to the Afghan national cricket team,’ she said in May 2010.

‘For those of you who don’t follow cricket, which is most of the Americans, suffice it to say that Afghanistan did not even have a cricket team a decade ago. And last month, the team made it to the World Twenty20 championships featuring the best teams in the world.’

Their success might not have been possible without one particular ally. ‘It is the favourite game of everyone in the country, including the Taliban,’ Dr Muhammad said. After Afghanistan qualified for the World Cup, the Taliban sent a message of congratulations to the players.

Afghanistan’s relationship with cricket stretches back to at least 1839 when British soldiers in Kabul played the game during the First Anglo-Afghan War. In Wounded Tiger, Peter Oborne recounts the Revd GR Gleig’s observation that ‘horse-racing and cricket were both got up to in the vicinity of Kabul; and in both the chiefs and people soon learned to take a lively interest’.

Gleig also noted, ‘They looked on with astonishment at the bowling, batting and fagging out of the English players; but it does not appear that they were ever tempted to lay aside their flowing robes and huge turbans and enter the field as competitors.’

Locals did play with British soldiers during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, from 1878–1880. Yet cricket had long since been forgotten when Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979. One of the more unlikely consequences of the decade-long war with the Soviet Union was to inculcate thousands of Afghan refugees with a love of the game.

Afghanistan’s captain is one example. Nabi was born on New Year’s Day 1985 in a refugee camp in Pakistan. The Nabis had fled Afghanistan as the war between the Soviet Union and the Mujahideen became ever more devastating. It was here that they came into contact with cricket for the first time. When the family returned to Afghanistan at the start of the next century, they took their enthusiasm for the sport with them. Although ‘there were no grounds, nothing in Afghanistan at that time’, Nabi was not to be deterred by the lack of cricketing infrastructure in his new home of Kabul, or the rest of the country.

As the Taliban extended their grip over Afghanistan in the 1990s, sport was not immune from the consequences. The Taliban took a markedly more draconian line than other Islamic regimes; while football thrived in Wahabi-dominated Saudi Arabia, it was anathema in Afghanistan.

Yet the Taliban’s al-Qaeda-funded regime made an exception for one sport: cricket. The elder brother of the first head of the Afghanistan Cricket Federation, founded in 1995, was a member of the Taliban. The Afghanistan Cricket Federation registered with the Afghan Olympic Committee as a national sport.

In January 2000 the Taliban urged the Afghanistan Cricket Federation to write to the Pakistan Cricket Board requesting support to join the International Cricket Council as an affiliate member. In cricket, the Taliban saw a sport that could both promote the regime at home and gain some acceptance abroad. The Taliban recognised cricket as a sport that could fit easily with a hardline Islamic state. After all, cricket was Pakistan’s national sport, and Pakistan was one of only three states to recognise the Taliban as Afghanistan’s official government. Taliban teams had even been known to play in Pakistan, as recounted in Wounded Tiger.

Cricket sat easily with Afghanistan’s cultural heritage. The sport bears significant resemblances to the old Afghan game of top danda. Both games involve a wooden bat hitting a spherical object. Cricket’s dress code also proved amenable to the Taliban. Unlike football, where the kit marked out those who wore it out as heathens in the Taliban’s eyes, cricket kits accommodated religious and cultural requirements.

‘Cricket became one of the favourite games of the Taliban because of the clothing,’ Dr Muhammad reflected. ‘They were not allowing sports with half trousers (shorts). In Islam, your knees should be hidden in your trousers and that’s it. Your knees should be hidden because that will allow you to offer prayers.’ In contrast to other sports, there is no direct physical contact between players in cricket.

After the 9/11 attacks on the United States, Afghanistan became the focus of President George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’. As provinces have been fought over since, cricket has offered a rare source of stability. It is played and watched in all parts of Afghanistan.

Taliban insurgents from Pakistan often inhabit the areas where cricket is most popular. ‘Cricket is stronger in areas where the Taliban are stronger,’ Dr Muhammad noted.

The Taliban have latched on to the sport. It is a shrewd move and means that the success of the Afghan cricketing side cannot be used as proof of the virtues of a more Westernised life. The Taliban have instead tried to claim the success of the cricket side as their own: leading players are reputed to have received gifts from people associated with the Taliban.

‘The Taliban don’t have any problem with cricket,’ Afghanistan’s former coach Taj Malik told me. ‘In areas that are ruled by Taliban there are a lot of boys playing cricket.’

Jalalabad, a Taliban stronghold 80km from the Pakistan border, is regarded as the home of Afghan cricket, and is the home of Taj, the man regarded as the sport’s father in Afghanistan.

After spending 16 years as a refugee, Taj had no time for those who thought that his dreams of Afghanistan reaching the World Cup were incredible. Temperamental and bombastic, Taj lifted Afghan cricket up through his insatiable enthusiasm and self-belief.

No one would have wanted to call the Kacha Gari refugee camp on the edge of Peshawar home. For tens of thousands of Afghans, including Taj and his ten siblings, it was allowing a sort of normalcy to develop. For Taj and many others, cricket was the centrepiece of their lives as refugees. ‘When we were refugees in Pakistan, we got interested watching international matches. I started playing cricket in 1987 when England was touring Pakistan during Mike Gatting’s captaincy.’

This was not the sport as Gatting’s team knew it. It was played with a stick and plastic bags wrapped up to make a ball or, if the players were more fortunate, a tennis ball. The Kacha Gari refugee camp contained little flat land so most games were played on a gradient. No one who played here would ever moan about the Lord’s slope.

It was still cricket. Taj set up a team in the camp: Afghan Cricket Club. Ramshackle as it was, for many Afghans the refugee camps provided their first exposure to cricket. It did more than just imbue Afghans with a love of the game.

The bonds forged in Pakistani refugee camps remain. Nabi played with Asghar Stanikzai, Dawlat Zadran and Shapoor Zadran, key figures in the national side today, in Peshawar. The players broke into the local club scene, where they played alongside leading Pakistan players including Umar Gul and Arshad Khan, both of whom would play Test cricket. Afghanistan’s cricketers can hardly claim to have been lucky, but it was fortunate that their years in Peshawar coincided with the flourishing of the game in that part of Pakistan.

As the refugees returned to Afghanistan, they found a country that had no time for cricket. ‘Even in 1995 there were not more than 20 or 30 people who were playing cricket in the country because it was a very new game,’ Dr Muhammad said. The refugees took their new sport with them. ‘They started street cricket. They were playing in very rough areas in football grounds.’

One refugee returning from Pakistan was Allah Dad Noori. In 1995 he set up the Afghan Cricket Federation in Kabul. It was the first organised cricket body in Afghanistan’s history. Taj Malik and Allah Dad fought for control of the nascent Afghan cricket team. Eventually they hit upon a compromise: Taj would become coach, while Allah Dad assumed the presidency of the Afghan Cricket Federation (which later became the Afghan Cricket Board).

In June 2001 the ACF was registered with the ICC, who awarded Afghanistan affiliate membership. Their first official tour was to Pakistan later that year, where they played against club sides.

Afghanistan’s first official fixtures came when they were invited to the Asian Cricket Council Trophy in 2004, a tournament featuring 15 teams (though none of the four Asian full members). The competition was held in Malaysia: this was the first time that any of the players had flown on an aeroplane.

Before they did that, there was the small obstacle of obtaining passports. This was more onerous that it sounds: many players had only a vague idea of when they were born. ‘Talking to my mother, she works out my age by seeing who the president was,’ the Afghan player Raees Ahmadzai told ESPNCricinfo in 2009. ‘Unofficially I’m nearly 25, give or take three years. Or four. I could be 21 or 28.’

The cricket was a modest success. Afghanistan lost their first official game – to Oman – by four wickets, but then defeated Bahrain and Malaysia to finish sixth in the tournament. The game was also beginning to show the positive effects it could have in Afghanistan. Wisden in 2004 highlights one example. ‘Allah Dad Noori was playing one day in Kabul when a young man walked by carrying an AK47, watched for a while before being invited to join in. Afterwards, he asked if he could play next time. When he returned he was without the rifle. “Where’s your AK47?” asked Noori. “Oh, I don’t need that,” the youth replied. “I’m playing cricket!”’

Factionalism was never far away in Afghan cricket. Allah Dad, by now the vice-president of the Afghan Cricket Federation, had appointed himself as captain of the side for the ACC Trophy in 2004. It was not a decision that owed much to his playing ability. His top score in the tournament was three; he bowled a total of ten overs, which went for 85 runs while claiming only one wicket. He dropped himself from the team for the final two games.

When he returned home, Allah Dad found out that not only had he lost his job as captain and been dropped from the squad, he had also been sacked from the Afghan Cricket Federation.

The outside world was beginning to take notice of Afghan cricket. An MCC team toured India in March 2006 and invited Afghanistan over for a game, splitting the cost of Afghanistan’s trip to Mumbai with the British Embassy, who were one of the early financial supporters of the game in Afghanistan. MCC were captained by a 48-year-old Mike Gatting, and the blithe assumption was that they would give Afghanistan a lesson in playing the game.

Gatting, whose England tour to Pakistan in 1987 had inspired Taj’s love for the game, edged behind for a duck. His side fared little better: Afghanistan won the 40-over game by 171 runs. A cricket promoter observing their success then organised a tour to England in 2006. ‘When we go there, the English counties and other cricket journalists they don’t know anything about Afghan cricket,’ Taj recalled. By the end of the tour their opponents had a sense of Afghanistan’s talent: playing mainly against county second teams, they won six of their seven games.

Afghanistan’s victory over MCC had special significance for two Afghan cricketers, Hameed Hassan and Mohammad Nabi. The bandana-wearing Hassan impressed with his pace and swing; Nabi bludgeoned 116.

While they had both lived on refugee camps, in other ways their life experiences were hugely different, and emblematic of the diversity in the Afghan side. Nabi’s family is among the wealthiest in Afghanistan, and has always keenly supported cricket. Like Nabi, Hassan learned the game in Peshawar, but his family loathed the game and attempted to stop him playing. The Hassans only embraced cricket when Hameed was becoming successful.

Both earned contracts to play for MCC Young Cricketers in 2006. John Stephenson, head of cricket at MCC, said that they brought a ‘pure and joyful’ approach to training sessions at Lord’s. ‘Incredibly dedicated and strong’, Hassan has the build of an ox but has ‘no sense of when to stop’, perhaps explaining why he has been injured so often. Rapid and with a devilish yorker, Hassan smashed Monty Panesar’s helmet with a bouncer in the nets. Nabi also made an impact – in fact, he made cricketing history. Playing for MCC against Sri Lanka A, he became the first player in the history of first-class cricket to hit the first ball in both innings of his debut for six.

Helped by their experience in England, Afghanistan had made solid progress since their first international in 2004. They came third in the Asian Cricket Council Trophy in 2006, an improvement of two positions on their previous performance. But Taj Malik and his team always had greater dreams. They wanted to play in the World Cup. Thanks to their performances in the ACC Trophy, they had a chance.

Still, it was a remote one. Afghanistan had to win three consecutive promotions – from World Cricket League Division Five, Four and then Three – just to get to the final World Cup qualifiers, where 12 teams would compete for the four places in the 2011 World Cup. However fanciful, the dream instilled Afghanistan’s players with a palpable sense of purpose.

In May 2008 a squad made up entirely of former refugees in Pakistan headed to Jersey for the World Cricket League Division Five. Vanuatu, Norway, Japan and the Bahamas were among those competing alongside Afghanistan. By now the Afghan side had the company of a group of film-makers who, sensing what an incredible story they had stumbled upon, followed the side around for two years in making the superb film Out of the Ashes. The director Tim Albone first encountered the side in 2005. ‘They had such enthusiasm for the game and such self-belief. It really stayed with me’ – so much so that he decided to make a film about their attempts to qualify for the 2011 World Cup.

Before the squad left for Jersey, the film-makers spoke to the British ambassador to Afghanistan about the side’s prospects. ‘They play cricket like war,’ he said before predicting, ‘They’re going to be stuffed!’ against international sides.

He was emphatically wrong on the second point, but it was hard to disagree with him on the first. For most sides in the competition, international sport was an enjoyable divergence from their mundane existences; Jersey’s side included financiers and hedge fund workers. Afghanistan’s desperation for success boiled over into ugly histrionics when decisions did not go their way. ‘You could see how much they wanted to win,’ Matt Hague, who captained Jersey in the tournament, recalled. ‘We thought they were a little bit arrogant.’

Jersey contained copious surprises for the players. For most, it was the first time they had gone beyond Afghanistan, Pakistan or Malaysia. In their hotel, the squad looked incredulous at the sight of female pensioners line-dancing. So distrusting were the squad of the local cuisine that they regularly ate at McDonald’s.

Without rain, Afghanistan might well not have qualified from their group. Their game against Jersey, who won their four group matches, was abandoned; had it gone ahead, Afghanistan would have needed to win. They then had to beat Nepal in the semi-final to advance to World Cricket League Division Four. Thanks to Nabi, who scored 48 and took two wickets, they did.

Before planning for their trip to Tanzania for World Cricket League Division Four, Afghanistan played in the Division Five final against Jersey. After collapsing to 42/7 in pursuit of 81 to defeat the hosts in the final, they scrambled to a two-wicket victory.

‘Once we won the final I couldn’t control myself from crying,’ the batsman Raees Ahmadzai told me. In Jersey he ‘saw peace and I saw birds and animals flying around and walking around in the middle of people. I was sad that our birds and animals are not feeling safe in our country.’ As the crowd applauded austerely, Taj fell to his knees, sobbing in celebration.

After all he had done for Afghan cricket, Taj might have felt entitled to some loyalty in return. But players turned on him after defeat in the semi-finals of the ACC Trophy in 2008 (a completely separate competition to the World Cricket League). No one doubted Taj’s commitment but his bluster and ludicrous predictions were deeply unhelpful. In Jersey alone, he boasted that Afghanistan would score 400 runs against Japan and that they could beat England. He threatened to throw himself into the Atlantic if Afghanistan failed to win the tournament.

Afghanistan now needed more than a brimful of passion. They needed a coach who could develop their cricketing skills, someone who would not resort to chain-smoking at the sight of a batting collapse.

Taj remains rankled by his departure. ‘Up to Jersey there was no government involvement in cricket, and there was no support from any department,’ he said. ‘When cricket became more popular all people got interested, all the nation got interested and the government removed me from my post. They told me, “Now we are going to the big stage and you are a low level coach.” But I’d done the most difficult job to help the team to play with a hard ball and I gathered the team and motivated them.’

England had just ditched Peter Moores – largely because he lacked Test experience – in favour of someone who had played at the highest level. Afghanistan did the same: for all Taj’s achievements, cricket in Afghanistan has never been about sentiment.

Kabir Khan was appointed as his successor. As a former Test cricketer for Pakistan (albeit only for four Tests) he was assured of respect. And though he could be considered a foreign coach, Kabir could not be called a carpetbagger. Like many of the Afghan side, he was born in Peshawar. His late father was Afghan.

‘It was a tribute to him,’ he said. ‘I thought if I could do something for that country, then my father might be happy.’ Kabir spoke Pashto, the most popular language in Peshawar and Pakistan-bordering parts of Afghanistan, as well as some Dari, Afghanistan’s other official language, so communicating with the players was not a problem.

‘I could speak to them in their mother tongue. They needed someone who could translate cricket language into their own language.’

Kabir described his role as more akin to a ‘headmaster keeping an eye on everything’ than a cricket coach. He had to teach the players everything from how to behave at functions to how to speak to the media and how to eat like athletes. On one occasion, on the night before an ODI in the Netherlands in 2009, some players became embroiled in an uber-competitive dance contest with locals until the early hours. ‘I shouted “it’s not going to be a dance match tomorrow”,’ Kabir remembered.

Paradoxically, developing a professional mentality – even though the players were only paid expenses until 2010 – was easier because of the turbulence in Afghanistan. ‘I was lucky, in that when I joined them, they were training full-time because there was nothing else to do. They were free anytime for practice,’ Kabir reflected. ‘And the respect of all the team for me, I could see it was like for another brother or a fatherly figure. All of them respected me a lot. Each thing in training I said, they never questioned it, they just did it. I think that was the main reason for their success.’

Kabir had a subtler and less demonstrative coaching style than Taj. Afghanistan became calmer and more disciplined in their shot selection and running between the wickets. They no longer collapsed like a tribute act to the 1990s England cricket team. Along with Afghanistan, Jersey qualified from Division Five to Division Four, which was held in October 2008 in Tanzania. Even during the three months between Division Five and Four, Afghanistan improved significantly. ‘They were at a different level,’ said the Jersey captain Hague. ‘They were always very strong in bowling but they became much better at building an innings. It wasn’t so wham-bam.’

In Tanzania, Jersey shared a hotel with Afghanistan and unlikely friendships developed between the two qualifiers from Division Five. ‘When you got to know them they were great people,’ Hague said. ‘They said to us we should come and play cricket in Afghanistan.’ That invitation was not taken up, but Hague heeded advice from Hameed Hassan during Afghanistan’s game against Jersey. Hague was padded up to bat at number three but, because of the heat, was waiting to bat without his helmet on. ‘Hameed said to me, “Skip, are you not wearing a helmet?” He was a bit worried for me – he knew he was going to bowl some short stuff.’

Throughout Afghanistan’s nascent years, they faced a perpetual worry over where they could find halal cuisine – or even just roti and naan. At the World Cricket League Division Three tournament, held in Argentina in January 2009, the all-rounder Hasti Gul took over the hotel kitchen to prepare traditional karai for the entire squad because they were missing home so much.

The cricket provided another worry. After losing to Uganda in their first match, Afghanistan won their next three games. But they had to win a fourth consecutive game, against the lowly Cayman Islands, to progress. Afghanistan chose a bad time for their batting to implode: they reached just 68/5 from 31 overs and, after rain adjusted their target, the Cayman Islands only needed 63 from 20 overs to win.

They were cruising on 35/2 when Afghanistan were reprieved by the rain, which forced the players off and kept their World Cup dream alive. ‘I have seen people die and I have not shed a tear,’ Hassan said after the game against the Cayman Islands. ‘But there is something about cricket that gets me here [pointing to his heart]. Cricket is our chance.’

Kabir said, ‘I nearly had another heart attack. I think I need to say thank you to God as he has been very kind to us today. We needed it to rain and it did.’

Rather unfairly, the game was replayed from scratch the following day. Afghanistan won and, with a little help from the weather, they reached the World Cup qualifiers in South Africa in April 2009. After making it past the first round, Afghanistan qualified for the Super 8 stage, which would determine which four qualifiers made the World Cup.

A match against Ireland, the associate cricket powerhouse, loomed ominously. Afghanistan posted a respectable 218/7 but, despite a jittery start, Ireland were cruising on 186/5. They needed 33 from 33 balls: a facile task for a side that had defeated Bangladesh and Pakistan in the last World Cup.

That was reckoning without Hassan. Armed with his trademark blue headband, he decimated Ireland’s tail: their last five wickets fell for ten runs. Four of those fell to Hassan, who ended with 5-23 including four batsmen clean bowled. Ireland had no riposte to his whippy action and 90mph late-swinging yorkers.

It heralded the start of one of the most captivating rivalries in the world game: the orthodoxy of Ireland, the best-drilled and most efficient side beyond the Test world, against Afghanistan’s audacity and irascible aggression.

‘Both teams have that same fighting spirit. We’ve had a few contests that have teetered on the edge but we know what’s at stake,’ Ireland captain William Porterfield reflected. ‘They are a fantastic team with the cricketers to put in big performances.’

Associate sides have been accused of lacking ambition, but it is not a claim that anyone could make against Afghanistan or Ireland.

Despite Hassan’s intervention against Ireland, Afghanistan’s fairytale thudded into reality. Afghanistan earned ODI status – and with it the extra funding necessary to implement a proper cricketing structure in the country. But sport is about glory and Afghanistan didn’t make the World Cup: they lost to Kenya, Netherlands, UAE and Canada in South Africa. As Afghanistan’s hopes of making the World Cup were ended by Canada, Taj was at home, following the game on a creaky internet stream.

Taj would soon return as assistant coach to Kabir. His profuse enthusiasm complemented Kabir’s more cerebral virtues. After the disappointment of missing out on the 2011 World Cup, Afghanistan still had the chance to qualify for the 2010 World Twenty20.

One of their group games in the World Twenty20 qualifiers was against the United States. It was a rare occasion when a game between non-Test teams attracted the cricketing world’s attention. And it was an instance when cricket did not provide Afghanistan with escapism, but a reminder of the devastating situation in the country.

On 27 August 2008, American forces raided the home of a former player, Rahmat Wali, after receiving a tip-off, and shot him dead at the age of 28. Wali was suspected of being an IED facilitator – someone who enables people to build improvised explosive devices or roadside bombs. Taj Malik, for one, does not believe that. Taj described him as ‘a very good guy, a very simple guy. In 2000 we had a match in Peshawar stadium, he hit the biggest six ever which I saw. When I heard that he died I was very sad.’

Afghanistan easily defeated the United States, who could not handle Hassan. After yorking one player, Hassan leapt to the floor, extending his arms and legs as he gloried on the wreckage he had made of the American’s stumps. The side dedicated the win to the memory of their former player Wali. The victory led to the team receiving a message of congratulations from the Taliban, recognising its potential psychological value in their own fight against America.

The win also helped Afghanistan secure one of the two places for non-Test sides in the World Twenty20, effectively the World Cup in the shortest format of the game. It was the first time that the country had reached an international finals event in any sport. That Afghanistan won the qualifiers – they twice beat Ireland in the tournament, including in the final – at the start of 2010 was a sign of how far they had come in under a year.

They were also proving that it wasn’t just the shortest format in which they could excel. Afghanistan also won the four-day Intercontinental Cup in 2010. Had the 2011 World Cup qualifiers taken place in the year preceding the tournament, Afghanistan would surely have made it. Still, the World Twenty20 was a significant prize.

‘It just went crazy after that,’ Kabir reflected. ‘You could see the tears in the boys’ eyes and obviously, the emotions and the emotions in the country. It was just like winning a World Cup, really, not only qualifying for the World Cup.’

Afghanistan found themselves in a group with India and South Africa: they could scarcely have received a less auspicious draw. ‘I am a big fan of American television and movies and my favourite film is Rocky – I vividly remember watching it when I was growing up – and one of my heroes is Sylvester Stallone,’ he wrote on his ESPNCricinfo blog after the victory over the United States in the qualifier.

‘I think that there is a similarity in the story of Rocky and the Afghanistan cricket team – we both started at the bottom and gradually made our way up.’

Though both matches were lost, like Rocky fighting against the world champion, Hassan would not be overawed: he took 3-21 against South Africa, dismissing Jacques Kallis, Mark Boucher and JP Duminy. Hassan and his side would be back at the World Twenty20s in 2012 and 2014. In 2012, they gave India a mighty fright: Afghanistan needed 44 from the last four overs, with four wickets in hand and Nabi going well before they collapsed.

By this point, Taj’s cricket career was already over. ‘There is no justice,’ he lamented when I asked about the end of his time with Afghanistan cricket. Like cricketers across the world, Taj blamed greedy administrators, saying that they were clinging on to money that the players earned for qualifying for the 2010 World Twenty20. The Afghan Cricket Board softened their stance and gave the players some of the winnings, but Taj said that the players did not make him aware of this. He resigned, though he briefly resurfaced as Afghanistan A’s coach after changes in the board. That stint only lasted for a few months.

He now lives a spiritual life of Tableegh – the same devout Islamic existence that permeated the Pakistan side under the captaincy of Inzamam-ul-Haq. Taj only follows Afghan cricket from a distance, but he still keeps in touch with some of the players – including Nabi, the skipper.

‘I worked for seven, eight years with these players when we had no facilities, no money. Now some of the senior players want to have a relationship and come and talk with me. I’m not the kind of person to have bad behaviour with them.’

In 2014, Nabi described Taj as ‘a great man’, saying ‘I meet him from time to time when I go back to Afghanistan. We don’t talk about cricket.’

Taj’s departure would not be the only time that the Afghan side was afflicted by boardroom disputes. His successor as coach, Kabir Khan, resigned later in 2010, citing interference in team selection and planning. ‘Everybody in Afghanistan wanted their son or nephew or whoever to play, because there’s a lot of fame in it, and obviously money involved in it. So every politician, every donor, or anybody who had a bit of power, they were trying to influence the Afghanistan Cricket Board. The officials of the cricket board couldn’t bear that pressure.’

No shortage of people wanted to latch on to the success of the side; a stable, well-run cricket team is a challenge anywhere, let alone in a country with Afghanistan’s wider challenges.

Kabir was persuaded to return from the more comfortable surroundings of the UAE at the start of 2012 after receiving assurances that he would be able to get on with his job in peace.

‘The team was doing really badly after I left and there was no one interested in joining them. I was coaching UAE and the team was doing very well, but I knew anyone would join the UAE but no one would be interested in Afghanistan at that point.’

As UAE coach, Kabir had masterminded two victories over Afghanistan in World Cup qualifiers in late 2011, and so endangered the goal of taking Afghanistan to the World Cup for which he had worked so hard.

His return as coach, which lasted until he resigned for personal reasons in September 2014, had the desired effect. In 2013 Afghanistan needed to win each of their last six games in the World Cricket League Championship – two each against Scotland, Namibia and Kenya – to be assured of a World Cup berth. By October, that was down to two.

Afghanistan could have been forgiven for being overcome with nerves. Kabir ensured that they were not. They bowled Kenya out for 89 and 93 en route to two emphatic wins. Hassan proved irresistible, taking 6-30 across the two games to underscore his status as – back issues permitting – the most exhilarating fast bowling sight beyond the Test world.

‘He is indisputably the fastest in the associate cricket world. One of those who could bowl 90mph when he was in a good rhythm – he was truly a fighter,’ Kabir said. ‘If he’s 50 per cent fit, he’ll still be hungry to play.’

On 4 October Afghanistan qualified for the World Cup: vindication for the side’s newfound professionalism, as well as its resolve.

It was far removed from Jersey in 2008. Yet there was continuity in the journey: six of those who had played in the victory over Jersey were in the final 11 that secured Afghanistan’s place at the 2015 World Cup, including the captain, Mohammad Nabi.

A few months earlier, World Cup qualification would have been far from Nabi’s mind. This owed nothing to events on the field, but to the kidnapping of his father. In May 2013, Nabi’s father, a wealthy car salesman, was abducted from his car in the city of Jalalabad. For more than two months, his father’s whereabouts were unknown, despite a concerted effort by the government to find him. ‘It was quite a difficult time,’ Nabi said. ‘It was very hard to find my dad.’

At the start of August, Nabi and his team faced two crucial World Cup qualifying matches in Namibia. He decided that he could not miss the tour. ‘My brother said, “It’s not your issue – inshallah when you reach Namibia we will have good news.” When I reached Namibia after three days my brother called and said, “Your father is found by the government.” I was very happy.’

Nabi celebrated by playing the match of his life. He smashed 81 not out from 45 balls, showing the audacity, clean timing and effortless power evident when he played for MCC Young Cricketers seven years earlier. He then made sure of victory by taking 5-12 with his crafty off spin.

Two months later, Nabi’s smash through midwicket against Kenya secured Afghanistan’s place at the World Cup. The moment was celebrated by a jubilant, intensely partisan crowd, and their chants of ‘Afghanistan, zindabad!’ The entire Afghan team ran from the dressing room to hoist Nabi into the air. ‘I was very proud of myself.’

It felt like a home crowd, but it was not: Afghanistan were playing their ‘home’ game at the Sharjah Cricket Stadium. No country has ever agreed to tour Afghanistan, so they have made the UAE their home. The Afghan contingent has been rather more raucous than many home crowds, cheering their side relentlessly and bringing in everything from Afghan tricolours to air-horns to bagpipes to add to the atmosphere.

Back when Afghanistan played Ireland in the final of the World Twenty20 qualifiers in 2010, the ICC only allocated an area with 3,000 seats, thinking that would be enough to satisfy demand for the fixture. Around 10,000 supporters came and the area they were supposed to be in became so overcrowded that they started scaling the fence at the front of the stand, where there was a 40-foot drop to the lower tier. The ICC had to enlist Taj to speak on the tannoy in Pashtu to make sure none of them invaded again. No one moved after he had spoken.

To prevent a repeat, Afghanistan’s final World Cricket League game against Kenya in October 2013 was the first time that the ICC had charged supporters to attend a game in the UAE not involving Test sides. Five Afghan parliamentarians were among around 5,000 in attendance. Then-president Hamid Karzai (one of the president’s functions is to act as patron of the Afghan Cricket Board) was glued to his TV.

As stirring as qualification for the World Cup was, having a women’s team free to compete on the international stage would be more remarkable.

Even among Afghan cricket fans, few people know of Diana Barakzai. She is the pioneer of women’s cricket in the country or, more accurately, the would-be pioneer. However great the obstacles that the men’s side has had to overcome, they are nothing compared with those faced by Afghanistan’s fledgling women’s team.

Diana and her three sisters, who are all keen players and ICC-qualified coaches, learned to play as refugees in Pakistan having fled from the Taliban.

Since returning to Kabul in 2009 they have tried to encourage other women to take up cricket. Diana said that her father and brother ‘have always been supportive to us, always teaching us about cricket’. Their father converted a plot of land from his old house in Kabul into a cricket pitch that has provided women with somewhere to play.

The Afghan women’s national team was formed in 2010, with lofty ambitions to emulate the success of the men’s team. It has not worked out like that. The women’s side has still yet to play an official match with ‘political reasons’ cited by the Afghan Cricket Board. Players have been likened to prostitutes, while practice matches have been disrupted by mullahs bellowing from the sidelines. The charity Afghan Connection, the driving force behind women’s cricket in Afghanistan, now endeavours to play behind walls in order to protect the girls.

An annual tournament is held between girls’ schools in Kabul, but the sport continues to be stifled by Afghanistan’s attitude to women. Outside the more affluent and progressive members of the society – who tend to live in cities like Kabul – it is still anathema for women to be seen in public by themselves. ‘Playing cricket for a girl was not less than suicide,’ Diana said of her experiences. She has now lost her role, with Dr Muhammad citing ‘poor performance for three years and for not having an educational degree’ as the factors.

Women’s cricket must respect ‘Islamic values and the values of traditional Afghanistan’ to grow, Dr Muhammad reflected. It is now hoped that the women’s side may appear in the Asian Challenge Cup in 2015, but plans for official matches have been abandoned copious times in the past.

Taj doubted whether women’s cricket could ever gain acceptance. ‘It’s very difficult because Afghanistan is a Muslim country and Islam does not allow women and girls to participate in the game especially in an area like Afghanistan. Even they cannot move without Islamic rules to walk from home. So how can they play?’ He said that female cricketers in Kabul ‘didn’t know anything about the game’.

Just as the Taliban’s support has been crucial in the success of the men’s side, it has stymied women’s cricket.

Afghanistan have already proved that World Cup qualification need not be the summit of their cricketing achievements. In February 2014 they defeated Bangladesh away in the Asia Cup. A few months later, they drew an ODI series 2-2 in Zimbabwe, including winning the last game by 100 runs.

Off the pitch, Afghan cricket has developed an increasingly professional operation. Even the phone line to the Afghan Cricket Board has become less capricious. A Memorandum of Understanding has been signed with the Ministry of Education to establish cricket as a compulsory part of the national curriculum. A diverse array of donors, including UNICEF, the Swedish Committee and USAID, has helped to develop the infrastructure of the sport. In October 2014, Germany agreed to put €700,000 towards the construction of a new cricket stadium in the city of Khost, near the border with Pakistan.

For donors eager to attach themselves to a good news story in Afghanistan, funding cricket holds obvious appeal. The Taliban’s support for cricket is also significant. Cricketers are not loathed by the most reactionary segments of Afghan society, as footballers often are, meaning that donors are insulated from criticism of pushing Western values before the country is ready. It also means that investment in cricket is unlikely to be wasted: cricket pitches and players have not been targets for Taliban attacks.

Sponsors have also invested in Afghan cricket: it offers one of the best ways for companies to reach the Afghan middle-class. The support means that Afghanistan is much less reliant on the International Cricket Council than other associate nations; ICC income only accounts for around a quarter of their funding.

In its running of the game, the Afghan Cricket Board is more enlightened than many full members. ‘The cricket board punch well above their weight in their environment in terms of good governance and administration. They’re really well-run,’ an ICC insider told me: chief executive Dr Noor Muhammad is a former United Nations youth coordinator.

Afghanistan aims to play Test cricket – and not at some mythical point in the future, but as soon as 2018 when the ICC Test Challenge, pitting the lowest-ranking Test nation against the winners of the Intercontinental Cup, is scheduled.

Afghanistan also needs Test cricket to prevent an exodus of its best players to Pakistan, as has happened with the best Irish players leaving for England. Wicketkeeper Mohammad Shazhad was initially reluctant to play for Afghanistan: he qualified for Pakistan too, which offered him the only possible route into Test cricket. Afghanistan’s associate opponents have often complained that the side has an unfair advantage because so many of their players have connections with Pakistan.

Sensitive to this, the Afghan Cricket Board pushes players to speak Pashtu in interviews rather than Urdu, to show it is for Afghans rather than Pakistanis. The links between the first generation of Afghanistan’s side and the Peshawar refugee camps also raises a question: can the Afghan structure produce players of the calibre of those who were exposed to the Pakistani club scene?

There are significant reasons to think that it can. While for most Afghans cricket exists as a game played with a tape ball wherever space can be found – from narrow streets to the promenade of the Darul Aman Palace on the edge of Kabul – the game is becoming increasingly structured. There are over 80 grounds in Afghanistan, including more than 50 turf wickets. The country has around 500 cricket clubs, including leagues in 32 of the 34 provinces.

Even before the Test Challenge was floated, the Afghan Cricket Board had plans to extend the duration of the two-innings regional tournament from three to four days. The new format began in October 2014. Afghanistan was ahead of its great associate rival, Ireland – as well as Sri Lanka – in introducing a four-day domestic structure. Bangladesh only formed a multi-day structure after it had been awarded Test status.

The domestic Twenty20 competition, the Etisalat Sixes, has been an astounding success. A capacity crowd of more than 10,000 watched the final – ticket prices were doubled from the final in 2013 but that proved no deterrent – and thousands more were turned away at the gates. The Etisalat Sixes are also a ubiquitous presence on television sets in Afghanistan. Perhaps optimistically, the Afghan Cricket Board claimed that 12m people watched the final in 2014.

Though its funding remains trivial by comparison with the Test-playing nations, the Afghan Cricket Board has put in place a good structure for nurturing players. As it has grown, so it has been able to improve ways of identifying talent, especially outside the main cricketing hubs. While the concentration of players from near the border with Pakistan remains, cricket’s popularity is also growing in the north. The quick bowler Mirwais Ashraf hails from Kunduz, a city in the north of the country, near Tajikistan, that has become a focal point for fighting between the Taliban and the Afghan security forces. The board contracts 43 professional players, including five under-19 players.

One of those who recently progressed through the Afghan youth structure is Usman Ghani. At the age of 17 he scored an ODI century against Zimbabwe, opening the innings. Five months earlier, he had been a member of the Afghanistan side that defeated Australia and Sri Lanka in the Under-19 World Cup in 2014. The results served as notice to the world of the abundant talent that exists below the Afghanistan national side, even if the exact ages of several players have been questioned.

The increased professionalism and popularity of Afghan cricket has lent it an entirely different character. Gone is the motley bunch who played in Jersey in 2008, receiving only travel, accommodation and a very modest allowance in return. In their place are Afghan celebrities who are not shy of monetising their talents.

The changes have not pleased everyone. ‘When I was captain in that time our players were hungry to play cricket,’ Raees Ahmadzai said. ‘Now players have contracts and make good money. When going on tour players have daily allowances and stay in five-star hotels so players’ lifestyles have changed.’

Taj Malik did not begrudge the players their riches. ‘I’m happy that they’re playing on a good level, they have good salaries, they don’t have economic problems. They have model cars.’

Yet, to him, professionalism has come at a price: the essence of Afghan cricket has been lost. His cricketing philosophy is encapsulated by his favourite game, against the UAE in the Asian Cricket Council Twenty20 tournament in 2009. Afghanistan needed ten to win from the final two balls with their last pair at the crease. ‘I shouted at Hameed to not go down the track and stay in the crease and hit it very far. The first ball he hit for four and the last for six and we won.’

He was desperate for Afghanistan to replicate such feats today. ‘Our style was just like the style which the West Indies have. We hit boundaries and have the big hitters and score a lot of runs hitting sixes and fours. In this style we win so many games from 2002 to 2009 everywhere in the world.’

Although he has moved on from his life in cricket, Taj has lost none of his bluster. ‘If I was there, I’m sure, with the help of Allah, we would be the number five or number six team in the world today.’ As Afghanistan’s rise continues, Taj does not deserve his role to be written out of history. If he has anything to do with it, there is no chance of that happening.

While Afghanistan’s players have become celebrated athletes in their own country, and the side has become increasingly consistent – in 2013, they were the runners-up to Ireland in the flagship associate competitions in all three formats of the game – Afghan cricket remains in a curious sort of limbo.

Much of this is the result of the country’s unique circumstances. ‘The biggest barrier to Afghanistan’s cricket will be Afghanistan the country,’ an ICC source told me. It could be many years before any country is happy to tour Afghanistan, for all the board’s protestations that it would be safe to do so. The ground in Kabul, where the national squad trains, is flanked by up to ten armed guards. But that is not the only complication.

‘The advice I am getting is that it’s not the Taliban wanting to shoot you, the danger around Kabul is kidnap,’ Afghanistan’s new coach, the Englishman Andy Moles, told The Telegraph. ‘There are armed guards at the hotel I am staying at and also at the bank next door. So you get used to seeing AK47s every day.’

Yet Afghanistan are also hindered by the lack of altruism and ambitious vision from the cartel that runs cricket. Their fixture list lacks coherence and structure, deterring sponsors. The cricketing world is always happy to share the credit for Afghanistan’s success but is rather less enthusiastic to help them.

The complex visa rules in English county cricket, for instance, act as a de facto ban on Afghans playing professional cricket in the country. Essex, Kent and Lancashire were interested in signing Hassan and Nabi after their fine performances for MCC against Nottinghamshire in 2011 but were dissuaded by the complexity of the process. Bangladesh and Pakistan are the only Test-playing countries that have had Afghan players in their professional leagues.

Most critically, Afghanistan remain completely reliant on the goodwill of full members to get games outside of the World Cup and World Twenty20. Even these opportunities are being reduced. After 2015, the World Cup will be restricted to ten teams. The main World Twenty20 has also been scaled back to ten sides and will now take place every four years rather than every two. Unless the full members become more amenable to giving Afghanistan playing opportunities, it will impose a glass ceiling on cricket’s growth.

‘It will frustrate the audience in the country,’ Dr Muhammad warned. ‘It should be their (the full members’) social responsibility as well to promote this game if they want peace and stability in this country.’

With cricket unique among sports in wishing to contract the size of its World Cup, Afghanistan’s tournament debut threatens to be their last appearance in spite of their on-field improvements. Administrators have no time for fairytales.

The neglect of Afghanistan, rooted in the short-term greed of the ‘big three’, would be shameful. Cricket has repeatedly shown that its importance in Afghanistan stretches far beyond the pitch.

‘The young generation is coming together and supporting the Afghan cricket team. From bad things like fighting and drugs, they leave everything and they support the team and they play cricket as well,’ Nabi told me. ‘It’s the main role of playing cricket in Afghanistan – it brings peace to every tribe.’

Afghanistan’s qualification for the World Cup is a brilliant story – the greatest testimony yet to the vision of Bob Woolmer in pioneering the ICC’s development programme. ‘It’s not something that would happen in real life,’ Kabir reflected. ‘Most of the time I say that this type of story only happens in films. It’s not very easy to believe it when I see it, but it happened. I’ve never heard or seen anything like this before in my life.’

For all the uncertainties that lie ahead, cricket has been a powerful unifying force in the country. Afghanistan’s success in its national sport has projected a positive image of the country to the rest of the world – and enriched the game of cricket in the process. Afghanistan are no ragtag bunch of cricketers, but a serious international side. Cries of ‘Afghanistan, zindabad’ are now imbued with expectation.

Ireland by Tim Wigmore

IT took a coin toss to wake Irish cricket out of its slumber. The date was 17 March 2007. Ireland were playing in their first World Cup. Few Irishmen realised it until a pulsating tie against Zimbabwe two days earlier which earned a front-page photograph in The Irish Times.

Now they faced Pakistan. Ireland were given all the St Patrick’s Day cheer they needed when they saw the pitch: as green as the leprechaun outfits worn by their supporters. When captain Trent Johnston won the toss, suddenly there was the whiff of an upset in the air.

Some couldn’t help sneering. ‘When we walked out on to the field there was a group of Pakistani supporters on the right-hand side and they were giving us all sorts of stick,’ Johnston has since recalled. ‘“You should be back in the pub and you should be drinking Guinness celebrating St Patrick’s Day. You don’t play cricket,” and all that. And you just saw the guys growing an extra inch.’

Six balls into Pakistan’s innings, another of Ireland’s Australian-born players, Dave Langford-Smith, celebrated: Pakistan’s opener Mohammad Hafeez had edged behind. Ireland were beginning to believe.

Seven years earlier, Andre Botha left a brief first-class career in South Africa to move to Ireland. He had to get time off from his job as a delivery driver to go to the World Cup. Yet he produced the second-most economical spell in World Cup history.

Bowling wicket-to-wicket at a pace that would not disturb motorway speed cameras, eight overs of skill and precision, mixing seam, cutters and slower balls, yielded only five runs. He snared Imran Nazir and, crucially, Pakistan’s captain Inzamam-ul-Haq.

‘Early on in his innings he got stuck at the crease. We had to get it up a bit fuller than normal. With the wicket moving off the seam and the ball coming out of the hand pretty well it worked,’ Botha reflected: Inzamam edged obligingly to first slip. ‘I probably did it once or twice in my career when I could move the ball both ways. All the balls on the day came out the way I wanted. If I could bowl like that every day cricket would have been easy.’

Johnston played his part too: seven miserly overs, and two catches. The second, as Johnston ended flat out on the turf but with the ball safely in his outstretched hands after running over his shoulder from mid-on, was vindication for the coach Adi Birrell.

Knowing that Ireland could not hope to match Test sides in their batting or bowling, he vowed, ‘The one area we could compete was our fielding.’ As simple as Ireland’s mantra was – ‘No no-balls, no wides and bowl straight at the stumps’ – they had bowled Pakistan out for 132. Overhaul that, and they would not only beat a Test nation. They would eliminate Pakistan from the tournament and progress, at their expense, to the knockout stages.

They would be the hardest runs that Ireland would ever have to score and Johnston knew it. During the break between the innings, he gave what several players call a ‘Churchillian’ speech. Johnston bounded around the changing room, topless and with a look of raw intensity in his eyes.

‘Now we have a chance to go to the Super 8s. We have a massive f***ing chance to stay in the West Indies for an extra four weeks,’ he bellowed. ‘It’s up to every single one of us, and see how much we want to f***ing stay here. I can promise you that it’s gonna be tough out there.’

Johnston went to every player in the Ireland dressing room, reminding them of the stakes if they lost: a return to their mundane existences as teachers, postmen and farmers. Only two had professional cricketing contracts. ‘I sure as hell don’t want to go back and sell fabric,’ he told his team.

But it didn’t look like Ireland would be staying much longer. With so few runs to defend, Pakistan resorted to bowling with primal intensity. The Irish batsmen had faced nothing like it. ‘We were really confident that we could knock the runs off, perhaps a bit naive as to what we were coming up against,’ opening batsman William Porterfield admitted. ‘Mohammad Sami was bowling at 90mph and a lot of us hadn’t really come up against 90mph bowling.’

Porterfield survived Sami’s opening onslaught but he was rendered strokeless: he took 49 balls over his 13 runs. Still, that was more than Jeremy Bray and Eoin Morgan managed combined, and Ireland were 15/2 when Niall O’Brien came to the wicket. While he was one of only three Ireland players who had first-class county experience, O’Brien didn’t seem like the man for this situation.

Two days earlier against Zimbabwe, he had made only one run before tamely poking behind. Birrell was under pressure to drop O’Brien, or at least move him down the order. ‘I was batting very badly,’ he remembered. ‘My confidence was very, very low going into the game, so much so that I didn’t even have a net the day before because I didn’t want it to get any worse.’

O’Brien chose a good day to remember how to bat. ‘From ball one, the ball was coming off the middle of the bat. I was hitting the ball well, hitting the ball into gaps. I always thought that as long as I batted, we’d win the game.’

Ireland had never before beaten a Test-playing nation in an official ODI. Rather than glibly claim that he was focused only on the next ball, O’Brien reflected that he ‘was very clued-in to how important the fixture was and how important it was we got the victory’. He moved past 50, scoring almost 80 per cent of Ireland’s runs while at the crease. Even a break for rain and bad light did not deter him. ‘I felt like I wasn’t going to get out, I was insurmountable.’ To prove the point, he hit Pakistan off-spinner Shoaib Malik over long-on for six, taking Ireland’s target down to 20 runs with six wickets in hand.

Defeat from that position wouldn’t have been a heroic loss. It would have been a choke. O’Brien ‘had a bit of a rush of blood to the head and tried to hit Malik for another six’. He was stumped attempting to hit Malik out of Sabina Park and perhaps all of Jamaica. In the next over Iftikhar Anjum took wickets in consecutive balls, and Ireland needed 15 runs with only three wickets remaining.

Niall’s brother, Kevin, chose a good moment to play the most uncharacteristic innings of his career. He crawled to 16 off 52 balls and, in Johnston, found a reliable ally. It was Johnston, fittingly, who sealed the win, harrumphing a six over long-on.

It had only taken 275 years for Ireland to make their mark on cricket. The sport was played at Phoenix Park, in Dublin, as far back as 1730. After 1792, when the Military of Ireland played the Gentlemen of Ireland – including the future Duke of Wellington – at Phoenix Park, it began to permeate the Irish consciousness, extending its reach beyond society’s elite.

By around 1860 cricket was the most popular sport in Ireland, according to The Oxford Companion to Irish History. It was played in clubs in all 32 counties and by Catholics and Protestants alike.

Professional sides regularly toured Ireland: in 1855, Ireland thrashed the Gentlemen of England by 107 runs at Phoenix Park. Tours by Ireland were also common: Ireland beat MCC by an innings at Lord’s in 1858, and also won there in 1862 and 1868.

In 1865, the first Handbook of Cricket in Ireland – an Irish Wisden – was released. It reveals a sport played not just by the military and in Anglophile educational institutions like Trinity College, Dublin, but also in workplaces.

‘There was a democratisation from the 1860s and 1870s which saw the game spread beyond the elite to the wider populace with the exception of the extremely poor,’ Dr Paul Rouse, a specialist in the history of sport in Ireland, explained. ‘In terms of field sports being participated in, if you exclude athletics, then by the 1870s cricket is without question the most popular field sport in Ireland.’

There were over 300 cricket clubs in Ireland and many more unofficial teams. Nevertheless, there were limits to cricket’s reach beyond Anglicised communities. In the final edition of the Handbook of Cricket in Ireland, published in 1882, the editor John Lawrence lamented, ‘Here in Ireland, cricket is unfortunately not the pastime of the masses, as it is in England.’

Analysis of the annuals by the academic Jon Gemmell found that ‘club cricketers were overwhelmingly drawn from the middle classes’, noting ‘the prominence of public schools, banks and hospitals in Lawrence’s annuals’.

Cricket was not equipped to survive the turbulence of late 19th-century Ireland. ‘Cricket did not fit an emerging nationalist consciousness,’ Gemmell wrote. In Tipperary, cricket was ‘tainted by association with the garrisons and affiliation to the big houses.’ In 1873, a newspaper in County Limerick lamented the popularity of ‘the English game of cricket’ at the expense of hurling. Yet such resentment of the ‘Englishness’ of cricket should not be overstated. Coverage of cricket in The Irish Sportsman and The Irish Times indicates a game that had wide acceptance in every corner of Ireland.

There was nothing inevitable about cricket’s decline from the start of the 1880s. Land wars between small farmers and mainly absentee landlords were disastrous for the sport, which was often played on these grounds. Emigration from the countryside, where cricket had thrived, to cities, where there was less space, was also problematic.

Cricket also found itself under attack from the newly formed Gaelic Athletic Association. Formed in 1884, it sought to organise and popularise ‘Irish sports’ – principally hurling and Gaelic football. The GAA can only be understood within the context of the Irish independence struggle. ‘If any two purposes should go together they ought to be politics and athletics’, wrote Michael Cusack, the founder of the GAA, in 1884. ‘Our politics being essentially national, so should our athletics.’

Cusack had once been a cricket player but he turned against it as his nationalism hardened. The GAA was ruthless in destroying competition from other sports. In 1901, the association’s constitution formalised what its official guide referred to as ‘The Ban’. This prohibited the playing, or even watching, of ‘foreign’ sports like cricket: anyone who did not comply would be barred from playing in games organised by the GAA. It remained in place until 1971.

Yet the GAA did not destroy cricket’s popularity on its own. Rugby and football, which were also banned, thrived. Cricket was in no position to survive the new threat. From the 1870s, The Irish newspaper and Lawrence, the editor of The Handbook of Cricket in Ireland, pleaded for a national organisation to be formed to run the sport. No one took notice until it was far too late.

The first attempt to formalise cricket in Ireland did not occur until 1890. Yet even this did not get off the ground: home clubs selected the Ireland side and were reluctant to give this power up. ‘Local authorities fought among themselves and fought spectacularly,’ Dr Rouse explained. ‘The lack of a single body for cricket is the starting point for understanding the demise of Irish cricket.’ It was only in 1923 that a coherent body, the Irish Cricket Union, was created to oversee the sport.

A lot had happened in the meantime. As anti-British feeling intensified, cricket became a popular target for nationalists. During the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), many houses that had provided homes for cricket pitches were attacked and burned by republicans, including that of Sir Timothy O’Brien, who was born in Dublin but played five Tests for England between 1884 and 1896.

In 1922, Ireland was partitioned. While Irish cricket had already been profoundly weakened this served as another blow to the game, especially in the Republic of Ireland. Many clubs in the Republic were heavily dependent upon the British military and civil service. For a new nation forging its identity, the quintessentially English nature of cricket made it abhorrent to nationalists.

Ironically, the middle-class leaders of the independence movement had far more exposure to the game: the Irish nationalist political leader Charles Stewart Parnell was a committed player until his death in 1891. Later, nationalists who loved cricket were compelled to conceal their embrace of the sport. The Irish journalist Ger Siggins has found that Éamon de Valera, a leading figure in pre-independence Ireland and president and Taoiseach after it, was once playing with a bat. When he saw a photographer he dropped it immediately, knowing that to be seen playing cricket would make him a pariah with his GAA-playing, mass-attending, nationalist Fianna Fáil supporters.

But cricket did not collapse – not quite, anyway. Partly, this speaks of the continuities after partition: most aspects of Irish life did not change. In Northern Ireland, the sport held obvious appeal for Protestants wishing to illustrate their commitment to the British Crown; the same was true of the Protestant minority in the northwest.

In the bulk of the Republic of Ireland, it failed to establish a support base beyond the middle-class, though it remained reasonably strong in Cork and Dublin. The Irish Cricket Union also proved capable all-Ireland custodians of the game, preventing sectarianism from infiltrating the side, and successfully organising fixtures in both the North and the Republic.

The sport had a very different character in different parts of Ireland. In Northern Ireland and the north-west it was more widely played. In the Republic, most of the cricket that was played revolved around Dublin, where it was seen as the preserve of so-called ‘West Brits’. ‘Maybe posh is the wrong word,’ the Dubliner Dougie Goodwin, who captained Ireland in the 1960s, reflected. ‘It was certainly middle and upper class.’

For a century, Irish cricket was doomed to lead a half-life. The only regular fixture for the national side was an annual first-class game against Scotland that began in 1909 and, for the next 90 years, would be interrupted only by world wars. Most summers, Ireland played only three or four other games.

Some touring sides to England deigned to pay Ireland a perfunctory visit too, though the matches were always unofficial. Occasionally, Ireland would even defeat the tourists. In 1904 they beat South Africa. In 1928 they won a three-day game against the West Indies, who had just been awarded Test status. And in 1969, Ireland bowled the West Indies out for 25.

The West Indies’ visit occurred against the appalling backdrop of the escalating Troubles in Northern Ireland. Unlike football, in which Northern Ireland and the Republic had separate national sides, an all-Ireland side had always played cricket, as was the case in rugby and hockey. The united side was not without its difficulties: one explanation for the inertia in creating a unified Irish cricket authority is that local regions relished the chance to pack sides representing Ireland with their own players.

Perhaps because it was such a minority sport, cricket was largely able to forge an existence free of sectarian divides. ‘We played up there at times when the Troubles were really bad but it had no effect on the cricket,’ the Ireland captain in 1969, Goodwin, told me. ‘It was only once in my sporting career that I was asked my religion and that was by one of my own team because the people, the members of the club, asked him to ask me. I didn’t know his religion and he didn’t know mine. It never entered into it.’

Roy Torrens, who played for 16 years from 1966, said, ‘In the actual team itself there was never any politics talked about.’

Yet cricket has not proved completely immune to the wider struggles in Ireland. The IRA occasionally dug up cricket pitches, which were seen as a symbol of Unionist dominance. As recently as 2002 an Ireland fixture was halted for an hour because the Mooney brothers John and Paul refused to play a match against Italy while North Down Cricket Club, in Belfast, flew the Union Jack. Eventually it was taken down and the match commenced. Today Ireland uses its own neutral flag. ‘Cricket Ireland has moved on from those days and works very hard with all the clubs and everybody to try and make sure that things like that don’t happen,’ John Mooney reflected.

When Birrell was coach, players made light of the divisions. ‘I didn’t know at the time who was a Protestant and who was a Catholic. Brían O’Rourke said, “It’s quite easy, the Catholics have their eyes close together and the Protestants have their eyes wide apart.” At the next practice I kept looking at the players, at how wide their eyes were apart, and they were in stitches of laughter. I obviously got them all wrong!’ Birrell ‘didn’t detect different camps within the team at all’.

A reminder of the political context in which Irish cricket is played came in April 2013 when John Mooney reacted to Margaret Thatcher’s death by tweeting that he hoped it had been ‘slow and painful’.

On 2 July 1969, cricket provided a glorious diversion from the Troubles. Folklore has it that the West Indians were hungover after being treated to a night on the town the previous day. The truth is a little more humdrum: the West Indies only arrived in Sion Mills, a tiny village in the west of Northern Ireland, after midnight following a Test at Lord’s the previous day.

‘They were late getting in and going to bed but there was no question of drink affecting their performance – they wouldn’t have had time to drink,’ Goodwin remembered. Even had the players wanted to drink into the early hours, no pubs stayed open that late. And Ireland’s players were barely better prepared: they worked a full day’s work the day before the game.

Until the 1990s, coin-tossing skills were seldom required of the Ireland captain. ‘When I went out to the toss, Basil Butcher, the West Indies captain that day, asked before I had even suggested it whether I would like them to bat first,’ Goodwin reflected. ‘I said, certainly, that is what I was going to say to you.’ After all, the spectators had come to watch the tourists bat. On this day, they would not get much chance to do so.

While the pitch was green so were most wickets in Ireland. There was nothing exceptionally treacherous about this surface. The pitch was too slow and low to suit the Caribbean stroke-makers. And Ireland had a wily pair to exploit their uncertainty – Goodwin and Alec O’Riordan, who both bowled unchanged.

‘When I saw the wicket there was a fair bit of grass on it which suited seam bowling. They had no covers at Sion Mills and there had been some overnight damp. It was kind of damp starting off,’ Goodwin said. ‘The wicket didn’t really suit their style of play. They were trying to drive the ball and the ball just wasn’t coming on to the bat with the result that it was going up in the air, and anything that went up in the air our fellows caught.’

So swift was the West Indian demise that the BBC, who had planned to broadcast the game from 12noon, an hour after play started, started recording earlier to ensure the remarkable collapse was preserved on camera. Extraordinarily the West Indies were soon 12/9, with Basil Butcher, Clive Lloyd and Clyde Walcott among eight batsmen who fell caught. This was no wicket for Caribbean flair.

As word spread, several thousand were at the ground to witness the end of the innings as the final pair doubled the score. ‘We would have been happy to have them all out for 12 if we could have,’ O’Riordan reflected, but 25 all out would do. ‘These things happen. I’ve played in sides that have been bowled out for 25 so I know what it’s like.’

Ireland went past West Indies’ score for the loss of only one wicket. Fans, and those just curious about the bizarre events that they had heard were unfolding, were able to watch on television. It was one example of the importance of the rise in TV ownership and the extension of the BBC’s reach (in the age when it broadcast cricket) in Irish cricket history. The BBC cricket commentary became one of the sounds of summer for Irish cricketing dynasties like the Joyce and O’Brien families.

Ireland’s players did not have long to celebrate. As soon as the game was over, they had an 80-mile trip to Belfast for a two-day game against the West Indians the next day. None of the side ever played county cricket. O’Riordan turned down multiple offers and chose a more secure life as an engineer instead.

Despite its occasional successes, Irish cricket fundamentally remained a joke. It took until 1980 for Ireland to be asked to participate in one-day county cricket and get regular official fixtures against a side other than Scotland.

Ireland were amateur in both the best and worst senses of the word. Best, in that all those who played did so for the love of the game; and worst, in that funding for cricket was so meagre that players made a loss from playing. Roy Torrens told me how he would learn of selection for the occasional tours that Ireland went on. A letter would arrive in the post from the secretary of the Ireland side, informing him of his selection and asking him to, ‘Please confirm your availability and send a cheque to cover your airfare.’

On a tour to the United States and Canada in 1973, players had to take five weeks off work, completely unpaid. ‘There were a lot of players who couldn’t afford to play for Ireland,’ Torrens reflected.

When international sides visited Ireland they were met by a motley bunch of enthusiastic club cricketers masquerading as international sportsmen.

On one occasion when Torrens faced Australia in Dublin, he had to spend the previous night sleeping in the armchair of an Irish cricket fan: funds were so lacking that Ireland could not even afford to rent rooms for their players. ‘They used to meet us at the ground the night before the game and take us away to their homes,’ Torrens said. ‘When I arrived at this guy’s house he had no spare bed but he had an armchair.’

Perhaps it was just as well that fixtures amounted to ‘a social game’, as Torrens put it. Fixtures against tourists to England were not recognised as official matches, let alone full internationals. ‘Whilst in one sense it’s lovely to play against the West Indies, did I really enjoy it? Probably not. You knew that for them it wasn’t really a competitive game,’ reflected Alan Lewis, who played for Ireland between 1984 and 1997.

‘The crowds were coming to see them, not see us. We were literally regarded as the fodder. You were meeting up for a weekend. We’d have a beer, we’d have to go to a reception. The event was bigger than the team itself – that was the way it was viewed.’

The sides Lewis captained hardly had much chance. ‘I could go from a club game on a Sunday to Sylvester Clarke on a Wednesday.’ The lack of depth in Irish cricket was such that ‘once you got into the team it was nearly more difficult to get out off it’.

Perhaps the best indication of the lack of regard for Irish cricket – both inside Ireland and beyond – was that Ireland were not members of the ICC. This meant that Ireland did not even attempt to qualify for the World Cup.

The 1990s were, as Gideon Haigh has put it, the ICC’s dalliance with League of Nations idealism. Ireland were one of the beneficiaries: the Irish Cricket Union was elected as a member of the ICC in 1993, and were awarded associate status. As with most ICC decisions, there was an element of arbitrariness to it – Scotland, generally better than Ireland, did not earn associate status until the following year.

There was very little to suggest that Ireland were ready to embark upon a cricketing transformation. Indeed there was a conservative faction that did not think Ireland should join the ICC. ‘There was a powerful element in the Union that had to be dragged screaming into the 20th century before we even considered the 21st,’ Ger Siggins recounted. ‘The feeling was that we were better operating as a type of ‘super Minor County’ getting NatWest games and fixtures against the tourists.’

Such small-mindedness was overcome and, suddenly, Ireland had participation in the World Cup to dream of. For the first time, Ireland could also afford a full-time coach. Former England fast bowler Mike Hendrick was appointed Ireland’s first coach in 1995. He was met by an attitude that would have driven most school coaches mad. ‘Players wouldn’t turn up because they had excuses like, “I had to take my wife shopping” or, “I had to take my wife to have her hair done”,’ Torrens said. ‘Those were excuses that Mike met.’

Hendrick expected to last a year in the job. In the end, he liked it so much that he stayed for five. As the former Ireland off-spinner Kyle McCallan put it, ‘He shook it up. He brought a very professional attitude.’

There was no shortage of work to do. A year after Hendrick arrived, McCallan made his debut in a two-day match against Wales. ‘You played to get your cap and your jumper and you were playing to get another game and a 20 or 30 was satisfying. You’d think you’d done okay and you’d get another game.’

His one-day debut was in the Benson and Hedges Cup against Sussex in Belfast. Ireland conceded 384 and were bowled out for 80. ‘Without being derogatory, the boys wanted to be able to say we played against so and so and swapped shirts with so and so. Rather than going out to win and get that scalp, we wanted to avoid failure.’

Such defeatism would not be tolerated by Hendrick. In 1997 Ireland recorded their first win against an English first-class county after 17 years of trying, beating Middlesex with a little help from their overseas player, Hansie Cronje. They also put up their best ever display in qualification for the World Cup. Ireland finished fourth in the ICC Trophy in 1997; had they won one more game – and they lost to Kenya by only seven runs – they would have been one of the three associates to make it to the 1999 World Cup. In 1998, Irish cricket also received a one-off boost with its inclusion in the Commonwealth Games: Northern Ireland defeated Bangladesh.

Hendrick’s excellent contacts in county cricket were to be just as important to Irish cricket as his contribution to the national side. During their century in the cricketing wilderness Ireland produced some fine players, but they just did not play county cricket.

Of those who learned the game in Ireland in the last half of the 20th century, left-arm spinner Dermott Monteith was the most successful in English cricket. And though his performances were exemplary – 24 wickets at 25 each – Monteith only played eight Championship games, as cover for John Emburey and Phil Edmonds for Middlesex in 1981 and 1982. Counties seldom considered Irish talent when assembling their squads. The poor wages in county cricket did not help, making promising cricketers disinclined to travel across the Irish Sea and attempt to win a contract.

Ireland needed a pioneer in county cricket to show counties that Irishmen could play cricket. They found it in Ed Joyce, recommended to Middlesex by Hendrick. ‘We banished the myth that you don’t play cricket in Ireland,’ McCallan said. ‘Ed went over and started to perform and what that did is send a message to the rest of the Irish guys that there are careers in cricket here.’ Joyce was the first born-and-bred Irishman to make a full-time career from playing cricket.

Even as Joyce was scoring over 1,000 first-class runs in five consecutive seasons from 2002, Irish cricket remained as undistinguished as ever. When Ireland were trying to qualify for the 2003 World Cup they twice had to enlist the journalist James Fitzgerald as a substitute fielder during the ICC Trophy in Canada in 2001.

‘As a reporter, I went up to the team manager John Wright and I asked him who his 12th man was going to be that day,’ Fitzgerald reflected. ‘He kind of looked around and said, “Are you available?” I said, “Yeah, I could give you a bit of time as I don’t have to file my copy until later this evening.”’

Although he had the pleasure of living every journalist’s dream and participating in international cricket, he describes it as ‘probably the lowest point of Ireland’s recent history’. At least the incident generated some headlines for the game: The Irish Independent made the reporter the story and put him on the front page. Ireland finished eighth in the tournament, below Denmark and the United States.

A year later, Niall O’Brien made his debut in a four-wicket defeat to the might of Berkshire in the first round of the Cheltenham & Gloucester Trophy. He reflected that it was ‘very much an amateur organisation’ at the time. ‘I was given a cap and a jumper and that was about that. I was probably given my expenses in a brown envelope and away you go. There wasn’t too much to it.’ Some players even ‘wore different coloured jerseys and different coloured hats’.

Ireland only ran the minor county that close because extras top-scored with 27. No one would have imagined that, three years later, Ireland would qualify for the World Cup.

The 2005 ICC Trophy, which determined qualification for the 2007 World Cup, was hosted by Ireland. It came at a time of renewed vibrancy in Irish cricket. In 2003, Ireland had appointed its first chief executive – the Irish Cricket Union’s first full-time professional administrator. In the same year, the side defeated Zimbabwe by ten wickets – Ireland’s first victory against a Test nation since the West Indies win in 1969.

In 2004 they overhauled a target of 293 to beat the West Indies, though the fact that Brian Lara batted at number eight says much for the seriousness with which the visitors approached the fixture: it was not a proper international game of cricket, after all.

Perhaps more noteworthy was the victory over Surrey in that year’s Cheltenham & Gloucester Trophy: Ireland chased 262 against a side containing six Test bowlers to record their second victory against a county. Trent Johnston took 1-35 on his Ireland debut.

By now, Ireland had a South African coach. When Birrell was interviewed for the job in 2002 he had never been to Ireland before. He took a pay cut from his previous job as head coach at Eastern Province in South Africa – ‘a leap of faith’ as he put it.

On his first day, Birrell realised that he had no office. He was handed the keys to a car, and told that the boot doubled as the storeroom for Ireland’s kit. ‘It was very sobering and somewhat disappointing that there was nothing. I was the only full-time employed person. I literally just didn’t have a clue of where to start or how.’

His first game was against Nottinghamshire. Ireland lost by six wickets but ‘the guys were pretty happy and laughed a lot. They were quite pleased that they weren’t getting annihilated.’

Birrell had not come to Ireland to tolerate such a mindset. ‘He had big, big brains and a vision for Irish cricket and he sold it to the players and we all bought into it,’ McCallan reflected. ‘He identified talented young cricketers and worked with them.’

In 2005, Joyce had Ireland back for the ICC Trophy, the tournament that would determine which associates qualified for the 2007 World Cup. As Ireland’s solitary player of proven county class, charged with underpinning their batting efforts from number four, he faced an onerous burden. And the tournament was played against a particularly curious personal backdrop for Joyce. On its first day, 1 July, Joyce officially qualified as an England player.

If the tournament would prove to be his last contribution for Ireland – and no one thought otherwise – Joyce ensured he left his country with the ultimate parting gift.

Had he been focused exclusively on impressing the England selectors, Joyce would probably have been better served playing for Middlesex. But Ireland had history to make: qualification for their first World Cup. They would not have succeeded without Joyce’s 399 runs at 99.75.

His innings against the UAE is still discussed with reverence in Ireland; Joyce hit 115 not out to lift Ireland to their target of 231 from the wreckage of 23/4. It may be one of the great forgotten innings; and without it, Irish cricket might have remained stuck in stasis.

Birrell is in no doubt of Joyce’s contribution to Irish cricket. ‘We didn’t have another experienced player like him. He forged a way for the others. There is always one trailblazer that shows that it can be done – that an Irish player can be a successful county player – and he gave the others a role model to follow.’

A year later, Joyce made his ODI debut – for England at Stormont. ‘If I could have chosen, I wouldn’t have made my debut against Ireland,’ he later admitted, saying he was used to ‘the green and blue of Ireland’.

While Joyce opened for England, making just ten and having the bizarre distinction of being Ireland’s first ODI wicket, his younger brother Dominick opened for Ireland. When Ed met his old team-mates again in the World Cup his father reportedly wanted England to lose.

When Ireland went to the 2007 World Cup they fundamentally remained an amateur side. Only Niall O’Brien and a 20-year-old Eoin Morgan were full-time professionals. For the remainder of the side, cricket co-existed alongside their more ordinary existences.

Not everyone wished Ireland well. After they had qualified for the World Cup, Matthew Engel used the Editor’s Notes in Wisden in 2006 to rail against what he termed ‘The expansion menace’. Engel lamented that ODIs such as Ireland against England would ‘add another layer of distortion to cricket’s poor old statistics. Far more often than not, it will also create yet more bad cricket, leaving less time for the great contests which the public want to watch.’

He mocked Ireland’s claims to have a separate international team, ‘It is just a historical quirk that the England cricket team is not called Britain or the British Isles. Every Scotsman and Irishman who gets good at cricket wants to play for England, and always has done. Of course they do.’

The editor of Wisden was also adamant that Ireland would cause no shocks in the World Cup. ‘We have enough form lines to go on to know how good these teams are: stronger than a Minor County; worse than the weakest first-class county,’ he wrote. ‘The idea that they can provide proper opposition for any genuine Test team is ludicrous. But the World Cup will be substantially ruined to perpetuate this myth.’

Ironically, had Ireland won the ICC Trophy they would have been hard-pressed to prove Engel wrong: Scotland’s reward for beating Ireland in the final was to be drawn with Australia and South Africa (as well as the Netherlands). Ireland were pitted against three Test nations, but Zimbabwe were one in such turmoil that they had recently voluntarily withdrawn their status.

Just before the World Cup, Ireland fared poorly in a tournament in Kenya – losing to the hosts, Canada, Scotland and the Netherlands and beating only Bermuda. But they had given South Africa a scare in a pre-tournament warm-up game, as they benefited from a glimpse of life as professional cricketers.

Kyle McCallan earned 226 caps between 1996 and 2009, and was until recently Ireland’s most capped player. He fitted it all in alongside his teaching commitments. ‘You’re always training when you’re not at your freshest,’ he reflected. ‘You’re not hitting as many balls as professional cricketers are. You’re not thinking as much as other professional cricketers are, because really I’m accountable to students for A Level results and GCSEs. That’s what pays my mortgage so I had to make sure I did the right thing for them.’

McCallan was able to take a sabbatical before the World Cup; he and the rest of the side got to glimpse life as professionals. ‘I pretty much had a professional team for six months,’ Birrell reflected. ‘There was a hidden force and a belief that we were better prepared than anyone thought we were. There was a belief that we could create an upset.’

Ireland’s first World Cup was not completely devoid of expectations. To the amazement of ignorant commentators who had assumed that the Ireland cricketing community was comprised exclusively of expats, several thousand Irish made the trip to the Caribbean. And Zimbabwe offered easily Ireland’s most realistic prospect of a victory, with games against Pakistan and the West Indies to come.

The Ireland players seemed badly afflicted by nerves. Porterfield edged behind before the side had even scored their first run. His team-mates played a series of sloppy strokes, with only Jeremy Bray – like Johnston, born in Sydney before settling in Ireland – passing 28. Had DRS been in use Bray would have been out for 18; instead, his 115 not out lifted Ireland to 221/9.

It was the sort of score that could be defended, but would require outstanding fielding. Instead Ireland missed three simple catches and a run-out and fielded shoddily.

Johnston was getting increasingly agitated. He had taken a particularly circuitous route to the Caribbean. He had been playing club cricket in Ireland since 1995 and, when he failed to make the grade as a cricketer for New South Wales and started dating an Irish woman who would become his wife, decided to move there for good.

The cricket journalist Jarrod Kimber brilliantly described Johnston’s actions as he saw Ireland throw away the game against Zimbabwe, ‘He was not trying to gee them up, he was literally trying to scream them into action. His eyes were wild.’

But Johnston’s histrionics weren’t working. Zimbabwe reached 203/5, needing 19 to win from 38 balls with five wickets in hand. Rather condescending ‘Plucky Irish’ headlines were being perfected.

If a coin toss sparked Ireland’s win over Pakistan, then McCallan’s fingertips sparked their tie with Zimbabwe. He diverted a straight drive back on to the stumps at the non-striker’s end to run out Brendan Taylor. Ordinarily it would not have mattered, but Zimbabwe were a side begging for an invitation to self-destruct. Now they had it.

Panic in a cricket team is infectious. When it takes hold it can acquire a life of its own. And so it did with this Zimbabwean side. Johnston and Andre Botha bowled immaculately, but both had bowled out with Zimbabwe needing nine runs from their last 12 balls and still having three wickets in hand.

Johnston entrusted the ball to Kevin O’Brien, whose only previous over had gone for eight runs. He bowled a rank full toss first ball. It was slapped to cover. A panic-stricken run-out followed from O’Brien’s final delivery: two wickets and a maiden from the 49th over had transformed the game.

Zimbabwe needed nine runs from the final over with only one wicket in hand. Johnston had two problems. The first was that Stuart Matsikenyeri, who had made a high-class half-century, was unbeaten and on strike. The second was that his most reliable bowlers had bowled out. Matsikenyeri was cruising against the rest of Ireland’s seamers and had hit McCallan for five fours and a six already.

So Andrew White, an off-spinner who had only bowled two previous overs in the innings, was entrusted with the last over. Three runs were needed from the final two deliveries when Matsikenyeri attempted to seal the win. His ungainly hoick teased and tantalised Johnston, who was by now fielding at third man. He ran with gusto to the ball and it looked like his outstretched left hand had secured a two-run win for Ireland. The ball spilled out. It would have been an extraordinary catch, yet Johnston looked ashamed of himself for missing it. And for a moment this uber-bloke looked as if he wanted to cry.

From the final ball, Matsikenyeri needed a single for victory. White held his nerve and fired in a quicker delivery. Matsikenyeri missed the ball but Niall O’Brien did not. Matsikenyeri was stumped and Ireland had tied their first World Cup game. ‘We should have lost that game but came through with the spirit and the fight and the tenacity and the resilience that was a cornerstone of that team,’ Birrell recalled. ‘That gave us the belief that we could cause another upset.’

In the bedlam that followed, few appreciated the true significance of the result. With Pakistan having lost their first game to the West Indies, Ireland’s match with them 36 hours later effectively became a knockout to determine progression to the Super 8s.

The stage was thus set for Niall O’Brien – and for Johnston to finish Pakistan off. ‘I think the biggest individual characteristic of a captain has to be someone who leads by example, who is prepared to do and others follow and Trent Johnston is a leader in the true sense of the word,’ McCallan reflected. ‘It was fitting that he hit the six that beat Pakistan.’

That moment was vindication for Birrell. In 2005 he had taken the controversial decision to sack Jason Mollins. While Mollins was a fine opening batsman, Birrell did not want Ireland’s captain to be a man with a full-time job in the City of London who flew home to play club cricket every weekend. His replacement was Johnston. ‘He was a great inspiration to the whole team the way he prepared, his fitness and his fight on the field,’ Birrell remembered. ‘He had that typical Aussie fight.’

After a roundabout journey, Johnston had made good on his talent. The same was becoming true of Irish cricket as a whole. They thrashed Bangladesh in the Super 8s to show their success was no St Patrick’s Day freak. Ireland took some hard beatings too: they made 77 against Sri Lanka, which was 53 more than Birrell had envisaged in a nightmare he had before the match.

Adopted Irishmen like Johnston, Botha and Bray were all central to Ireland’s development, performing crucial roles in the Caribbean. And those who immigrated during the days of the Celtic Tiger also helped to lift up the standard of domestic cricket in Ireland, to the benefit of future generations. ‘They brought high standards with them,’ Torrens said. ‘They were the leading lights in the clubs and that was a massive help to cricket in the South. There’s no doubt now that, because of that, cricket in the Dublin area is much stronger than it used to be.’

Yet the risk was that their presence would lead people to devalue Ireland’s achievements: it did not help the perception of Irish cricket that their inspirational skipper spoke with such a pronounced Aussie twang. The 2008 Wisden’s review of the World Cup, for instance, referred sneeringly to Ireland’s ‘reliance on several players born or raised in more traditional cricketing lands’, seemingly ignoring the presence of Kevin Pietersen and Ed Joyce in the England side. Gary Ballance, Chris Jordan, Craig Kieswetter and Jonathan Trott – not to mention Eoin Morgan and Boyd Rankin – were yet to come.

The underlying amateurism of Cricket Ireland was not conducive to developing a structure to nurture and develop young Irish talent. And the side’s sterling deeds in the World Cup barely yielded financial rewards, either. Research by the journalist Richard Gillis has found that Ireland received just $56,000 in prize money for their performance in the Caribbean. Zimbabwe, who tied with Ireland and lost their other two matches and exited in the group stages, received an $11m share of the tournament’s media rights. As it had always been, cricket was a private members’ club with no time for those outside it.

Players’ expectations had risen after the World Cup but Ireland’s administration still lagged behind. Two months after returning from the Caribbean, Jeremy Bray complained, ‘The reality is that it costs me money to play for Ireland’ and branded Irish cricket ‘a joke’.

In July 2007 the Ireland team even boycotted the press in protest at a lack of payment and cricket equipment from the board. It made for an unedifying backdrop to the start of Warren Deutrom’s reign as chief executive of Cricket Ireland.

When he began his job in December 2006, the only person Deutrom had for company in a rudimentary office was a part-time PA who worked four mornings a week. Cricket Ireland had no server so Deutrom had to use his personal e-mail account. Men less ambitious than Deutrom might have despaired at it all.

After the success in the World Cup, he began to develop a structure that would allow leading cricketers in Ireland to turn professional. It helped that he had worked for the ICC and was well versed in the politicking of cricket administration. He convinced South Africa and India to play an ODI series in Ireland after the World Cup.

This terrified the England Cricket Board, who did not want Ireland setting itself up as a rival for marquee televised fixtures, fearing that this would undermine the value of its broadcasting deal with Sky. In return for not scheduling ODIs at the same time as England fixtures, Ireland signed a contract to receive a six-figure sum from the ECB every year – and the guarantee of an ODI every two years.

Deutrom was also successful in lobbying the ICC for extra funding, and his palpable vision for Irish cricket, and desire for Ireland to be seen as the ‘19th county’ no longer, also attracted sponsorship. The upshot was the introduction of the first set of professional contracts in 2009, though these were initially only awarded to six players.

No wonder that Birrell’s ‘only regret’ of his time as Ireland coach was that he did not get to work with Deutrom for longer, ‘He was the one guy who could move them all into a professional era. I needed him at the time and I didn’t have him.’

Still, Deutrom could not help being frustrated by the ICC’s lack of support in helping Ireland to reach the next level. Ireland won three consecutive Intercontinental Cups from 2004 to 2008 but there was no mention of how this first-class success could lead to Test cricket.

Deutrom’s frustrations boiled over before the World Twenty20 competition in 2009. ‘What is the point of associate cricket?’ he asked. ‘We are bumping up against a glass ceiling. What does the ICC want us to do? How do we get from the High Performance Programme to the higher echelons of the world game? There is no road map for us. The issue brings to question the whole mission statement of the ICC High Performance Programme: what is it preparing teams for?’

He predicted, ‘Three or four years from now there will be no new entrants in to the cosy club of full Test members.’ Of course, Deutrom was right. And his complaint about Ireland’s exclusion from the Future Tours Programme – ‘currently, we don’t know what next year’s fixtures are going to be’ – applies equally today.

Deutrom was speaking after Ireland had again suffered from the loss of their best player to England just before a world event. Eoin Morgan, whose fusion of clinical accumulation and chutzpah were perfectly suited to limited-overs cricket, was called up by England just before the World Twenty20 in 2009. He told Ireland’s coach Phil Simmons of his selection in the middle of the World Cup qualifiers in April 2009, prompting a blazing row, though he remains good friends with many Ireland players. ‘I love the fact that Eoin Morgan has become a superstar,’ John Mooney said. ‘He potentially wouldn’t have done that if he’d stayed with Ireland.’

Even without Morgan, Ireland beat Bangladesh to reach the Super 8s of the 2009 World Twenty20. With him – not to mention the estranged Joyce – they may well have beaten Sri Lanka too, rather than losing by seven runs.

Come the next World Cup, Ireland’s best player was again playing for England: Morgan was established as an indispensable member of England’s limited-overs side.

Still, at least Ireland had Ed Joyce back. England had not treated Joyce well: he injured his ankle on his Twenty20 international debut against Sri Lanka and had to be taken to hospital. When he was given the all-clear that evening he did not have any money on him. Nor was there anyone from the ECB to assist him. Joyce had to get a cab back to his hotel and pay the driver then.

Despite a sparkling ODI century for England against Australia in Sydney, Joyce was discarded by England after the 2007 World Cup. He was never given an opportunity in whites, even though he described first-class cricket as ‘the format of the game that I’ve enjoyed most and been best at’. Test cricket, the allure of which persuaded him to give up playing for Ireland in the first place, proved elusive. Yet Joyce is the only player who has enjoyed victory in both games between England and Ireland in the World Cup.

On 2 March 2011, perhaps the most extraordinary game in the history of the World Cup occurred. Even without their best one-day batsman – Morgan was injured – England powered to 327 from their 50 overs. The only solace for Ireland was that England had scored 338 to tie with India at Bangalore a few days before.

Associates did not chase such scores. One of the features of upsets in World Cups – from Zimbabwe’s Duncan Fletcher-inspired victory over Australia in 1983 to Kenya’s triumphs over the West Indies in 1996 and Sri Lanka in 2003 and Ireland’s own glorious moment against Pakistan in 2007 – is that they came in low-scoring games. This is unsurprising: on wickets that are slower and less conducive to strokeplay, it becomes harder for Test cricketers to assert their class.

In their first game of the tournament, Ireland had been bowled out for 178 in their defeat to Bangladesh. So a target of 328 seemed beyond Ireland’s capabilities – especially after their first ball. William Porterfield attempted an expansive drive off James Anderson. To his chagrin, the ball thudded off his bat on to his stumps. Ireland’s skipper had made a golden duck.

Joyce and Paul Stirling both batted breezily but Ireland needed rather more than entertaining cameos. When Kevin O’Brien entered, Ireland were 106/4, which soon became 111/5 after Gary Wilson fell to Graeme Swann. Ireland needed 217 from 25.4 overs at a run rate of 8.5 an over: an arduous prospect for any side, and an utterly hopeless cause for an associate nation with only five wickets in hand. They faced embarrassment, not just defeat.

At the time the ICC had decided that the 2015 World Cup would be reduced to ten teams. Not only that but, contrary to the basic notions of sporting competition, it would be made an invite-only affair; ‘a glorified Champions Trophy’ in the words of Porterfield. It fell to Ireland’s players to pressurise them into a U-turn. They were not making a persuasive case.

Stocky with his hair dyed pink in aid of a cancer charity, O’Brien did not look much like a cricketing superhero. Commentators blithely caricatured him as an agricultural slogger. As Graeme Swann bowled to O’Brien early in his innings, one commentator asked, ‘What are your thoughts on four associates?’ – the implication being, of course, that Ireland’s collapse justified the decision to exclude them from the next World Cup. As if to challenge the point, O’Brien heaved the ball over midwicket for six. Not that many journalists were watching too intently as they honed their reports of a comfortable victory for England.

While he continued to launch England around the ground – it was not slogging, but brutal, clinical hitting – journalists frantically began to rewrite. And the English players became frustrated that Ireland refused to meekly subside. In O’Brien’s account of the tournament, Six After Six, he recounts an exchange with Anderson after he had dug out a yorker:

‘“Good ball, Jimmy”,’ I said to him.

‘Anderson’s face darkened and snapped back, “What would you know what a good ball is?”

‘“Well, I mightn’t know what a good ball is,” I came back with, “but I know a bad one. I just hit your last one over there,” as I pointed my bat towards the grandstand.’

The incident showed that England were becoming rattled as they realised that O’Brien intended to achieve rather more than respectability. He also revealed an astute cricketing brain. The batting Powerplay (five overs of extra fielding restrictions nominated by the batting team) had become a burden for all sides – especially England. They did not know when to take it, so normally waited until they were forced to.

O’Brien recognised the Powerplay for what it was meant to be: a weapon to attack the opponents and put their bowling plans out of sync. He looted 62 runs in the Powerplay, smiting England’s Ashes-winning bowling attack with gusto.

When O’Brien had made 91 and Ireland needed another 82 to win, England captain Andrew Strauss spilled a steepler at long-off. ‘It was then that I told myself to pull my head in,’ O’Brien says in Six After Six. ‘They had five men on the boundary and another four inside the ring were all on the edge of it. It was the easiest thing in the world to just block the ball and take the single.’

With a nudge to the leg side for two off Michael Yardy, O’Brien reached a 50-ball century: the fastest in World Cup history.

At the other end, Alex Cusack was playing a formidable support role. The pair had reduced the target to 55 to win when Cusack sacrificed himself after a mix-up between the wickets: an aptly selfless end to a magnificent supporting innings.

That brought John Mooney to the crease. ‘I couldn’t wait to get out to bat. I was nearly out in the middle before Cusack had got off the wicket,’ he remembered. ‘After being out in the middle for only a couple of balls, I remember thinking to myself, “Jeez I wish it was the last over.” I kept on saying to myself, “Bring it down to the end.”’

Mooney could sense how flustered England were becoming. Normally they liked to consider themselves above sledging a side like Ireland. Now they were desperate. ‘They were really riled up. You could tell that they knew they were in big trouble.’

As O’Brien went into his shell, calmly hitting a single every ball to ensure he batted for as long as possible, the onus fell on Mooney to score boundaries. He hit five, including three off the final ball of an over. When Mooney moved around his crease and lashed Anderson to midwicket, Ireland needed only 12 from the last 12 deliveries. And O’Brien was still there.

After the next ball, he was not. O’Brien was left flat on his back attempting to complete a second run, wondering whether all his brilliant work would go to waste. ‘We still haven’t actually talked about it,’ Mooney said of the run-out.

There was no one better to come out at number nine than Trent Johnston. His first ball was a full toss from Stuart Broad: Johnston drove it emphatically to the cover boundary. ‘When TJ hit that for four I knew we were safe,’ Mooney remembered.

It was left to Mooney to seal the win. Just as he had intended, he was still there when the final over began. He needed only one delivery, which he clipped to midwicket for four. Mooney remembered the moment, ‘No thoughts – just throw the bat in the air and run really fast and scream and hug my team-mates.’

Next man in George Dockrell was so nervous that he spent the winning moment in solitude. ‘I was inside, watching it on the TV. I was actually in there by myself and as soon as the winning run was hit I sprinted out on to the balcony.’

As against Pakistan, Ireland’s winning margin was three wickets – and Johnston was there at the end in both games.

In the celebrations after Mooney had hit the winning runs, the television cameras picked up one of his team-mates shouting ‘Best f***ing day ever!’ It wasn’t just about beating a leading cricket nation. It was about beating England.

Even setting politics aside, Ireland has a deeply ambiguous relationship with England. County cricket has been hugely beneficial to Ireland, enabling the best players to turn professional and fulfil their potential. It also paid their wages at a time when all cricketers in Ireland were completely unpaid. But it is hard to find too many Irish cricket fans grateful.

England remain as reluctant to play Ireland as they have ever been; all the other leading cricket nations in the world played Ireland before England deigned to. They have poached three leading Irish talents – Ed Joyce, Eoin Morgan and Boyd Rankin – leaving Ireland in the utterly perverse position of wanting their cricketers to get good, but not too good.

A particularly trite argument used by some England supporters is that England have earned the right to poach Ireland’s best talent because of the role played by counties and the wider national set-up in helping to nurture it. By the same logic, many of the great West Indies players of the 1970s and 1980s would have played for England in recognition of county cricket’s role in helping fulfil their talent. And Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey, who could never have become footballing superstars had they been forced to play domestic football in Wales, would be playing for England too.

Joyce, Morgan and Rankin were all born and brought up in Ireland. They learned the game there, playing for Irish representative and youth sides before moving to England. ‘Ireland spent a lot of money on Eoin Morgan in his development,’ Torrens reflected. ‘We sent him away to different academies and spent a fortune on him.’ Volunteers spent hundreds of hours coaching Morgan and shipping him to cricket grounds in the hope that he would enjoy a long career for Ireland.

That is why, when England played an ODI in September 2013, one Irish fan brought in a sign that said, ‘We don’t want our best players playing for England: Irish cricket deserves better.’

On this day, it was especially easy to sympathise. A year earlier, Rankin had retired from playing for Ireland after pressure from Warwickshire director of cricket Ashley Giles – who, in a flagrant conflict of interest, was also an England selector. Rankin took 4-46 while Morgan, on the ground where he had learned the game, scored a match-winning 124 not out.

It is a great sporting cliché to say that a side beat themselves. On this day it was really true, because the best Irish players were playing for the other side. And until Ireland get Test status and a decent schedule of fixtures, it won’t stop; Morgan has often touted Middlesex team-mate Paul Stirling as a potential future England player.

While Ireland lost against England, the day had still been a triumph. Ten thousand supporters packed into Malahide to witness the game; late arrivals were only greeted by ‘Sold Out’ signs. On a Tuesday in September with schools back, it was a magnificent testament to the ambition and energy of Irish cricket.

When I visit Malahide one year on to take in Ireland’s ODI against Scotland, the scene is very different. In a sleepy middle-class enclave, 20 minutes by train from the centre of Dublin, The Village ground no longer resembles an Irish sporting coliseum, but an idyllic outground, complete with abundant space, resplendent trees and a picturesque bank on which to watch the cricket. Cars are parked only ten metres from the boundary edge. Frugal fans can even lean on the fences surrounding the ground to watch for free.

For all Malahide’s charms, Cricket Ireland hopes that, within a few years, it will look very different. To attract the funds necessary to make ‘Fortress Malahide’ a permanent entity, rather than one that pops up for a day every two years, Ireland need a fixture list to justify the outlay. As it is, the huge investment needed for every marquee game at Malahide means that Cricket Ireland needs to sell 8,500 tickets just to break even.

‘It’s financially unsustainable,’ chief executive Warren Deutrom reflected. ‘If people are serious about investing in Irish cricket and assisting us to develop the game, they realise “What is the point in Irish cricket investing half a million euros to make half a million euros?”’

This should be where the ICC comes in. But, for all Ireland’s success over the past seven years, they remain utterly reliant upon scraps of goodwill from full members. These are desperately hard to find – and the situation is getting worse. Between the 2007 and 2011 World Cups, Ireland played 17 ODIs against full members. Between the 2011 and 2015 World Cups, they played a paltry 11 – of which three were abandoned. And there is a very real chance that Ireland won’t even make the 2019 World Cup.

Cricket is unique among sports in contracting the size of its World Cup: from 16 teams in 2007, the 2019 tournament will have only ten. Only the bottom two full members will even have to qualify – and Zimbabwe, almost certain to be among them, will even get home advantage.

Still, at least Ireland now have what Deutrom has long demanded: a pathway to Test cricket. Details are predictably vague but it is understood that the winner of the next Intercontinental Cup will play a four-game Test Challenge – two matches at home and away against the lowest-ranked Test side in 2018. The Test side’s status would not be under threat but if the Intercontinental Cup winners won, they would earn Test status too, probably for a four-year period.

Even if Ireland did qualify for Test status, many of their problems would remain. Regardless of on-field performance, Ireland would receive around one-eighth of Zimbabwe’s funding from the ICC and TV companies every four years: the ICC is a private members’ club, and Ireland remain out of it. There is no indication of how Ireland could ever gain full membership.

An ICC insider accepted that and told me that Ireland’s best chance of a fixture list and ICC funding remotely resembling the worst Test sides was through ‘incremental’ improvements in the running of the game. ‘Often you don’t get the lightning-rod moment, you get incremental bits and pieces, and sometimes it’s two steps forward, three steps back, that’s just the way it is.’

While Ireland remain excluded from the Future Tours Programme, and have a fixture list that amounts to Zimbabwe-lite, it might not deter future Irishmen from trying to play for England. ‘The money offered from the England and Wales Cricket Board was totally different class from what the Irish cricket people can offer,’ Bob Rankin explained when his son Boyd defected. Similarly, Eoin Morgan said, when I asked him about the Test Challenge, ‘Given the aspirations that I had as a kid, I’d probably still make the move if it was only four Test matches playing against Bangladesh or Zimbabwe.’

Yet none of these uncertainties deter Ireland. Despite less than emphatic support from the ICC, Cricket Ireland are driving forward their plans to make the country into a cricketing stronghold. Their stability has been the envy of many Test nations: Birrell and Phil Simmons have been the only Ireland coaches since 2002. Between 2006, when Deutrom was appointed chief executive, and 2014, Cricket Ireland’s turnover increased tenfold, to €4.3m a year. The number of active cricketers quadrupled, from 11,000 to 44,000. In all this, the influence of Deutrom, cool, methodical and self-controlled, is palpable. ‘They’ve got a system that I would argue is better than a lot of the full members, the way they run their cricket there, and it shows,’ an ICC source told me.

For Ireland’s Test aspirations, nothing has been more important than establishing a domestic structure – one that Deutrom hopes will cease the player drain to England. ‘They get settled there, get married and suddenly playing for Ireland becomes an encumbrance during the season,’ he reflected in September 2014.

‘Counties start coming back and asking us for compensation to have players available during the year, suddenly the conversation becomes more difficult. They get on the England radar, start playing for the Lions, we all see what happens. Is it a risk to Ireland’s future? Of course it is. We have to do everything we can to keep hold of those resources.’

In 2013, Ireland created a new inter-provincial structure. It began modestly enough: with just three teams, to prevent the quality in Ireland being diluted too thinly. In a sign of Ireland’s intent, the provinces played each other in three-day cricket though, in time, it would be beneficial if that were changed to four to mirror first-class cricket around the world.

‘It’s about trying to professionalise the next step up from club cricket,’ Deutrom explained. ‘The risk has been that the more professional our structures become at senior level then the greater the gap for players to step up from club to country. We had to be able to put something in place to bridge that gap.’

While Cricket Ireland lacks the financial resources to tempt established county stars home, the standard will remain significantly below that in county cricket. But Craig Young took the decision to leave Sussex and return to Ireland, where his career has been reinvigorated. The tale of Peter Chase, another tall, young and quick bowler, suggests that Irish cricket has more depth than many imagine. After averaging 69 with the ball for Leinster in 2013, he was not selected at all in 2014. Yet he forced his way into the Durham side in 2014 and promptly took five Championship wickets on debut.

On the banks of Malahide in September 2014, I bought an ice cream for the former Ireland captain Alan Lewis. Discussing the transformation in Irish cricket in the 17 years since his retirement, he admits to jealousy. ‘Am I envious? Absolutely. Because the other thing that you don’t know is with that type of input how good you might have become.’

There has never been a better time to be an Irish cricketer. A generation ago, playing professional cricket was deemed beyond the reach of an Irishman. Over 30 Irishmen have played first-class cricket in England this century – and five Irish players captained counties at some stage in 2014. Counties, especially Durham and Middlesex, now ensure that Irish talent is never forgotten.

It has never been harder to get into the Ireland side. Proof of this is how many first-class players around the world have written to Cricket Ireland saying that they are Ireland-qualified and would be keen to play. Sean Ervine and Mal Loye, former international players for Zimbabwe and England, are among those whose interest has not been followed up: Cricket Ireland needs to know whether they want to make a contribution to Irish cricket or merely use Ireland as a vehicle to play in the World Cup.

The example of Tim Murtagh shows how seriously Ireland take this process. After he realised that he was eligible to play for Ireland – the result of talking to his good friend Ed Joyce – Ireland did extensive research on his character to gauge whether he risked disturbing the team dynamics. Having concluded that Murtagh, an unassuming and affable type, posed no such risk, the paperwork for him to play for Ireland was completed in early 2012, just before the World Twenty20 qualifiers. Murtagh had just enjoyed his finest season: 80 Championship wickets at 20.98 each. Based on these figures his selection would have been beyond doubt.

Yet Ireland took a different approach, reticent about parachuting Murtagh into the side ahead of those already established. He was omitted altogether from Ireland’s squad for the qualifiers and only called up as a reserve after an injury. More egotistical men might have sulked at having to don a bib and carry the drinks despite possessing an outstanding record in county cricket. Murtagh asserted that the experience made him treasure his subsequent appearances for Ireland even more. ‘Maybe it was a bit of a test of my commitment. I think it was actually good that it worked out that way. The last thing I wanted to do was walk into the team and put someone out of the team who’d been there for years and years and not feel that I’d really earned it.

‘I didn’t play straight away and sat on the bench for a while. I think that was good for me – it made me more hungry and more determined to want to pull on that green jersey.’

The contrast with other associate nations – even Scotland – who have freely dished out caps to players as soon as they qualify without ascertaining their commitment is just one example of how Ireland could be considered to have outgrown the associate world.

It is apt that Ireland’s premier cricket ground is in Dublin: it is here that the transformation of cricket has been most pronounced. During its wilderness years, Irish cricket was strongest in the northwest and Belfast. It was always played in Dublin too – the beautiful ground at Trinity College is easily visible from the street – but it has only been in the last decade that the city became Irish cricket’s stronghold.

The two best Irish cricketers playing today, Joyce and Eoin Morgan, were both reared here. Dublin was also the biggest beneficiary of the Celtic Tiger, which helped to bring players like Trent Johnston, David Langford-Smith and Andre Botha to Ireland. The standards they brought with them helped lift up the quality of club cricket.

They also helped to erode the image of Irish cricket as a posh sport. According to the journalist – and former Ireland substitute fielder – James Fitzgerald, Trent Johnston ‘transcended all of that. People were able to follow him as an adopted Irishman and an Irish cricketing hero without any of that baggage; without knowing or caring what school he went to or what his dad did for a living.’

The Celtic Tiger is long gone yet the real benefits of it to Irish cricket may be yet to come. Since 2006 the non-Chinese Asian population has been the fastest growing in Ireland, with an annual growth rate of 13.3 per cent. This has been particularly great in and around Dublin, reflected in a surge of new clubs in Leinster: there are 120 in the province today, compared with 99 in 2006. Around half of all cricketers in Leinster today learned the game overseas.

While significant numbers of the Asian community have attended recent ODI series against Pakistan and Sri Lanka, against Scotland the ground consisted overwhelmingly of white faces. ‘We don’t have the means and the resources to be able to say, “Let’s target this particular community in terms of promotion,”’ Deutrom admitted.

Brían O’Rourke, the Leinster cricket development manager, admitted to me, ‘We need to get these Asians to sit on our various committees in Leinster and fully engage them in all our activities. And we badly need one player of Asian background to represent Ireland.’ No such player has played for Ireland since they gained ODI status in 2006.

Simranjit Singh could be the first. Born in Punjab, he played for Punjab Under-17s and was close to earning a contract with Kings XI Punjab in 2008. He has played in Ireland since 2006 and, in 2011, made the decision to attempt to play for Ireland. His first appearance for Ireland could be in the World Twenty20 qualifiers in 2015, which Ireland are co-hosting with Scotland. ‘I am targeting that,’ he said. ‘The dream is to get the green jersey on.’

Batting has always been Singh’s strength, and he has scored heavily in Irish club cricket, but he was aware that his off spin could fast-track his route into the international side. ‘There’s an opportunity for a spinner in Ireland.’ He is working on expanding his bowling repertoire – including bowling the doosra. ‘I bowled a few last season but I haven’t got full control. I’m working on it.’

Singh asserted that the presence of an Irish-Asian in the national side ‘would definitely attract more of the Asian community’ to support the Ireland team. Today there is ‘not much connection’ between some of the new, virtually all-Asian clubs like Adamstown and Cricket Ireland.

An incident at Leinster Cricket Club in 2012 hardly helped: a group of Asian players were questioned about their club membership while watching India play Pakistan in the World Twenty20. In protest against the lack of ‘sense of urgency’ about investigating the issue, 18 players left the club.

Insiders agree about the need for a Cricket Ireland outreach officer to ensure that Irish-Asians are fully incorporated into the mainstream Irish cricketing scene. It would also help to ensure that Ireland’s team benefits from the most talented Irish-Asian cricketers.

Cricket in Ireland has always been accused of being an ‘English sport’ – a claim often made by those in Liverpool or Manchester United shirts. Even a generation ago, young people often kept their cricket playing to themselves. ‘Anybody who I met through school or discos, I never owned up to them that I played cricket,’ John Mooney said. ‘The English thing was a big stigma over in Ireland especially where I was from. I’m from a real GAA background. Cricket would have been frowned upon.’

A little of that attitude remains today: some children face pressure to pursue Gaelic sports over cricket. But Mooney and his team-mates have done plenty to change that. And nothing undermined the perception of cricket being a posh English sport quite like beating England at it. ‘That was the biggest thing that broke down the idea of cricket being an English sport within Ireland – the fact that the Irish people have witnessed an Irish team beat England at what they call their own sport,’ Mooney reflected.

The Ireland side is remarkable for more than just their success in transforming the game in Ireland – but also for their spirit and unity in spite of profound differences. The journalist Nick Royle described the squad as ‘genuinely the most mixed of any sporting team I have ever encountered’. It comprises Protestants and Catholics; Sinn Fein supporters and staunch Unionists; Dubliners of working-class and posh violin-playing stock; and immigrants from South Africa, Australia and – soon – Asia too.

The diversity has not only contributed to a vibrant cricket side – it has been an all-Ireland beacon for unity and inclusiveness. ‘If anything, it doesn’t create problems, it helps to solve them,’ Mooney asserted. ‘Hopefully it will continue to break down the barriers between north and south, and continue to integrate young Catholics and young Protestants together.’

If the transformation of Irish cricket over the last decade has been extraordinary, the acute fear is that Ireland is not being allowed to capitalise upon its cricketing moment. As idyllic as The Village ground is, Ireland are restless for much more – and quickly.

UAE by Peter Miller

FEW balls become iconic. There was Eric Hollies dismissing Don Bradman for a duck in his final Test innings to deprive him of averaging 100. Shane Warne’s ‘ball of the century’ to Mike Gatting. Trevor Chappell rolling a delivery along the ground under instructions from his brother.

For many, if you ask them about cricket in the United Arab Emirates there is an equally memorable moment. Allan Donald was the bowler. The batsman was Sultan Mohammad Zarawani. He was the captain of the UAE, the only native of that country in the side, and pretty much a club cricketer. He walked out to bat wearing a sun hat. In 1996 there was no one bowling faster and with more venom than Donald. It is not often that a nickname is as fitting as Donald’s ‘White Lightning’ moniker. Facing him as a player with international pedigree was a daunting prospect. To do so as a man with a batting average of just above four in ODIs, not wearing a helmet was, quite frankly, a bit daft.

‘This helmet thing made me claustrophobic, I never wore one,’ Zarawani told me. ‘And they were still quite new at the time.’

As the UAE skipper marked his guard to face that first delivery you could tell what was going to happen. Of course Donald bounced him first ball. Of course it hit him straight on the head. Zarawani swayed on his feet. He searched around for his sun hat, as if that was all that he needed at that very moment. He faced another six balls, he didn’t score a run. He was taken straight to hospital.

By the time Zarawani arrived at the World Cup, his body was no longer his to control. He had received three operations on his knees and was having regular cortisone injections just to enable him to play through the pain. He spent 24 hours in bed before every game to get into a fit state to play.

‘I wasn’t meant to walk, forget about playing. Between overs I couldn’t even change positions, that is how badly I was affected. I couldn’t even feel my knees or my toes but my will was to play in the World Cup because I had given so much to get there. I said on my dead body am I going to let my knees ruin this dream of mine.’

He was 35 but his knees were those of a much older man. On top of that, he was a lower-order batsman facing the quickest bowler in the world. In a sun hat. ‘It was just a very good bouncer, it bounced just right in front of me. I didn’t have the reaction time and with these wobbly knees I couldn’t even bend down.’ He is very stoical about it, and although it became a big issue at the time he says he had no ill feeling toward Donald, although he admits to calling him a name or two in the immediate aftermath.

‘It just grazed my head, it didn’t hit me bang on. It looked bad, it shocked me a bit, and I was a bit nervous afterwards. I was more camera conscious than worried about being hit by Donald.’

Thankfully there were no lasting effects but Donald said in his autobiography that as he watched Zarawani tumble to the ground he thought that he had killed him. In fairness, Donald was not alone in thinking that. Watching it at the time, I could hear my father make a sharp intake of breath. I think I shouted. Was he brave or stupid? Is the line between the two all that clear?

While the image of a visibly shaken Zarawani searching for his head gear is one that endures, his contribution to cricket in his country is much more significant than that. He was well-thought of by those he led in the World Cup, all of whom speak of him in reverential terms to this day. While there was talk of sports cars and fabulous wealth that gave you the impression of some sort of playboy millionaire, it is clear that Zarawani had a great love for cricket.

He wasn’t a terrible cricketer, even if he was no batsman. He bowled leg spin well enough to dismiss Sachin Tendulkar in an ODI with a ball that dipped, turned and took the edge through to the wicketkeeper. It was his one wicket in the match, but what a wicket! While he may have struggled in the rarefied air of international cricket, you could imagine him picking up bucketloads of wickets in Premier League cricket in England or in the Australian Grades.

He says the World Cup adventure was his doing. It was him that brought the team together. He says he was the one who paid for the airfare to the World Cup; it was him who arranged the fundraising events. When he wanted to practice at the Sharjah Stadium owned by Abdul Rahman Bukhatir, he had to pay out of his own pocket for the privilege. He even negotiated for the permission for the team to go to the tournament.

Bukhatir was the man behind bringing cricket to Sharjah in the early 1980s. He arranged for international cricket to be played there in sponsored tournaments known as the Sharjah Cup. The stadium continues to be used for high class cricket until this day. It had modest beginnings, but it is now a 16,000-seat floodlit venue. In 1994, Zarawani’s team had qualified for the World Cup in a tournament in Kenya where the UAE had achieved 12 straight victories. He wanted his team to play against India, Pakistan, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and Australia in that year’s Sharjah event.

‘I called Abdul Rahman Bukhatir from Nairobi and said, “Can we play in this Austral-Asia Cup?” First they were resistant. I literally threatened that I would go to the press if they didn’t let us play.’

The tournament organisers gave in and the UAE were allowed to play. That first game of the Sharjah-based event was against India where Zarawani dismissed Tendulkar. The UAE lost both of the games by a wide margin in that event, but they were not overawed by their opponents.

Despite doing so much for UAE cricket, despite getting to a World Cup through force of will, he walked away from the game. Shahzad Altaf was one of those who played under Zarawani and he cannot speak of him highly enough. It is with real sadness that Altaf says, after the 1996 World Cup, ‘Mr Sultan Zarawani never entered a ground.’ Zarawani fell out with those in charge and took his sun-bleached hat with him.

Speaking to Zarawani was not easy. I managed to contact him only after a lot of graft and perseverance. I had begged for his contact details on Twitter. I had sent Facebook messages to the account of a bar I was told he owned. I finally got his number and called him. When I spoke to him, he asked me to e-mail him details of the project. I sent him the proposal for this book and awaited a response.

The deadline was looming and I still had not heard. I called again. No answer. I resolved to give it one last go; he answered, he said he would speak to me. He explained that he hadn’t wanted to talk as he was done with UAE cricket. I said that without his story none of this would make sense. Zarawani tells me, ‘You won’t like what I have to say’; he doesn’t want to be critical but that is the way he feels.

‘After qualifying and after playing in the World Cup we came back and expected to make the World Cup a way to take things forward and we could have achieved so much more,’ he said. ‘But nobody did anything, apart from firing me and putting a ban on me for life.’

When he talks of the way the relationship broke down, he says, ‘After the World Cup they didn’t want me. And I didn’t fight it at all.’ He wanted to do things his way and that was not something that those in charge at the time felt comfortable with. He says he was too much of a powerful force, that they wanted him out. ‘I was not under their control. I was never going to be a yes man to them. My love for the game was different. They don’t have the love of the game. I wanted to play cricket at this level. To feel it, to taste it. And I did it.’

Since Zarawani’s departure, there have been few Emirati cricketers in the team. The reasons for this are both cultural and political. For those who are UAE citizens, cricket isn’t their sport. It is the game of the wastelands and workers. It is what the people who arrived in their country to build their hotels, skyscrapers and roads brought with them from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, England and more recently, Afghanistan. While cricket is everywhere in the Emirates, played on every scrap of land that can be commandeered for the purpose, it does not belong to the country.

To understand cricket in the UAE you need to understand the history of this very young country. The United Arab Emirates is only slightly older than the Cricket World Cup, a tournament that they qualified for in 2014. It wasn’t until 1971 that the area now known as the UAE became independent from the British. It was founded when Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Sharjah, and Umm al-Quwain come together, joined a year later by Ras al-Khaimah. The formation of this alliance of Emirates came about as the British decided they could no longer afford to honour the protection treaties they had signed and withdrew from the region.

The government is made up of the hereditary emirs from each of the Emirates, with the ruler of Abu Dhabi taking the presidency and the ruler of Dubai the prime minister’s office. To be a citizen of the UAE your father has to have been a citizen, or you need to have been married to an Emirati for at least ten years. Even then, marriage does not guarantee that you will be welcomed into the fold.

Emirati citizens are outnumbered eight to one by immigrants, with the country having the tenth highest net immigration rate of anywhere in the world. Being born in the UAE doesn’t mean you come from there, with the children of immigrants born in the country still considered expats. As the nation used oil revenues to build its infrastructure there was a massive increase in migrant workers, most of them from the Asian sub-continent. What all of this has meant is that those who have arrived in the UAE from Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka have brought their love of cricket with them.

In terms of playing numbers, cricket is by far the most popular sport in the UAE. The issue for those who run the game isn’t numbers of people playing the game. It isn’t that there is no top level cricket; the UAE has been hosting international cricket for well over 20 years.

The challenge lies in getting locals to be passionate about it. Emiratis see cricket as the game of the labourers who have come to the country to help build the hotels and resorts for which the UAE has become famous. It isn’t something that the locals see as belonging to them. As a result, it isn’t something that the government are particularly keen to fund. Whereas in other countries football is the game of the working man and cricket is seen as an elite pursuit, in the UAE it is the exact opposite.

Football, with its rich superstars who holiday in the Emirates, is more fitting with the way that Emiratis view themselves. Cricket is associated with India and Pakistan rather than with its English roots.

Alawi Al Braik, one of the few UAE nationals to have played for his country’s cricket team, told me some of his compatriots would be embarrassed to pick up a cricket bat. ‘I was teased for playing the game,’ he said. Like most Arab families in the UAE, Al Braik was brought up with servants. One of those working in his house growing up was a lady from Sri Lanka. She was like a second mother to him. She loved cricket, and when she was looking after the young Al Braik, cricket was on the television. He was hooked in by this strange game straight away.

As he was introduced to the game by a Sri Lankan, it is perhaps not surprising that that his first heroes were from there. He talks of Sanath Jayasuriya and Muttiah Muralitharan with a reverence. Thanks to his father’s influence he was able to meet them as the years went by, travelling to watch them play all over the world. He was coached by Sunil Fernando, the same man who tutored Muralitharan and Kumar Sangakkara.

In a lovely quirk that sport sometimes throws up, his one ODI appearance was against Sri Lanka in 2008. He lasted just three balls before he edged Ajantha Mendis to slip. It was like playing against his big brothers; Al Braik was only 18 at the time. He said Jayasuriya questioned him as to why he didn’t sweep the ball that dismissed him. It was on leg stump, why push at it, his hero and friend asked.

Despite his affinity for Sri Lanka and its cricketers, Al Braik says he is a proud Emirati. In fact this is the reason why he has not played for them in such a long time, and he claims he has been approached. As things stand, the UAE side is not even one where the players can speak the language of the country that they represent.

While it is unlikely that the team will ever be staffed exclusively by UAE nationals, right now it isn’t even close to that. Al Braik says he would not advocate having the entire team made up of UAE nationals, but he feels that more needs to be done to embrace those Emiratis who are playing the game. ‘My argument is not to have all eleven nationals, no, but you’ve got to get three or four guys to be your front image to get the kids [to] start playing.’

Al Braik has created a team called UAE Nationals, a side he claims is very strong at Under-19 and Under-17 levels. He feels that the cricket board ignores them, that it is easier to just concentrate on expats. You don’t need to teach them about the game, they already love it. You don’t have to start from the very beginning, because you have a steady stream of ready-made cricketers arriving in the country all the time.

Perhaps the current make-up of the side is as it should be. If a national team is a reflection of the population, then it makes sense that so many of those who wear the UAE shirt are doing so without being a UAE national. But for Al Braik, the Emirates Cricket Board (ECB) doesn’t want nationals in the team. ‘They do not like to promote the game because once you get nationals in, you get recognition from the government, and once you get the government in, then they start questioning all of the ICC funds and ACC funds.’

Although Al Braik says the government is not involved, this is not completely true. Two years ago Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak, the UAE Minister for Youth and Culture, was made the honorary head of the ECB. This gives the Emirates Cricket Board some government involvement, but Al Braik said that ‘word does not reach’ Sheikh Nahyan.

There is a real feeling among the cricket-playing Emirati that they aren’t wanted; that cricket is, and always will be, an expat sport. This may be the feeling that some have, but there are weekly meetings that take place between ECB management and the Sheikh. If the UAE are playing he tends to be there to watch. Perhaps the perception doesn’t match the reality, but that is something that the ECB needs to address.

Zarawani says that little is done to encourage UAE nationals to play the game. Whereas other sports give equipment and coaching to Emiratis for free, funded by the government, cricket does not do the same. ‘They have achieved having a UAE team and keeping it alive. But it is all expats, but these same expats are not going to stay here forever. They are going to go back to their homeland and they are going to be representing their homeland. This is not achieving anything.’

David East, the chief executive of the Emirates Cricket Board, is well aware that getting local talent playing the game is key to the growth of cricket. His plan is to appoint a national development manager and use that to drive participation upwards, with the hope that this person will be in post as soon as possible. They plan to get into schools and have Emirati ‘champions’ for the sport. Those locals who have played the game to a high level are going to be used to try and raise the game’s profile.

East said they are always looking for new ways to spread the sport among Emiratis. ‘It’s a case of making it accessible to them: we’ve got a number of facilities here, sadly not as many as we would want, but the plan is to get it out to the schools, use Emirati champions to actually get into those communities and demonstrate that it’s actually a really exciting sport to be part of.’ Kabir Khan, former Pakistan player and one-time coach of the UAE, told me, ‘Locals were not interested to play and there were not enough numbers.’

Those living in the UAE certainly aren’t starved of top-level cricket. Since the opening of the Sharjah Stadium in the 1980s the amount and quality of cricket that takes place in the Emirates has only increased. The ICC has its offices and its academy in Dubai. It is the home venue for Pakistan and Afghanistan. In 2014, it hosted the first few games of the multi-million dollar Indian Premier League (IPL) when elections in India meant the Twenty20 behemoth needed a new home. This has been fantastic for expat fans of the game. They have been able to see the best players in the world on their doorstep. Whether it has increased local interest or not, however, is questionable.

East says that the IPL certainly caused a stir among the Emiratis who came to watch the games. ‘The response we had from Emiratis when we were hosting the IPL was quite remarkable, and probably the best way of showcasing cricket to a new audience is something like the spectacle of the IPL.’

The razzmatazz that the IPL brings may well be the kind of event that turns the heads of the locals. It is certainly more easily accessible than a Pakistan Test, where the game unfolds slowly and is a more cerebral enterprise. Twenty20 is seen by many as the gateway drug into a love of cricket.

The issue for the ECB may well be that this amount of cricket actually makes growing the sport and the success of the national side more difficult. The team running cricket in the Emirates is a small one and, as East admitted, they struggle when it comes to fulfilling all of the board’s roles. ‘It is a challenge. We’ve got a very small staff, and we’re trying to juggle an awful lot of things in terms of commitments to the ICC, delivering international cricket, and also developing the game here as well.’

The difficulty is which part of that mix do you say no to? The answer is none of it: you need to get involved in as much as you can, but ultimately it is about funding. Qualification for the World Cup will make a difference in this regard. Performance payments of around $250,000 are made to associates for the four years after they reach a World Cup. This should help to ease the strain for the ECB.

Al Braik told me there is another solution to money problems. ‘Just imagine if we can get Arabs playing, what money we can get involved in cricket.’ David East says he understands this, and he is attempting to bring the local population into the game. Certainly, government funding is something that he is well aware of and is looking to bring into the sport.

The national team reflects the fact that 90 per cent of the population are not UAE nationals. If you live in the UAE but are not a passport holder, the only sports that you can compete in at international level are cricket and rugby. Whereas football is a closed shop in the UAE for expats, with cricket the qualifying is relatively simple. To play for a country other than the one of your birth you need to have lived in your new nation for four years. This is the same for all nations, whether full, associate or affiliate members.

This relative ease with which players can qualify for the UAE has actually made it harder for Emiratis to get into the national team. There is a history stretching back 40 years of companies bringing over cricketers as employees to represent company cricket teams. Many of those who appeared for the UAE in the 1996 World Cup found their way into the country through this route. As the demand for expat workers has grown, so has the number of able cricketers. Close to 70 per cent of those who arrive in the UAE to work come from the Asian sub-continent and they bring their love and knowledge of cricket with them.

Cricket is the number one sport in the UAE but not the number one funded game. The top spot is held by football, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. The level of cricket underneath the international team is relatively high. They are not playing multi-day games but the leagues in the UAE are populated by players with first-class experience elsewhere.

Will Kitchen is the head of the ICC Academy in Dubai, and the high performance manager for cricket in the UAE. For him the issue is not so much a skills gap as an experience gap. While there are talented cricketers in the UAE, many of them within the national setup, none of them play cricket for a living; they are semi-professionals at best. Kitchen is aware of what needs to be done. ‘Our job is to try to bridge that gap, it’s to give them as close to a world-class programme on what in essence is nothing like the budget that English, Australian or Pakistani cricket is operating on.’

Those expats who are in the country to play cricket for their company are primarily answerable to their employers, not the ECB. Kitchen says some of these men are playing 150 games a year. While that is far from ideal, if they refused they would lose their visa and have no right to remain in the country.

‘Ninety per cent of our squad will do a full day’s work in fairly labour-intensive jobs,’ Kitchen said. ‘These aren’t guys that are lawyers, doctors, teachers, they’re guys that work for industrial firms, fairly low-paid, low-skill jobs.’

They will finish a full day’s work and then arrive at Dubai Sports City for four hours of training. So you have a situation in which there are players who could compete at a high level were it not for them having to work full-time to earn a living. A professional cricketer in a full member country has a schedule that prepares them to give their best for game days. In the UAE there is 150 days of cricket, full-time jobs and late-night training, all of which hampers their efforts. They are playing catch-up before they even take the field against more professional outfits.

There are times when a UAE cricketer gets to play at being a full-time pro. During the Australian Test side’s warm-up match against Pakistan A in Sharjah in October 2014, they called upon the services of UAE international Saqlain Haider. He works in a bank but was asked to step in for Brad Haddin to allow the Aussie wicketkeeper some rest ahead of the first Test. That day, instead of counting cash he was catching Mitchell Johnson thunderbolts. They even let him keep the Australian squad training kit but he also had bruised hands as a souvenir.

Speaking with the ESPNCricinfo website, he showed off his swollen palms and said, ‘It hurt me, see! [Johnson] is a very speedy fast bowler. It was the first time I’ve experienced that in my life, 150-plus I think. I learnt many things from that. He is a very good fast bowler.’

Another of those juggling a full-time job with an international cricket career is the UAE captain, Khurram Khan. He is a flight purser, a job that sees him working long shifts flying around the world. He has been in the UAE since 1996, arriving from Pakistan after finishing university. He came to the Emirates for work but he had also been told that cricket was being played at a pretty high standard. By 1999 he had got his job with Emirates Airlines and was recruited on to their cricket team. By 2001 he was qualified as a UAE player and was travelling to play in a tournament in Canada, the first ICC Trophy.

Khan turns 44 in June 2015 but he is as driven as ever. As a top-order batsman, spin bowler and captain of the side he is always involved in a match. Watching him play, you start to wonder if there is a portrait of him in an attic that is getting older while he stays young. The UAE’s very own Dorian Gray.

For Khan, the biggest challenge is that he is not playing cricket full-time. ‘After finishing our jobs, some of us are working in shifts; some of us are working office nine-to-five kind of duties and having to drive to practice,’ Khan said. ‘And some are coming from Abu Dhabi, which takes more than one hour to drive’.

This isn’t a once-a-week deal; they are training five times a week. These men have families and social lives that they have to put on hold for them to fulfil their cricketing ambitions. ‘I think you don’t get even enough time for yourself and the family,’ Khan tells me. This is the sacrifice that these cricketers have to make if they are going to compete with full-time cricketers from associate nations, let alone the infinitely better-funded full members.

The man in day-to-day charge of these cricketers is former Pakistan international, Aaqib Javed. Javed played for Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s, appearing in 22 Tests and 163 ODIs. Following his retirement he moved into coaching. He was involved with Pakistan age-group cricket for many years, taking a team to the Under-19 World Cup in 2004. From 2008 until 2012 he was the bowling coach for the full Pakistan national side. He was offered the role of head coach with the UAE and at first he was reticent. He had never worked with amateur sides, having always been involved in the Pakistan coaching set-up. However, when he mentioned the chance of moving full-time to Dubai to his wife and daughter, they told him he should take it. The life they could have in the Emirates was a massive attraction for them.

Javed was not delighted with what he saw when he arrived. ‘It wasn’t promising, because when I saw the team I got really disappointed, because once you’re sharing a dressing-room with people like Younis Khan, Misbah-ul-Haq, Shahid Afridi, Umar Gul, all the top stars, and the next day you’re sitting with amateurs.’

He soon realised that there was a lot of work to be done, and while he had immediate buy-in from those in charge, the players were less keen. The only time that they had to train was in the evening after they had finished work. They were tired and not delighted about being pushed to their limits.

He asked for three months. He said that they would be tired at first, but the harder they trained, the less tired they would be. ‘Thankfully, after three months, they realised that it was working well, because in three months some of them lost about four to six kilos, and eventually they realised that you can’t achieve anything without hard work.’

The results that Javed has achieved have been impressive. When qualification for the 2011 World Cup was at stake the UAE finished seventh and nowhere near the big prize. At the 2013 World Twenty20 qualifier, just a year into Javed’s time in charge, his side secured a place at the World Twenty20. At the 2014 World Cup qualifier the UAE finished second, losing to Scotland in the final but winning a World Cup spot and ODI status. There is no doubt that standards are improving. Whether they can continue this upward trend without a further move towards professionalism is the real question.

That is the way Javed wants to take things. ‘Now I’m really satisfied because we are striving to making up a semi-professional team. In a couple of years I’m looking to make the UAE team a full professional set-up.’ He talks of how David East understands the ethics of running a cricket board. He says how Will Kitchen’s experience at the England and Wales Cricket Board has been vital to his side. Javed is delighted with how it is all going. ‘We used to have no proper trainer or analyst, or skills coaches. Now I’m really satisfied that the people who are working around us, we have a full staff. We’ve got a good set-up now. I am really happy with the way we are moving forward.’

Khurram Khan says he is extremely happy with the direction the team has taken under Javed. ‘I’ve never done so much hard work in my life, and I’m doing it at this age!’ Khan said. ‘[Javed] is very positive first of all. He’d say something, he’d really want it to happen, he wouldn’t just say things for the sake of saying them. So he doesn’t stop, he never stops.’

Cricket in the UAE has a massive following. There is a ready-made audience for the sport, excellent facilities and year-round sunshine. There is a wealthy population and a growing middle class. The IPL showed how the local population can buy in to the game.

The standard of the national team is improving all the time as the number of excellent cricketers who decide to make the Emirates their home increases. The ICC is based in the UAE and there is a real chance to make cricket the sport of choice for everyone; all it needs is the will and the money for it to happen. The funds are there in the UAE, but in order for it to flow into cricket, the game needs to capture the imagination of the local population.

UAE cricket has been a victim and a beneficiary of the country’s appeal as a destination for expats. The number of building projects, jobs and opportunities, albeit tempered by the global economic downturn, has meant that nationals have been sidelined by more experienced players from countries where cricket is more established. As cricketers from the Asian sub-continent have arrived, they have filled up the spots in the national squad. The four-year qualifying period means that in a short space of time someone can find themselves in the national squad. That spot is one that could have been given to a UAE passport holder.

Those who care about cricket on either side of this local/expat divide care about the game deeply; the challenge for all those involved is to bring the sides together. It is impossible for the game to grow and succeed without both expats and locals. The ‘foreigners’ bring experience and talent, the locals bring Emirati interest, funding and sustainable growth.

Sultan Zarawani and Alawi Al Braik bring just as much to the game in the UAE as David East, Aaqib Javed, Will Kitchen and Khurram Khan. Everyone just needs to realise that.

Scotland by Tim Wigmore

EVEN cricket was embroiled in the referendum on Scottish independence, which reached a conclusion of sorts with the No vote in September 2014. A week before the referendum, The Grange Ground in Edinburgh – the Scotland international side’s most regular home ground – hosted a 1,500-strong rally against independence. It was perhaps an appropriate setting, given cricket’s traditional role as a symbol of the English-loving posh elite. When I asked a Scottish cricketer about the team’s views on independence a few days earlier, the reply was terse, ‘We’re all against it.’

The presence of English international cricket on Scottish terrestrial television has long been a source of angst within a strand of the Scottish National Party, and, in their view, proof of the influence of English culture in Scotland. In 2009, an SNP Member of the Scottish Parliament even tabled a motion in protest at the level of Ashes coverage on the news on terrestrial TV.

To some Scots there remains a sharp sense of cricket as an alien, and deeply un-Scottish, game. The Scottish political journalist Fraser Nelson has written that, north of the border, the Conservative Party is viewed as ‘a harmless perversion, roughly in the same bracket as cross-dressing or cricket’. In the political comedy The Thick of It, the snarling Scottish attack dog Malcolm Tucker sneers at someone discussing cricket. ‘That’s the English equivalent of sport,’ he scoffs. ‘There’s no actual physical contact.’

The notion of cricket being an English interloper may never be entirely dispelled. ‘Some people always associate it with being an English game. I don’t think we’re ever going to get away from that,’ admitted Roddy Smith, whose ten-year stint as chief executive of Cricket Scotland ended in 2014. Cricket thrives in the Edinburgh public schools, while the Grange Cricket Club, formed in 1832 by members of the Edinburgh Speculative Society, has long been considered the MCC of Scotland. Players for the Grange are commonly referred to as ‘the Chaps’. Anyone who wants to play cricket for the club must stump up £390 a year for the right, in addition to match fees.

But the image of Scottish cricket as a fundamentally elitist pursuit is a myth. More people play organised cricket in Scotland than in any other country in the world that does not have Test status. Scotland has more cricket clubs than rugby clubs. In parts of the country, especially the Borders and Aberdeenshire, cricket has a classless appeal. Former SNP leader Alex Salmond, known to be a handy cricketer in his youth, was furious when the BBC did not broadcast Scotland’s first one-day international against England in 2008.

Since then, Scotland have played a biannual ODI against England; the two sides will also face each other in the 2015 World Cup. Yet cricket retains a unique place in Scotland: it is the only sport in which Scots find themselves cheering for England, regarding the England side less as a rival than a representative of the United Kingdom at Test level, akin to the British and Irish Lions in rugby.

In The Encyclopedia of Scottish Cricket, D.W. Potter argues that, because Scotland do not compete on level terms with England in Test cricket, England cannot be assigned the role of ‘the other’ as in other sports. As Alan Bairner and Dominic Malcolm assert in Cricket and National Identities on the Celtic Fringe, ‘There is less evidence of the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh supporting anyone who plays against England at cricket than would be the case in the context of football’ and ‘England is of necessity the surrogate British team in world cricket.’ The former Scotland cricketer and current head of performance Andy Tennant reflected, ‘The England cricket team was who you supported. A young boy’s dream was to play cricket for England.’

This state of affairs stems from the low regard in which the national side has been held – not least by those who have run the game in Scotland. Historically, Scotland viewed itself less as a sovereign cricketing nation than as a sort of auxiliary English county. While the situation conferred certain advantages – Scotland was guaranteed a semi-regular supply of fixtures from tourists to England – it meant that Scotland were not a true international side in their own right. Any Scot serious about cricket had to look south to forge a career.

Scotland produced a surprising number of such players. Three England Test captains have had Scottish roots. Tony Greig was born in South Africa to Scottish parents. Douglas Jardine, that supposed embodiment of cussed Englishness, had only Scottish blood in him: his father was educated at Fettes College, later the alma mater of Tony Blair. Born in India, Jardine spent his formative years in Scotland, before completing his education in England. He always considered himself a Scot; after his death, his ashes were scattered in Perthshire. Mike Denness, whose 19 Tests as England skipper included the Ashes tour in 1974/75, is the only Test captain to have been born in Scotland. He played club cricket in Ayr and grew up in a house literally on the boundary’s edge of a ground.

In total, ten Test cricketers have been born in Scotland. The most tragic was the Rutherglen-born Archie Jackson, who emigrated to Australia as a boy and was considered the equal of Don Bradman. He died from tuberculosis midway through the 1932/33 Bodyline tour aged 23.

There was a fundamental link between all of these cricketers: the realisation that Scotland would not provide sufficient outlet for their talents. A sign of cricket’s standing was that, in 1990, the most famous Scottish cricketer was not really a cricketer at all. That was Andy Goram, the international football goalkeeper who played cricket for Scotland between 1989 and 1991. Against Allan Border’s Australian tourists in 1989, Goram, despite having been a professional footballer for a decade, was selected to bat at four as part of his fitness regime before the new football season. It was testament not only to Goram’s sporting prowess, but also the paucity of cricketing talent in Scotland. He made four.

Goram was a dual international but there was a chasm between the two sides he played for. He was selected in three football World Cup squads for Scotland (though never picked for a game). During his cricket-playing days, Scotland were not even members of the ICC and were ineligible for the Cricket World Cup. While first-class games against Ireland were hard-fought, games against tourists to England were merely exhibition matches.

In 1980, Scotland were invited to play against English counties in one-day cricket. They enjoyed scant success. Players used to fight over the free packets of cigarettes that were handed out after Benson & Hedges Cup games. Even when Scotland fielded a high-profile overseas player – the West Indian openers Gordon Greenidge and Desmond Haynes both had seasons as honorary Saltires, as did Malcolm Marshall in the last year of his career – their performances remained dire. Scotland won just three games in their first 23 years in county cricket.

The first recorded cricket match in Scotland was in 1785 in Alloa, between two aristocratic sides. In 1821, Kelso Cricket Club, Scotland’s oldest cricket club, was founded. An administrative body for Scotland, the Scottish Cricket Union (which would later change its name to Cricket Scotland), was formed in 1908; and an annual Scottish cricket yearbook – a Scottish Wisden – was published almost continuously from 1871 until the 21st century.

In the first half of the 20th century, cricket was much more than a niche pursuit; it was an intrinsic part of Scotland’s sporting culture. Every part of the country had a vibrant league – except Edinburgh, which did not adopt a league structure until 1953, in homage to gentlemanly ideals.

A young Wilfred Rhodes played for two seasons in the Border League in 1896 and 1897. And the crowds came: a report in The Scotsman newspaper in 1921 made reference to a crowd of 6,000 ‘keen cricket-lovers the people of Perth and surrounding district’ attending Scotland’s game against the Australians.

In another match between Scotland and the Australians that year, John Kerr hit 147 at Edinburgh, considered one of the finest innings against Warwick Armstrong’s Australians all tour. In an article for Wisden in 1999, the journalist Allan Massie recalled that, as a child in the 1950s, trams ran up and down Aberdeen’s Union Street with placards reading ‘To and From the Cricket Match’. The Perthshire–Forfarshire derby regularly attracted over 5,000 spectators. Don Bradman’s last innings on British soil was 123 not out, in 80 minutes, against Scotland at Aberdeen in 1948. It was played in front of a crowd of 10,000.

Despite these deep roots, cricket’s ruling elite did not conceive of Scotland as an international entity in its own right. While New Zealand, with a smaller population, was granted Test status, Scotland continued to be viewed as an extension of England. The Test and County Cricket Board and its predecessor retained jurisdiction over Scottish cricket until 1992. The upshot was that Scotland’s fixture list seldom amounted to more than four or five games a year: an annual first-class game against Ireland, a game against MCC, and perhaps a couple of games against sides touring England. Other sports forged ahead in the public consciousness.

Only in 1994 did Scotland become an autonomous cricket nation, acquiring associate membership of the ICC and, with it, the chance to qualify for the World Cup. ‘It didn’t do a lot of good for players to get pumped in international cricket,’ Bruce Patterson said. ‘We missed a layer of competitive development.’

In essence, the choice for Scottish cricketers remained as it had always been: go to England and pursue a professional career, or stay in Scotland and mix weekend cricket – whether against counties or other countries – with a full-time job. Not that many got the choice: few players received any interest from English counties.

‘There was no scouting and no trialing of any players from Scotland,’ Dougie Brown reflected. Brown turned professional for Warwickshire at the age of 22, from the start of the 1992 season, and was often the only professional in the Scotland team. Even though it scuppered his chances of playing for Scotland in a home World Cup, Brown did not regard it as a tough decision to pursue an ODI career with England. ‘It wasn’t really. I’m a passionate Scot and proud to be Scottish, but I wanted to challenge myself to play at the highest level I could.’

By April 1998, Brown’s England career had been and gone: nine matches spread over four months. It meant that he wasn’t playing for either England or Scotland at the 1999 World Cup.

Without Brown, Scotland played their first ODI on 16 May 1999. Many feared that it would be embarrassing: Scotland were taking on Australia at Worcester in the World Cup. It was the first time that many had cause to take notice of Scottish cricket: it was Scotland’s first ever match broadcast live on terrestrial TV.

Scotland lost the toss, exposing them to Damien Fleming, one of the best seamers in the world, with the new white ball. It did not seem much of a fair contest against the opening batsman Patterson, an estate agent from Ayr. He had been a fine batsman in his time, scoring 70 against Allan Border’s Australians in 1989, but the World Cup was no place for a 34-year-old amateur cricketer. With three slips waiting expectantly, the first delivery was pitched up enticingly outside off stump. Patterson could not resist. He leant in to attempt a cover drive. The ball did not take the edge of his bat; instead, it was lashed gloriously through the covers for a boundary. ‘A half-volley’s a half-volley,’ he said. ‘I should have hit the second ball for four as well.’ While Australia still won easily, it took them 44.5 overs to chase down Scotland’s 181/7. Ignominy had been averted.

These were exciting times for Scottish cricket. Scotland had qualified for the World Cup at their first attempt and believed that they could compete in their fixtures. ‘There was no fear of being embarrassed,’ reflected Gavin Hamilton, who played for Scotland between 1993 and 2010. ‘We had quite a mature side in those days, and a fantastic mix of characters. It was certainly the best bowling attack I played in for Scotland by an absolute country mile.’

The World Cup would come to Scotland too: in an enlightened move, Scotland were awarded two home games in the tournament. ‘The game changed during the 1999 World Cup when people started seeing what Scotland were doing – and more importantly Scotland could see what Scottish cricketers were doing,’ Hamilton said. The media could not help but notice: papers went from a few hundred words of coverage on Scotland’s county matches to a few thousand. Even the tabloids could not ignore cricket.

It was the first home game that Scotland anticipated particularly eagerly. After beginning the World Cup with defeats to Australia and Pakistan in England, Scotland faced Bangladesh in front of over 4,000 spectators at The Grange. Scotland’s director of cricket Jim Love labelled the game their World Cup final. Bangladesh, at the time a fellow associate, represented by far Scotland’s best chance of a win in the five group games.

The day began perfectly, too. Put in to bat, Bangladesh subsided to 26/5 against consummate new-ball bowling in overcast conditions. It should have been 45/6 soon afterwards when Minhajul Abedin edged to slip. The catch was put down, Abedin’s unbeaten 68 held Bangladesh together, and Scotland were set 186 to win. It would not have been daunting to a side of professionals but then, with a couple of exceptions, Scotland were a side of amateurs.

They batted like it, too. Emulating Bangladesh’s mistakes, Scotland collapsed to 8/3 and then 49/5. Fortunately they had, in Hamilton, a man with the temperament and skill for the challenge. He went into the tournament as Scotland’s only established county player and would score more runs than any England player could muster: 217 at an average of 54. ‘Every shot I played and every situation I got involved in it came off. I was quite proud of the way I played some of the world’s best bowlers. I had it in my mind that I’d rather go down taking them on and just seeing how good I was.’

While Hamilton cruised to 63 at nearly a run a ball, he appeared to be steering Scotland to their first World Cup win. Manjurul Islam’s fingertips put paid to that: Islam steered a booming straight drive on to the stumps from Alec Davies, who had combined with Hamilton to add 55 for the seventh wicket. Hamilton was run out and Scotland promptly collapsed. ‘It was one of the most disappointing days in Scottish cricket history,’ he said. Victory would have given a significant boost to the profile and funding of Scottish cricket, and might also have made it harder for Bangladesh to become a full member of the ICC the following year. More than 15 years later, Scotland are still waiting for their first World Cup win.

As for Hamilton, the World Cup provided him with a platform to impress the England selectors. It was a mark of Scotland’s standing that, immediately after the end of the tournament, Love said, ‘I hope that we lose him to England.’ The implication was clear: Hamilton had outgrown the little that Scotland could bring. ‘Playing for England was the be-all and end-all in those days,’ he reflected. ‘It was an obvious decision.’

He was selected for Duncan Fletcher’s first Test as England coach. Hamilton faced nine balls in the match, falling twice to Allan Donald without scoring a run. His 15 overs went for 63 and he was never picked by England again.

For Scotland, the vision that the 1999 World Cup would galvanise the country’s cricket remained unrealised. ‘There is a sense that the administration of cricket didn’t really seize on the marketing opportunities as well as they could have done,’ Tennant said. ‘There was no reason to expect them to – it was amateur committeemen giving up their time.’

Craig Wright, who captained Scotland in 107 matches and is now the side’s assistant coach, called it, ‘A little bit of a flash in the pan. The problem with the World Cup is there wasn’t really anything to sustain us after that. It gave us a bit of visibility but if you look at the cricket we played in 2000, 2001 and 2002, there wasn’t a lot backing it up.’

In 2001, Scotland performed terribly to miss out on qualification for the World Cup; had Brown and Hamilton been available, things might have been different.

Fresh hope came in 2003. Scotland were invited to play in the English National League, guaranteeing them 18 one-day matches per season against county sides: unimaginable riches compared to the piecemeal fixture list that Scotland were used to.

And the side was treated to the best gift imaginable: Rahul Dravid would join as an overseas player. The Scottish cricketing community united to pay Dravid’s salary. Events were organised with the Asian community; private schools were enticed by the promise of Dravid coaching for a day; and a donation from a particularly generous Glaswegian dentist sealed the deal. Not that it seemed like Scotland needed him: before Dravid arrived they won three of their first five games – matching their total wins in the previous 23 years of county cricket in 22 days. This included a miraculous chase of 181 runs in 14.3 overs in a rain-affected game against Somerset.

‘This was prior to Twenty20 cricket – nothing had been achieved at over ten runs an over,’ the burly opener Ryan Watson remembered. ‘I remember hitting the first ball for a one-bounce four and thinking this could be my day. You just went out and tried to hit every ball for four.’ He also harrumphed seven sixes in a sensational 44-ball hundred.

When Dravid arrived, he did not disappoint. ‘He was amazing – such a nice approachable guy, and he really cared which I remember being very impressed about,’ Watson recalled. ‘He spent a lot of time with the batsmen.’ In 11 matches, Dravid scored three centuries and averaged 66. Yet Scotland only won one game with him in the side.

Dravid’s experience with Scotland was far removed from his time with India. Most fundamentally, he was playing with complete amateurs. A lack of government support certainly did not help: just before the season began, Sport Scotland withdrew National Lottery funding, meaning that plans to award eight professional summer contracts had to be abandoned. Players were asked to play for free, not that it quelled their enthusiasm.

‘The guys thought, “We are on holiday – we might as well enjoy this and have a crack”,’ Watson remembered. After Scotland won their first game in the National League in 2003, wicketkeeper Colin Smith, fresh from hitting the winning runs, had to drive back from Durham to Aberdeen overnight and deliver the post the next morning.

Traditionally Scotland has had a superior cricket team to Ireland. In 2005 they proved as much by comfortably beating Ireland in the final of the ICC Trophy; the previous year, Scotland had been the inaugural winners of the Intercontinental Cup, the first-class competition for non-Test sides. Scotland were the best associate side around, and there was nothing to suggest the trajectory that Ireland and Scotland would take over the following decade. ‘We just fell off a cliff after that – we thought we were going to dominate for a number of years,’ Hamilton reflected. ‘We should have developed massively and kicked on hugely from 2005.’

An opportunity was missed to advance cricket in Scotland. ‘There could have been a far bigger push to market cricket in Scotland,’ a player in the 2005 side asserted. ‘If we’d professionalised the environment in 2005 with a whole host of really good experienced cricketers and then started introducing youngsters I think we’d still be ahead of Ireland.’

Luck undeniably played a part. Scotland’s reward for their ICC Trophy victory was to be put in the same group as Australia and South Africa at the 2007 World Cup. It was the cricketing equivalent of a hospital pass and ensured that Scotland emulated the traditions of the football team in the World Cup: Scotland are said to always ‘arrive home before the postcards’ when they qualify. Ireland were drawn with Pakistan, West Indies and Zimbabwe: three Test nations but each distinctly vulnerable, as Ireland would demonstrate.

Petty squabbling also hampered Scotland. The coach who led Scotland to the ICC Trophy in 2005, Andy Moles, was forced out by a coterie of senior players. Hamilton later called it a ‘strange decision’. Perhaps the squad did not approve of Moles’s assessment of the culmination of the 2005 county season, ‘It was a tired, listless group of players who finished the season, and it dawned on me how unfit they were, both physically and mentally.’

As John Blain, Brown and Hamilton edged towards retirement, Scotland were not producing similarly talented players. ‘I don’t think the young players believed in themselves enough when it came to the crunch,’ reflected Gordon Drummond, who played for Scotland between 2007 and 2014.

In their desperation, the selectors turned to players from Australia or South Africa who had settled in Scotland, and qualified for the side after living there for four years. Often these players were not any better than the Scots that they replaced, and their selection sent a terrible message to locally-reared cricketers.

After Scotland’s failure to be one of four associate qualifiers for the 2011 World Cup, Ian Stanger lamented the rise of ‘Jock Boks’ and asked, “Why do we persist in handing out Scotland jerseys to players with foreign accents on the evidence of a few games? Why do we have a tendency not to rate our own guys and abandon rather than seek to support their development?’

Stanger likened the selectors to ‘kids in the candy shop, unable to resist the temptation to try something new in favour of a more tried and tested choice’. It was a view shared by Hamilton, ‘In the early years, Scotland were guilty of picking them just because they were from Australia or South Africa.’

All the while, Ireland were surging forwards, determined that their success in 2007 should not be an end-point in itself but the catalyst for transforming cricket in the country. ‘Ireland spotted an opportunity and were very ambitious and proactive and aggressively chased the dream,’ a Cricket Scotland employee told me. ‘We were a little bit more conservative in our approach.’

Perhaps it is no wonder that fans were not captivated. Where Ireland fans saw a side with the self-belief that they could cause upsets, Scotland supporters complained of a side that was accepting of defeat. After a 189-run loss to Australia in 2009, the captain Hamilton said, ‘I’m very happy with the way we handled ourselves in the last 10 overs of their innings because they could have gone on to get 400.’ It is unimaginable that any Irishman in the post-2007 era would utter similar words.

It took a glorious day in September 2013 to put into perspective just how far Ireland and Scotland’s fortunes had diverged. To prepare for their ODI series, both Australia and England were playing an ODI against the nearby associates. It was a rare day when associate cricket did not have to fight for airtime. Ireland gave England a major scare, and would have beaten them had they not had the minor inconvenience of their best batsman and bowler playing for England against them. At the same time, Australia decimated Scotland by 200 runs.

The contrast between the two associates was even greater off the pitch. ‘That day highlighted the journey that the two organisations had been on in the last five or six years,’ a Cricket Scotland employee said. ‘It was a real reality check as to where they are and where we are.’

Ireland recognised their game as a chance to show off Irish cricket to the world. The Village in Malahide – which has no permanent stands and the feel of an idyllic out-ground – was turned into a ground capable of seating 10,000 spectators for the ODI against England. It represented a monumental gamble – 8,500 tickets had to be sold just to break even – but one that Ireland needed to take to highlight its appetite for international cricket. Thanks to a sterling marketing campaign and a sumptuous day, only “sold out” signs greeted latecomers.

In comparison, The Grange was deeply underwhelming. Like The Village, The Grange is a picturesque club ground. It is flanked by trees and the club’s tennis courts – even international cricket has to compete with other attractions at this private members’ club.

Scotland risked nothing on the game against Australia, and gained even less: 3,000 spectators came to see the side get mauled and little was done to present Scotland as desperate for more showpiece international fixtures. ‘Malahide was a great customer experience. A lot of money had been spent on getting it to the right level – it would have been a great day for Irish cricket,’ the Cricket Scotland employee told me. ‘When you look at how much effort had been put into the customer experience of the Scotland–Australia game, it wasn’t of the same quality.’

When Scotland played England in May 2014 at Aberdeen, they did so in front of a crowd of 3,000 – fewer than half the 7,000 who saw the first ODI between the two nations in 2008. While attendances surged in Ireland, they stagnated in Scotland; the discrepancy cannot be exclusively attributed to on-field performances. It also reflects the caution of Cricket Scotland; its fear of being overambitious in the number of tickets it could sell for a marquee match and making a loss. All this is easy to criticise but associate finances are unforgiving. ‘They were very conservative, very afraid of losing money,’ said the Scottish cricket journalist Jon Coates. ‘You can’t afford to gamble the game’s future on the possibility of there being a bigger audience out there.’

The weather provides a further complication: Cricket Scotland needed to insure the biggest matches to prevent losses. A sell-out ODI against Australia in 2005 and an ODI between India and Pakistan in 2007, which promised to be a lucrative way for Scotland to tap into the Asian community, were both abandoned without a ball being bowled. In 2012, Scotland’s ODI against England was cancelled three weeks in advance due to the flooding of The Grange.

The caution in Scottish thinking was embodied by the decision to try and remain a part of the English county game even after Ireland left in 2009, complaining that the 40-over one-day cricket on offer did not replicate the 50-over cricket played at ODI level. Scotland only left county cricket in 2013 after being forced out by the ECB’s restructuring. Few lamented their departure: in their last season, Scotland lost all 11 completed matches. Damningly, the Netherlands were far more successful in county cricket despite a much smaller pool of players.

There remains the sense that Cricket Scotland could have done more to promote the national side as a vibrant and commercially attractive cricketing force. Coates asserted, ‘There hasn’t been enough done to cultivate a real culture of following Scotland.’ This is even detectable on social media: as of October 2014, Cricket Ireland had 30,000 Twitter followers to Cricket Scotland’s 12,000.

Nor have they matched Ireland in making a persuasive case for greater opportunities at ODI level. ‘The Scottish cricketing public should be disappointed at how Scotland have articulated and pushed,’ the Cricket Scotland employee reflected.

Insiders have also noted the close friendship between Keith Oliver, Cricket Scotland’s chairman, and Giles Clarke, the chairman of the ECB. Clarke sits on the sport nominations committee for the distribution of honours and, in January 2014, Oliver was awarded an OBE as a reward for the progress of Cricket Scotland in the 12 years since he was appointed chairman. This happened just as Clarke was finalising his plans to spearhead the Big Three’s takeover of the ICC.

Ireland’s rise should not obscure the significant strides made by cricket in Scotland. There are around 60,000 active cricketers in Scotland today, 15,000 more than in Ireland. In 2006, Cricket Scotland’s annual revenue was under £800,000; today, it is £2.1m. The increase has funded the professionalisation of the sport. As recently as 2013, Drummond, who juggled international cricket with his commitments as a development officer for Cricket Scotland, led the side. He is in no doubt that playing full-time would have improved his game. ‘I feel 100 per cent that if I’d had more access to training of the right kind and more opportunities to develop my skills I would have become a better cricketer.’

It seems inconceivable that a part-time cricketer will ever again captain Scotland. In 2014, ten Scottish players had county contracts. Cricket Scotland introduced full-time contracts in 2008 and today awards eight full-time professional contracts and three contracts to younger players. ‘The excuse of being an amateur cricketer no longer exists,’ Roddy Smith said. Yet the sums awarded remain very modest: the top contract is only worth £30,000 a year. ‘The players are the assets of the organisation,’ a current Scotland cricketer complained.

‘The top players should be paid close to what the CEO, head coach, and technical director get,’ Watson reflected. ‘Scotland are in limbo where they are going into this professional phase and not being rewarded hugely for it. Guys are almost having to make more sacrifices now, even though they are getting paid.’

Having captained Scotland while working for Caledonian Breweries (who later employed Hamilton), Watson rejected the offer of a professional contract in 2009 because of the cost of his young family. ‘My earning capacity would have gone down a whole heap. I just took a stance purely based on finance.’

Cricket Scotland’s focus has not merely been on improving its best players. While challenges mirror those in England – a lack of cricket on free-to-air TV and in state schools – significant steps have been undertaken to create a sustained culture of the sport. In 2012, Scotland won the ICC’s Best Overall Cricket Development Programme award. Cricket has even been taken to schools in the Shetland Islands, where there is a league during summer and an indoor competition every winter.

In 2010, Cricket Scotland launched an Interprovincial competition featuring two Scottish sides and two from the Netherlands. The intention was to bridge the gap between Scottish club cricket and international cricket. Initially the competition only featured one-day and Twenty20 cricket, but multi-day cricket was introduced between the Scottish sides in 2013. It was taken out of the schedule the following year. As three-day cricket is an integral part of Ireland’s Interprovincial structure, it does not speak highly of Cricket Scotland’s ambitions to achieve Test status in the foreseeable future.

While Ireland would like fewer of their players to be contracted to counties, Scotland take the opposite view. ‘We are happy, glad and trying as best we can to feed players into the county system,’ Smith, the former chief executive of Cricket Scotland, said. ‘We’re a long way off from being able to match the amount of money that players can earn down south.’

And Scotland are less vexed than Ireland about the prospect of future stars declaring for England. ‘If a Scotland player ended up playing for England, then well done him for being that good,’ Smith told me in September 2014. ‘We’d be delighted if someone got to that level and played at the highest level possible that they can.’

One rather more encouraging change came in 2014 with the announcement that Stirling would become the new centre of Scottish cricket. ‘We’ve suffered because we’ve been trying to deliver professional sport and professional athletes with amateur facilities,’ Smith admitted. The development at Stirling represents a statement of intent by Scotland: a sign to the cricketing world that they should take Scotland seriously, because they are taking themselves seriously. That has perhaps not always been true.

As important as all of these steps are, they fall short of what is really needed to transform Scottish cricket: on-field success. ‘What Ireland have managed to do which we haven’t is to win games consistently at international level. They have qualified consistently for world events which we haven’t. That’s the one big difference,’ Smith observed.

Scotland have never enjoyed a totemic victory to rival those enjoyed by Ireland against Pakistan in the 2007 World Cup or England four years later. They have only ever beaten one full member. No one would ever release a DVD in homage to Scotland’s triumph over Bangladesh in a Twenty20 international in Holland in 2012; bad news for Richie Berrington, who scored a round 100 that day.

The underlying lack of self-belief in Scottish cricket was highlighted by a change in player eligibility rules two years ago, which allowed the selectors to pick players with Scottish parentage. This still puts Scotland at a disadvantage compared to other countries – Ireland were able to select Tim Murtagh based upon his grandparents’ birthplace – but has opened up new talent to the Scottish selectors. Hamish Gardiner, Matt Machan, Rob Taylor and Ian Wardlaw, four crucial current players, have all benefited from the rule.

More controversially, so did Neil Carter. A fine player for Warwickshire in his day, Carter was a retired 38-year-old county cricketer living in South Africa when he made his Scotland debut. The impression created was of Scotland being overly desperate to ship in new talent, distrustful of players who had come up through their own structure and leagues. One former player told Herald Scotland that he was ‘disgusted’ at Carter’s inclusion. ‘This sends out all the wrong signals to the guys who work their backsides off in Scotland. I’ve nothing against Neil Carter, but he is nowhere near the player he used to be and is nearly finished with cricket. So why are the Scots going with him?’

After the eligibility change, Cricket Scotland wrote to almost every county player, including Ireland’s skipper Will Porterfield and his opening partner Paul Stirling, to ask if they had any Scottish blood and if they wanted the chance to play for Scotland in the World Cup. The contrast with Ireland was unflattering. Despite his outstanding county pedigree, Murtagh had to wait a year to become an Ireland regular after qualifying in order to prove his enduring commitment.

Dougie Brown sympathised with the Scottish selectors – as long as they were committed to bringing through local talent. ‘You’ve got to make sure you put your best team on the park. Whether that’s somebody who was born and bred in Scotland or whether that was somebody who is South African who has Scottish roots, if you’re wanting to win that doesn’t matter. Long term it does matter because you want to make sure that you are bringing through your best young players to senior teams.’

Despite sources of encouragement, Scottish cricket felt threatened with irrelevance as 2014 approached. Scotland had failed to qualify for the 2011 World Cup and the previous three World Twenty20s. Former England Test player Paul Collingwood, who had been drafted as assistant coach, offered a withering assessment of why Scotland were not among the six associate qualifiers from the World Twenty20 qualifier in November 2013, ‘There were moments when, I’ll be honest, I thought, “These guys can’t take the heat.”’ He later reflected on ‘a lack of belief’ in the squad, and said, ‘As a general approach, they needed to put the opposition under pressure. Sometimes I felt that they were putting themselves under pressure.’

There were only two further World Cup places at stake in the 2015 World Cup qualifier, held in New Zealand in January 2014. It did not look like Scotland would be among them: they lost their first game, to Hong Kong, and were left needing to win six consecutive matches to make the World Cup. No one gave them much hope.

Yet Scotland played as if liberated by their multifarious failures. ‘The players just embraced the fact they hadn’t played well enough,’ Craig Wright, who was working alongside Collingwood, told me. ‘They realised that a lot of their careers and professional contracts were on the line had we not been successful in that tournament. They realised the wider implications for Scottish cricket and they embraced the challenge.’ After the defeat to Hong Kong, the Scotland side, shell-shocked, had a few drinks together. They agreed that their performances had not been adequate and vowed to avoid self-pitying.

It was Calum MacLeod who exemplified their new approach. His personal turnaround was as stirring as his country’s. In 2008, just after his 19th birthday, MacLeod was signed by Warwickshire as a quick bowler. But, already, trouble was brewing. ‘I developed some bad habits in my bowling action and never really rectified them or did the correct technical work. So I ended up throwing, for want of a better word. I’d rather someone had the difficult conversation earlier when the habits were starting to form because they would have been able to rectify them.’

In July 2009 umpires reported MacLeod’s action after an Intercontinental Cup match. A year of remedial work, including with Warwickshire bowling coach Allan Donald, followed, but MacLeod was not much use to his county. He was released at the end of 2010. For a man who batted at nine or ten for Scotland, it threatened to be terminal for his career. ‘I wasn’t entirely sure what direction I was going to go in. I didn’t know whether to give the game up and try something else or go and play hockey.’

Even five years earlier, MacLeod’s career might never have recovered. ‘I would have had to have gone and found a job. I wouldn’t have been able to train as much and wouldn’t have been able to have the enthusiasm to do the extra sessions and do the extra work that I had to do. Plainly I just wouldn’t have had the time.’

Cricket Scotland had the funds to award player contracts and MacLeod was given a summer contract for 2011. ‘I was able to do as much as I needed. Without that in place I don’t think I would have been able to come back.’

He used the time not just to remodel his action but to turn himself from a merry lower-order slogger into a batsman of substance. From sharing nets with Ian Bell and Jonathan Trott at Warwickshire, MacLeod was training with Scottish club cricketers. He would not be deterred. ‘I’m quite single-minded when it comes to my training. I have certain things that I want to get done. It comes down to what you demand of yourself.’

MacLeod managed to force his way into the side as a batsman but his form remained erratic. Before the World Cup qualifiers, MacLeod had ‘a pretty frank conversation’ with Scotland’s skipper Kyle Coetzer (who later went home injured). ‘He didn’t think that I was scoring the runs that I should be for Scotland.’

All those complaints changed in New Zealand. Opening the batting, MacLeod hit a 62-ball 113 against the UAE and 175 against Canada in consecutive games: innings marked by mature shot selection, as well as MacLeod’s power and swagger.

His belligerence underpinned Scotland’s run of five consecutive victories, but that would not matter if they could not beat Kenya. Scotland required 261 to win and MacLeod made only 17 before he fell groping outside off stump. The rest of the top order then collapsed to leave Scotland 169/6, requiring 92 from 12.5 overs.

The situation proved too much for MacLeod and some of his team-mates as they sought shelter in the club bar at the Hadley Oval in Christchurch. ‘We couldn’t watch it. We were sat in the pavilion in the little corner with a couple of cups of coffee as nervous as anything. There was an India–Australia game on the TV – we were pretending to be interested in that.’ All the players knew what was at stake. ‘We knew how big a game it was and what was riding on it not just for Scotland qualifying for the World Cup but for guys’ contracts.’

When Preston Mommsen was dismissed for 78, the eighth-wicket pair of Taylor and Safyaan Sharif needed 35 from the last 25 balls. The onus fell on all-rounder Taylor, who had qualified to play for Scotland a year earlier under the new eligibility rules on account of his late mother being born in Scotland. ‘I always spent time up there as a child with my grandparents. She was brought up there and lived up there until she met my dad. So I have a very close connection to Scotland and see myself very much as Scottish.’

A contemporary of Gary Ballance at Harrow, Taylor ‘was due a score for the guys’. He chose a good time to get one. With 17 required from 12 balls, he cleared his front leg and launched a delivery cleanly over long-on for six: a shot of daring and élan. ‘If the ball was up under my eyes I would back myself to clear the ropes and it came at a time when we needed one big over. The bowler missed his length by a yard or two.’

Unobtrusive accumulation was all that Scotland required thereafter. Taylor finished on 46 not out, sealing victory with a steer through point with three balls to spare. Scotland’s jubilation, tinged with palpable relief, seemed faintly incongruous set against the piles of cement and construction vehicles on the boundary edge at the Hadley Oval, which was being refurbished. But no matter: Scotland had qualified for the final and guaranteed their place in the World Cup. They promptly thumped the UAE in the final to make it a magnificent seven wins in a row. It could yet be the streak that reinvigorates Scottish cricket.

If Scotland require a new poster boy for this age, there is no one better than MacLeod. Not just for his 360-degree hitting but also because he quashes any notion of cricket being the preserve of Edinburgh public schools. His granddad moved to Glasgow from the island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides. With his parents keen for him to pick up Gaelic, MacLeod attended an inner city Gaelic School in Glasgow. ‘There wasn’t a lot of cricket mentioned or spoken about,’ let alone played.

MacLeod picked up the game through his father, who was a social member at a cricket club. Cricket was considered an English sport but ‘you kind of got over that once you started to understand it’. In 2009, MacLeod made history as a substitute fielder for England in an Ashes Test – becoming the first Gaelic speaker to appear in a Test. He is emblematic of a sport that has expanded its confines. While the base has never been as narrow as the stereotype suggests, there is now the sense that cricket is shedding its crusty image in Scotland and expanding its appeal. The development of Twenty20 cricket and coloured clothing ‘have made the game seem a bit more jazzy and a bit less formal’, Andy Tennant told me.

Demography is also working in cricket’s favour because of the increase in the Scottish-Asian population, especially in Glasgow and the west. Over 40 per cent of cricketers in the west today are of Asian origin. Sai Majeed, the chairman of the Western District Cricket Union, described the integration process as ‘very positive’.

Many former Asian-only recreational clubs have been incorporated into existing club structures. These traditional clubs have adapted to the rising Asian population, for instance, by offering a halal option at club teas. The successful integration of Scottish Asians is reflected in the make-up of the national side: Moneeb Iqbal and Sharif have both featured regularly, while Majid Haq, an off-spinner born in Paisley in the west Lowlands, went past 200 caps before his 32nd birthday. ‘I hope it has helped as we have had some excellent Scottish Asian players coming through the system,’ he said.

A cunning off-spinner with subtle variations, Haq has overcome weight issues – he blamed ‘my love for chocolate and cakes’ – to perform magnificently for Scotland for a decade. The launch of the professional era has lifted his bowling and fitness alike to new heights. Haj did not believe that the Scotland team has always received sufficient backing. ‘The ambition has always been there from the players but not always backed up from the CEO and Board which has been disappointing.’ The implication was clear: for too long Scotland have seemed content to bumble along rather than aggressively target success against full members.

There is now a definite sense that Scotland’s lack of ambition is being addressed. Uncertainties – especially a lack of regular fixtures and a paucity of games against lower-ranked full members – still impede Scottish cricket from seizing its opportunity to become the dominant summer sport. But the onset of professionalism, the building of a new home of cricket in Stirling and World Cup qualification has combined to reinvigorate Scottish cricket.

Scotland already has more players and coaches than Ireland. If the board can match the vision that Ireland have displayed under chief executive Warren Deutrom, Scotland could soon become the next big associate thing.

The Forgotten
Associates

The Netherlands by Peter Miller

CRICKET in the Netherlands has been around for almost as long as the sport itself. The national association was founded in 1883. It is suggested that the sport was introduced into the country during the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries cricket was one of the most popular sports. The same cannot be said today. Cricket is still a sport that has a foothold in the Netherlands, but it isn’t in the top 20 most popular pastimes.

It has a pretty steady playing base, with most agreeing that the number of active cricketers is somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 players. When you consider that, it is remarkable that the Dutch have done so well. They have competed at every ICC Trophy since its inception. In theory, and it will probably remain a theory, they could qualify for Test status if the plans the ICC has mooted about promotion of the top associates become a reality.

So how have the Netherlands been so consistently competitive? How is it that they became and remained the top associate side for so long? More importantly, why have they started to fall back into the chasing pack? At the 2015 World Cup the Dutch won’t be there. Instead the newcomers of Afghanistan, Nepal and Papua New Guinea are starting to catch up and overtake the Netherlands. As a result of failing to finish in the top four of the World Cup qualifier in early 2014 they lost their ODI status.

There has been success in the Twenty20 format; most notably the twin wins over England in the World Twenty20s in 2009 and 2014 and the incredible run chase against Ireland that saw them score 193 in less than 14 overs. Despite this success on a global stage cricket is not gaining recognition or increasing playing numbers. Competition from other sports, a small population of just over 16m and, perversely, its disappearance from terrestrial TV in the UK have all had an impact. Most Dutch households have the BBC, and when the British national broadcaster televised cricket matches there was a chance that you could stumble across a game in the Netherlands. Now cricket has disappeared behind the Rupert Murdoch paywall, that is no longer the case.

Are the Dutch going to become the forgotten associate nation? As money and publicity is poured into cricket in Afghanistan, as the player base in Nepal and Papua New Guinea grows, are the Dutch going to fall further behind the rest of those that are aspiring to full membership of the ICC? Have we seen the peak of Dutch cricket, or is there a chance that once again we will come to see them as one of the best sides outside of the full member clique?

Dutch cricket is a small world. When you start to speak with people involved in cricket in the country it becomes very clear that they all know each other. If you are somebody that goes along to watch Dutch cricket you will have had a beer with the players. It is a community in every sense of the word, and with close-knit communities comes politics. One of those most high-profile events took place at the World Twenty20 in 2014.

Tim Gruijters, a 22-year-old member of the World Twenty20 squad, was all set to take part in the event. The squad had been announced and the details lodged with the tournament organisers. The only way that any amendments could be made would be in the case of injury to one of those in the 15-man squad. Just before the tournament began, news filtered through that Tom Cooper, a Dutch-qualified batsman who is based in Australia, became available. New South Wales were able to release him earlier than planned. The issue was the squad was decided. Cooper, a top-order batsman and off-break bowler, has represented Australia A. There was no doubt that he would have improved the team. Gruijters said there was a plan put in place to get Cooper in the squad. He was the man to make way.

In a YouTube video that he posted just as the Dutch campaign in Bangladesh was commencing, he was unequivocal in his condemnation of how he had been treated. ‘I would have played in the Dutch cricket team had it not been for the fact that the Dutch coaching staff decided to bend the rules, act against the spirit of cricket and basically cheat.’

The plan as described by Gruijters was a simple one. He had a long-standing back problem, something that he had played with for a number of years. In order for the ICC to sign off on any replacement from within the squad it needed to have medical evidence of an injury. Gruijters said he was ‘forced and bullied’ into getting a scan done. It came as no surprise that the scan showed an issue, and the details were sent to the ICC. It signed off on the replacement. Cooper became a full member of the squad and Gruijters was sent home.

The KNCB denied that this was how the incident took place. Instead it say, that it just replaced an injured player with a fit one, a move that the ICC has confirmed as being completely within the rules. Even if you believe Gruijters’s version of events, and it is compelling, you could debate between now and the end of time as to whether the KNCB did anything wrong in looking to improve its side.

The larger issue is the one of homegrown players versus talent that has been brought in from outside the Dutch set-up. The Netherlands actually have more native-born players than many associate nations. Despite this, in the defeat of England in their last game of the World Twenty20 there were just two Dutch-born players in the side, Pieter Seelaar and Ashan Malik.

That is not to say that all the others in the side have no Dutch connection. As ever in the world of modern international sport there are in essence three types of player. There are those who were born in the country, like Seelaar and Malik. There are those who may have been born elsewhere but learned the game in that country, like Wesley Barresi, and to an extent Peter Borren. Then there are the out-and-out imports. That would include Tom Cooper, but also Mickey Swart and Timm van der Gugten, cricketers who have used the Dutch side as a springboard for success.

Captain Peter Borren is aware of this and said he would like to see 11 Dutch-born, or Dutch-produced, cricketers in the playing side. He is quick to point out that where someone is born is less important to him than where they learned their cricket. Borren himself was born and raised in New Zealand, although his family is Dutch. He made it into the New Zealand Under-19 side but he said he doesn’t feel like he had any real coaching while he was in New Zealand. His game only developed after he arrived in the Netherlands at the age of 18. By the time Borren played a List A game in New Zealand, he was doing so as a Dutch overseas player.

This is not the same as someone who merely flies in for international games and then departs again. Borren wants the Netherlands to reach the point where they no longer require those players, but at present they are needed to make his side competitive.

Pieter Seelaar is a Dutch-born player who has been representing the Netherlands for a decade. For him the equation is a simple one: if the player who jets in for the big games gives you something a player in the Netherlands does not, then you pick him. Seelaar wants to win; after all that is what a professional sportsman is supposed to do. That is not to say he is a massive fan of jet-set players, but he understands their worth.

Perhaps the best example of a player who has come into the side from elsewhere and made an impact is Ryan ten Doeschate. Everyone who has been involved in the Dutch side can’t praise him highly enough, and this is despite him not appearing in a full international since the 2011 World Cup.

Ten Doeschate has moved on to bigger and better things but he did his bit.

His record for the Netherlands is remarkable. In List A games for the Dutch he averages 65, in first-class matches for them his average is 142. In 12 first-class innings for the Netherlands he passed 100 on seven occasions. He played two seasons in the Netherlands but for most of the time he was a Dutch international he was plying his trade elsewhere.

Tom Cooper, that man who was inadvertently at the centre of the World Twenty20 controversy, is one of those who came to Dutch cricket late. He didn’t even know playing for the Netherlands was a possibility; he only applied for a Dutch passport because he wanted to travel easily in and out of Europe without visas. He was playing for a club side in Scotland when he got a phonecall.

‘It just so happened that the club I played for in Dundee, the Dutch coach at the time, Peter Drinnen, had played there about ten years prior to me being there,’ Cooper told me. ‘He had stayed in touch with all the hierarchy at the club.

‘I averaged 100 for the season, and somehow the word got to him that I had come in on a Dutch passport. Out of the blue I got a voice message during the night saying, “Have you ever thought of coming over and playing in Holland?” It hadn’t even crossed my mind.’

It wasn’t just a case of turning up and getting a spot in the national team. He was invited over to play a season in the Netherlands and was an immediate success. ‘They didn’t want to just pick me straight into the side, because obviously there is a bit of controversy regarding non-Dutch-born players.’

To avoid any ill feeling Cooper said it was important to get to play in Dutch domestic cricket. ‘I organised with one of the clubs through the KNCB for me to come over and play the season. For me to be there for the year and seeing how that went, with the intention to get into the Dutch set-up.’

The fact remains that most of these overseas internationals give far more than they take from associate cricket. Their talent and experience makes associate nations more successful, and success is important in growing the game. Not only do on-field wins bring more ICC and government funding, they also generate ‘buzz’. Wins bring coverage, coverage brings people to the game. The more people involved in the sport the more chance you have of finding the next Dutch-born superstar. When ten Doeschate orchestrated a win against England at Lord’s it made the national news in the Netherlands. Perhaps that bulletin will encourage a few more kids to give the sport a go.

Players representing a nation that is not the one of their birth is hardly new. It has been a fixture of international cricket for as long as internationals have been played. In the same way, Dutch club cricket has a history of employing overseas pros. One of those was Bajan Nolan Clarke. He was playing first-class cricket for Barbados when he was approached about going to the Netherlands as a coach in 1977. He said his first summer in the role was a nightmare. At that time coaches were not allowed to play, so he sat on the sidelines ‘like a football manager’ unable to pick up a bat or bowl a ball.

He returned for the 1978 season as a player-coach. Dutch cricket at that time was in need of some modernisation. The cricket being played was not of the standard you would see on the club grounds of Barbados, but Clarke said that was as much to do with the players in the West Indies knowing the game. They had grown up immersed in it. The same was not the case in the Netherlands.

In Barbados they ‘played cricket with passion and never sit back’. The cricket in the Netherlands was formulaic. Clarke said there was no attempt to read the game. ‘Bowling changes were made by the number of overs a bowler had bowled, or time. It didn’t matter what the score was or who was batting.’

He tried to change things but there was resistance. He tried to explain that you needed to use the skill of the players that you had available to make the most of the resources that you had. He attempted to instil this approach. He said that this more laid-back way of letting the game unfold is still prevalent in Dutch cricket. It has improved with the addition of overseas players, but for Clarke there is still a way to go before the cricketers at Dutch clubs have the same instinctive feel for tactics that he grew up with in Barbados.

The professionalism that has started to take root at the highest level will certainly help. There are now five centrally contracted Dutch players including Seelaar and Borren. They spend their time running clinics in schools, working with the A side and age group teams. And training. Lots of training. With that level of commitment comes improvement.

However, for Dutch cricket to continue to do well in the ever more competitive world of associate cricket, they need to expand the playing base, especially among Dutch nationals. The KNCB has done a fantastic job finding and integrating players from overseas who have embraced the Dutch set-up. Nurturing Peter Borren from an 18-year-old prospect to a fine cricketer and excellent captain has been a real achievement. Making the most of Ryan ten Doeschate while he was available did plenty to raise the standard of the cricket that the Dutch play, even after he had moved on to the Indian Premier League and all its associated riches.

The longevity of cricket as a sport in the Netherlands is about expanding its footprint among locals. There are more than 20 sports that have a greater level of popularity than cricket. How cricket moves up that list is a difficult question. Most cricket clubs in the Netherlands are also football or hockey clubs. As those seasons get longer the time that cricket can be played gets shorter. It is hard enough to convince players to give up the time needed to play the game without the opportunities to take part becoming less frequent.

One reason for the erosion of cricket from the Dutch public consciousness is that it is a lot harder to watch it. It is not on terrestrial TV. It is not going to be stumbled across while you channel-surf. You would need to watch it through a pirate stream or by having a United Kingdom TV package, something that is also on the wrong side of the law. There are a few Indian or Pakistani channels that might show the odd bit of the sport but it is unlikely that a Dutch subscriber would have access to these channels. If you want to watch cricket you have to go looking for it; it won’t find you.

Overcoming these challenges to get more people from outside the immigrant community and existing cricket families involved in the game is the biggest issue that the KNCB faces. It says its goal is to have the vast majority of players homegrown by 2018. There is work to be done.

At the World Cup qualifier in New Zealand in January of 2014 it all went wrong for the Dutch. They were entered in to the tournament as they failed to finish in the top two in the World Cricket League and therefore needed to compete with other associates for the final two World Cup spots. They were one of the favourites to qualify from this event. They had already made it to the World Twenty20 in a tournament in the UAE just three months earlier, and with the big guns of Ireland and Afghanistan already certain of a place in the World Cup the chance was there for the taking.

The news that World Cup qualification was on the line did not filter through until two matches into the World Cricket League. The ICC hadn’t told the nations that were competing. Peter Borren said that had they known that was the prize, the team they put out in those first two games would have been a lot stronger. As it was they lost both of those matches to Scotland and were playing catch-up for the rest of the tournament. Afghanistan finished just one point ahead of them to seal a trip to Australia and New Zealand. If they had beaten Scotland in both those games they could have got automatic qualification. Instead, the Netherlands were condemned to the qualifying event.

Borren is keen to point out that he doesn’t feel hard done by, and he doesn’t sound like a man who feels the world is against him. Rather, he attempts to give an honest assessment of where things went wrong for his side. Several times he said, ‘I am not trying to make excuses.’ And he isn’t. He feels that his side should have been at the World Cup and he wants to explain why that didn’t happen.

The Netherlands finished fourth in the World Cricket League, level on points and with a higher run rate than the UAE, but the Emirati side finished above them as they had more wins. The Dutch would have finished above the UAE but for a tied game with Ireland where a last-ball six saw them draw level with, but not pass, the opposition. They could have made it, they fell just short.

So to the World Cup qualifier. To make it to the World Cup the Dutch needed to finish in the top two; they needed to be in the top four to keep their ODI status. They failed to do both, a massive blow for all concerned. That this status was taken away by them losing just two matches, and failing to reach the next stage by a run rate difference of just 0.03, made it even harder to take.

The loss of ODI status was described by captain Borren as ‘pretty crucial’. Even having to go to the qualifier was disappointing for Borren. ‘In the end when you have three years of playing pretty consistent cricket and only just miss out on the top two, you then have to go to a tournament where not only is your ODI status riding on it, qualification for the World Cup is riding on it. You lose two games and you are in Division Two of the World Cricket League, I can’t help but feel a little aggrieved about it.’

Again, Borren was clear that he was not trying to make excuses. They should have played better but it is clearly still something that hurts. Many would say the Dutch side is better than the status they now have – and they have a point. The issue is the amount of time it will take them to regain that status. Many of the players in the Dutch set-up could well be at the end of their careers by the time that ODI status has returned to them.

This hierarchy of cricket formats and status is at the heart of the life of associate nations. They are playing at the behest of those who are full members of the ICC. No matter how low the standards of the teams from full member nations fall, they will not lose that status. Bangladesh have lost match after match in the last few years, being defeated by full and associate members alike. They have ODI and Test status in perpetuity. The Dutch have two bad days and they have it taken away from them despite consistently competing throughout the preceding three years.

Sport should be about meritocracy. This is rarely the case with cricket.

‘To have all of that fall apart from under us in one afternoon, I see that as a poor investment from the ICC with the Netherlands being a high performance country,’ Borren said.

Seelaar can’t hide his disappointment when you ask him about it. The first word that he uses is ‘devastating’. He follows that up with saying that things didn’t go their way. That can happen in sport, and just like his captain he is very clear that no one was to blame but themselves. Again the frustration is one of men who have worked hard and come so close, only to see the prize slip away at the very last moment. A slip that caused a catastrophic tumble.

The loss of status was not only one that impacted on fixtures and statistics in the record books. In the four years after you have qualified for a World Cup the ICC gives associate nations a $1m grant. The Dutch are no longer entitled to this.

While in recent years ODIs have been a source of disappointment and frustration, in Twenty20 cricket the Dutch have had some stellar successes. There was the last-ball victory over England at Lord’s at the 2009 World Twenty20, when a Stuart Broad overthrow gave them the win, but perhaps the biggest rollercoaster they had to endure was at the same event in 2014. They finished with yet another success against England but that wasn’t the most remarkable thing they achieved in that tournament.

For the 2014 event, the ICC had made it even harder for associates to reach the biggest stage. Those who had already qualified for the World Twenty20 were expected to qualify again in another round that was jammed on to the beginning of the tournament. In this ‘qualifying round for qualifiers’, the associate nations that had fought hard to get to the tournament then had to re-qualify by facing each other and Zimbabwe and Bangladesh. As ever when the top associates faced the bottom full members it was pretty close. Ireland beat Zimbabwe, Hong Kong defeated Bangladesh, but the fireworks came in the last game of Group B.

Ireland needed a win to get through to the next round. The Netherlands needed to win big to go through due to a poor net run rate. A close win for the Netherlands would see Zimbabwe qualify to the next round. For supporters of associate cricket a poor and undercooked Zimbabwe making it through would be a disaster. Bangladesh had already qualified so if neither of these two teams made it the event became a full member only affair and further ammunition for the anti-expansion lobby. Why bother having qualifiers if none of them make it through to the main event anyway, they would cry.

Ireland batted first, and a flat pitch, some poor bowling and short boundaries saw them motor to 189/4 off their 20 overs. Ashan Malik had managed to keep things tight but other than that all the Dutch bowlers were given some serious tap by the Irish batsmen. It was the end of the Netherlands’ involvement for sure. They would need to chase down 190 off 14.2 overs, a rate of well in excess of 13 runs an over. Even on the flat Sylhet pitch that seemed ludicrous. Thirteen an over is achievable but not for that length of time, and not from the very start of the innings.

What happened next is an excellent allegory of what you can achieve when you have nothing to lose. Self-belief becomes more important the higher you go in sport. Everyone at the top level has talent; they wouldn’t be there without it. It is those who have the most belief in themselves that are able to harness that talent when the pressure is on.

At the halfway stage the feeling in the dressing room was one of disappointment. The Netherlands had not bowled well. Peter Borren, captain that day, was frustrated with the performance his side had put in. ‘I could sit here and say I was full of confidence and really bullish about going out there and chasing those runs. But I was pretty disappointed with the execution with the ball. It really was a case that we had nothing to lose.’

Pieter Seelaar said he was ‘gutted’ as they left the field at the close of the Ireland innings. The plan had been to win the toss, bowl, restrict them to as low a total as possible and see where they ended up. Chasing 140 or 150 was the target they had in mind off 14 overs but 190 was too many to even dream.

They decided to push Borren up to open, a brave move that was the coach’s call. The thinking was that the Irish would open the bowling with two spinners and that would suit the way that Borren plays, especially slog-sweeping over the leg side. It was as he was walking down the steps to open the innings that the talk of winning was brought up. Borren’s opening partner, Stephan Myburgh, told his captain that they were going to win the game. Borren said he didn’t believe it but he knew that his team would go down swinging.

The next 14 overs produced some of the most remarkable cricket that you will ever see. The Dutch were 91/1 off the first six overs. Myburgh reached his half-century off just 17 balls. It was the joint second fastest fifty in Twenty20 internationals. Only Yuvraj Singh’s effort against England, where he hit 36 off a Stuart Broad over, has been faster.

Seelaar was next to Michael Swart in the dressing room and neither of them could quite believe what was happening. They weren’t laughing at Ireland but they couldn’t stop smiling at what they were watching. In the second over of the Dutch innings Myburgh hit Andy McBrine for 25 runs. Seelaar mentioned he was joking about it with Swart. ‘Imagine we do this for 13 more overs,’ they said to each other.

‘After the Powerplay you start to think, “Wow, could we?”’ Seelaar said. ‘But we still needed to go for eight overs at 12 an over. It is just sort of ridiculous. But the moment I knew we were actually going to do it, where I started believing it was going to happen, was when Cooper hit Dockrell for four sixes in the 11th over. It was the sense of belief from the guys that we could do it.’ It could have been different. Cooper was dropped by Ed Joyce when he had scored just one run. For this to happen, everything had to go the Netherlands’ way.

Anton Roux, the coach, made it clear that he didn’t want to hear any negativity. They were going to go hard and go for qualification. Just getting a consolation win against the Irish was not good enough. Seelaar admitted it was not some big speech, the time between innings in a Twenty20 is short, but Roux made it clear that he wanted everyone ready to bat, both mentally and in terms of having their pads on.

They won the game and qualified for the main event with three balls to spare. The scene as the not-out batsmen, Wesley Barresi and Ben Cooper, were swamped by their team-mates was of pure joy. This was as close as cricket gets to a side doing the impossible. To do what the Dutch did with so much riding on it, to have the belief that they could even attempt it, was one of the defining moments of any World Twenty20. If those running the game have their way, teams like the Netherlands could be banished from further global events. The game would be poorer for that, spiritually if not financially.

The Irish team felt like they were just observers watching something that they didn’t have control over. Tim Murtagh, the man off whom the winning runs were hit, said he has tried not to even think about it. It was just one of those things. ‘I’ve tried to scrub that from my mind completely. I just remember the ball flying everywhere. They got off to such a good start I was struggling to see how we were going to claw back in. It was one of those days when everything they tried came off.’

For the Irish captain, William Porterfield, the fact that the Dutch had to achieve their target in 14 overs made the difference. Having to go hard from ball one meant that they didn’t have to build up to the target by setting a base. They had absolute freedom, which gave them a chance to achieve the near impossible. ‘They came out there and struck the ball very cleanly. The fact that it happened in 14 overs hurts, but it was a flat wicket and a small ground. If you gave them 20 overs to chase it, it might have been a different story. They just came out with a few lads who strike the ball very well and they did that.’

When the main draw came the performance of the team was tinged with disappointment. Yes they beat a hapless England, and they defeated them comprehensively. However the games against Sri Lanka and South Africa were heartbreaking. Against Sri Lanka they were bowled out for 39, and in the aftermath the overriding sentiment from Borren and his side was one of embarrassment and a feeling that they had let the other associates down. Those who are happy to see cricket remain a cabal were able to say that this performance was the reason to keep the game a closed shop.

For Borren and his team the frustration was that they lost so many wickets to the seamers first up. There is nothing in the bowling of Angelo Mathews and Nuwan Kulasekara that the Dutch players had not seen before. Despite this they were four wickets down for just nine runs. This left the middle and lower order exposed against the spin of Ajantha Mendis and the sling of Lasith Malinga. The rest of the innings was a sad procession of wickets as the Netherlands recorded the lowest total in Twenty20 internationals, all out for 39.

Despite this embarrassment, this is not the result that upsets those that were part of the squad. That real regret is reserved for the game against South Africa where the team were in a position to win comfortably and then threw it away. That hurts a lot more than losing a game that you were never close to competing in from the very beginning.

Against the South Africans the Dutch needed less than five an over at the halfway stage of their innings with the experienced pair of Borren and Tom Cooper at the crease. Here, self-belief was the enemy of the Dutch just as it had been their friend against Ireland. South Africa’s Dale Steyn seems capable of winning games of cricket just through strength of will, and this game was no different, but it was the leg spin of Imran Tahir that did the most damage. The game should have been won.

Borren sees the Sri Lanka game as an ‘anomaly’. ‘These things can happen, and it happened, and on that day we were really very poor. For me I didn’t even think about the Sri Lanka game after that evening. The next day it was gone. I didn’t think about being embarrassed, well only very briefly on that evening. But that South African game I will never forget.’

Being beaten is part of sport, and something that all those that have played any sport at any level are used to. The losses that really hurt are the games that should have been won. The Netherlands were not outplayed by South Africa. They lost the game; the South Africans didn’t win it.

‘It doesn’t even matter that we beat England, it was nice, but we obviously should have won two of those games,’ Borren said. ‘Even in the New Zealand game we had them in a bit of strife and we could have won that game too. If it wasn’t for Brendon McCullum we would have, and he admitted that too. To play that kind of cricket after the Sri Lankan game was pretty awesome. But to lose seven for 50 in ten overs against South Africa, and also the nature of the dismissals, that South Africa game was probably my most disappointing day in a Dutch shirt.’

The last game was against England, and the Dutch side were confident of beating them again, just as they had at Lord’s five years earlier. While the win at Lord’s was a massive surprise for most spectators, the Dutch were much more confident for the game in Chittagong. The English were on the back of a horror winter. They had been humiliated in the Ashes and the limited-overs games that followed. There were a few new faces, but there was uncertainty over the future of Ashley Giles as coach and the side was a mix of inexperience and those jaded by Australian failure.

Despite those challenges England had actually performed reasonably well leading up to the Dutch game. They were hampered by rain when well placed to challenge New Zealand. They lost that game by the Duckworth Lewis method. They beat Sri Lanka thanks to an Alex Hales century. Against South Africa it was a close defeat. England lost by just three runs while trying to chase 197 for victory.

England were already out of the tournament by the time they faced the Netherlands in their last group game, but no one would have made the associates favourites. England were still the big boys in this contest. The Dutch didn’t see it that way.

They batted first and set 134 for England to win. Borren was not happy with this at the innings break. He felt that they had not pushed on in the death overs as they should have done. In hindsight he said they had an above par score. The pitch was tired, as was shown in the Sri Lanka v New Zealand match that immediately followed this match. In that match Sri Lanka set New Zealand 120 to win and bowled them out for 60. To see a full member side struggle as they had against the Sri Lankan bowlers must have pleased the Dutch, although it would be unlikely for any of them to ever admit it.

Looking back, he thought they would have to bowl well to win. Borren, ever the perfectionist, isn’t convinced that they did. They could have executed their plans even better. Watching from the outside, they seemed to get things spot on. They bowled England out for 88 with Mudassar Bukhari and Logan van Beek the stars as they picked up three wickets each. The point where there was no way back for England was the wicket of Ravi Bopara as he departed to leave his side 74/7 with only the bowlers left to come.

Van Beek was the bowler, Seelaar the catcher. For Seelaar the time that his side had playing county cricket helped playing England. These players weren’t unknown to them; the Dutch had played against England and done well against them before. There were no mysteries; they were not overawed or star-struck by the England players.

This was a clinical performance that saw them sweep aside a full member nation. England will no doubt have been disappointed with how they played, but the Netherlands were worthy winners. The most striking part of discussing this match with the players involved is that they seemed underwhelmed by this win. They won against England, but the real focus is the games that they should have won but didn’t. England was a consolation victory. This tells you a lot about the belief that Borren and his side have in themselves.

Dutch cricket has a long association with the English county game, not least from cricketers who have played for county sides. Fast bowler Andre van Troost was a Somerset stalwart throughout the 1990s. Roland Lefebvre also played for Somerset before moving to Glamorgan and playing a leading role in their victorious Sunday League campaign in 1993. In 1995, the Netherlands national team were playing in the one-day cricket knockout competition. They competed every year up until it went from straight knockout to a league format in 2006, although they were already knocked out of the 2003 event in 2002 qualifiers.

A Gentlemen of the Netherlands side toured England a few times at the turn of the 20th century, with an MCC side returning the favour in 1902. Despite that, cricket in the Netherlands remained very much a local sport. There were a few players who did make some waves in England, J.E. Rincker, Carst Posthuma and Henri van Booven among them, but it wasn’t until after the Second World War that cricket spread out from the elite that played the game in its beginnings.

After the war, an influx of immigrants from former British colonies saw people bring a love of the game with them and that opened things up to a wider range of people in the Dutch clubs. It seems that this was welcomed by most, even though it changed the make-up of the clubs. Having more cricketers was good for the game but those new cricketers didn’t venture overseas to play. It wasn’t until Paul-Jan Bakker got a deal with Hampshire that a Dutchman played county cricket as a professional. He was joined by Roland Lefebvre and Andre van Troost when they started playing for Somerset in the 1990s, but these Netherlands players in county cricket are few and far between.

Bakker had a successful career with Hampshire as a bowler, playing for the county for six seasons. Lefebvre made his first-class bow for Somerset against Oxford University in 1990. Van Troost joined him at the West Country side a year later, making his first appearance against a Surrey team that featured a young Waqar Younis and an even younger Graham Thorpe.

Van Troost turned out for Somerset for seven seasons, mostly in first-class cricket. By the mid-1990s Lefebvre had been forced to retire from county cricket due to injury, but alongside Bakker he was a member of the first side from the Netherlands to compete at a Cricket World Cup.

Even now, Lefebvre talks in excited terms about getting to play cricket for a living. It was his dream. As a youngster he used to drive into Rotterdam with packed lunches and deckchairs to watch Test cricket on a big screen outside a news agency. It was his passion, it was his hobby and it became his job. ‘I had posters of Viv Richards, Graham Gooch and David Gower on my bedroom wall,’ he recalled.

The chance to join Somerset first came about thanks to an appearance against England A, where his Dutch team beat a strong England side that included Nasser Hussain, Alec Stewart and fatefully, Peter Roebuck. It was Roebuck who first discussed the possibility of Lefebvre getting a gig at Somerset and that set the wheels in motion. He was a mainstay of the Somerset team the next season.

The highlight for Lefebvre came in 1993 with Glamorgan. ‘I was probably the missing link in that Glamorgan side. At the same time I was playing with Viv Richards in his last year in professional cricket. He is just the most amazing person I have played with. The inspiration, the aura, the energy he exudes was just amazing. It is something that I will never forget in my lifetime.’

Lefebvre is now involved in Dutch player development and van Troost was briefly the CEO of the KNCB until he decided cricket administration was not for him. Bakker was the coach of the Dutch team, albeit briefly, in 2007. These men were the trailblazers who helped turn Netherlands cricket into a force on the international stage. All of them played a part in getting them to the World Cup in 1996.

Since then some Dutch players have turned out in county cricket, but not as many as those from Ireland and Scotland. Ryan ten Doeschate was playing county cricket before he played for the Netherlands, having been an Essex regular for over a decade. Bas Zuiderent was at Sussex from 1999 to 2003. Dirk Nannes has had various county stints, though not all would consider him Dutch. In recent times it is only Alexei Kervezee, who plays for Worcestershire, but no current members of the Dutch national squad have a county contract.

This is something that Borren would like to see change. ‘[Playing county cricket] has never been anything for me, but for some Dutch players it should be something they do in the future. It is a healthy thing for Dutch cricket. There is a young guy called Viv Kingma who could be a sensational bowler who swings the new ball at 140kph. He is an incredible talent, not just by Dutch standards but by any standards. It is a good pathway, and playing in England can help us develop our players.’

As is often the case with county cricket, there was a decision to revamp the one-day competition for the 2010 season. The 18 first-class counties were to take part along with a Minor Counties composite team called the Unicorns. Scotland and Ireland were also invited to participate. Ireland declined, deciding that they were better served by trying to play more international games than being ‘the 19th county’. The Netherlands were asked if they would take Ireland’s place and they readily agreed. The competition lasted for four seasons before the inevitable reshuffling of the county fixture list saw the involvement of these additional teams brought to an end.

The first season was a tough one for the Dutch; they won just the one match, against Derbyshire. The next two seasons were more positive. In 2012 the Dutch were in contention for a semi-final spot for most of the competition. They won five of their first seven games and spent much of the group stage at the top of the table. They weren’t there to make up the numbers.

Seelaar found taking part in the tournament a positive experience. ‘I thought it was a really good thing for us. It was a massive disappointment to be out of that tournament when the schedule was restructured. We were competing. Not to point the finger or to be unkind, but if you look at the results Scotland got they only won two or three games. Whereas we were contending for top spot in 2012.’

The exposure to county cricket helped when it came to playing England in the World Twenty20. So much of elite sport is about belief. If you can clear your mind of the fear of failure and have faith that you deserve to be playing at that level you have gone a long way to winning. After that it is just a case of doing what you have done thousands upon thousands of times in practice. When the Netherlands walked out to bat against England in Bangladesh at an ICC world event, none of the players on the opposition overawed them. They had played them, and beaten them, before.

‘By the third year we were thinking to ourselves, “These are just average county players”,’ Seelaar said. ‘Every time we played them it was their overseas star that was getting the runs. We didn’t feel like we were worse than them.’

For Borren, playing regular cricket was the part that he liked most. ‘As a Dutch team we are pretty used to going on tour, and we are pretty used to playing tournaments, but to have regular games throughout the summer at Test grounds and on good surfaces, week in week out was really good for our development as a side.’

As with all things where a full member and an associate are involved, the arrangement only lasted as long as it suited the English cricketing authorities. Once it was decided to move to a 50-over competition that was split into two groups, the Dutch were dropped like a holiday romance. It could be that we see the Netherlands playing in county cricket again, but we may have to wait a while.

To become a cricketer in Europe having not come from a family with links to the sport is a matter of happenstance and commitment. It is something that you have to make a real commitment to from an early age. Playing cricket in a country where it is on TV, where you play it at school, where it is an established and mainstream sport. Those things are easy. Deciding that cricket is to be your game when most of your school friends will not have a clue about it, is a brave decision. Not one for the faint-hearted, we will never know how many promising cricketers have turned their backs on the game because it meant spending less time with their friends for something few understand.

One of the first to make an impact in domestic cricket having learnt the game in mainland Europe was Ole ‘Stan’ Mortensen. A Danish tax inspector in training when he was first spotted by an English county, he discovered cricket by accident. The teenage Mortensen was walking past a field one day when he saw a sport he had never come across before. There were men wearing white clothes chasing a red ball around. He sat on a bench and watched for a while, trying to work out what was going on. Eventually one of the players asked him if he was interested in playing.

A talented natural sportsman who wanted to be active all the time, Mortensen agreed readily to coming back at the weekend to learn more about this weird game. He came to the ground fresh from playing in a football match and keen to find out more. No sooner had he arrived than he was being asked to play. He had never held a cricket bat, cricket ball or even fully understood the rules. He batted at 11 and top-scored. He was hooked. His immediate success gave him ‘real motivation to learn – it kick-started my career’.

For Seelaar, his introduction to the game was similar but less down to happenstance. Many football clubs in the Netherlands also play cricket. While the cricket section is smaller, many clubs run cricket sessions for the youngsters playing football to introduce them to the game. With cricket not being part of the school curriculum, this is often the first introduction to the game that a Dutch youngster has. Seelaar said for the most part, people in the Netherlands don’t know it is a sport or that it is played by the Dutch. You need to be led to it; it won’t find you.

‘Once you are in love with cricket,’ Seelaar reflected, ‘there is no way back. It has got you.’ But without the sport being widely played in schools the chances of that happening to a young person in the Netherlands are remote. It was clear to the coaches that Seelaar had a natural ability for cricket and they were quick to take him to one side and ask him to play the game more often. That push towards the game was all that was needed to get him more involved and he had the bug.

That is not to say that being a cricket-playing youngster was easy. Seelaar admits that by the time he was a teenager he nearly walked away from the game. His friends would refer to cricket as a ‘geek sport’, and as the teenage instincts to fit in and impress became all the more important to him he seriously considered packing it in.

This is a problem not just in associate countries, but elsewhere. Cricket isn’t a sport that is all over by 12noon on a weekend, leaving you free to meet friends, male or female. Cricket requires sacrifice in terms of time. The chances are you will be gone for the whole day and that means seeing less of your friends than you would like. The old stagers of your cricket club who smell of sweat and Deep Heat are not as appealing as a pretty young thing who wants to go to the cinema with you.

One of the aspects of associate cricket that is most obvious when you speak to the players is the sacrifices that they needed to make to play the game. It isn’t an easy choice to play cricket. Whereas in full member countries there is a career path that is well-trodden and clearly marked, in associate nations cricket is not a career choice. It is only in the last few years that the KNCB has been able to offer professional contracts to players, but even then only five players made the cut. When you think that the UK has around 400 county players and many more people who are paid to turn out for club sides, it shows you the divide that exists.

If you decide that you are going to make international cricket your hobby, you will need an understanding family, partner and employer. There will be late-night training sessions after a full day’s work. There will be times when you are paying out of your own pocket for equipment, travel and accommodation. There will be annual leave that is used for travelling to play cricket and family celebrations missed to represent your country.

Any sportsman who makes it to international level will have made countless sacrifices; those in associate cricket nations like the Netherlands have done so with virtually no chance of financial reward and worldwide fame.

The challenge for the KNCB is to grow its player base. All those involved are aware of this and know the obstacles that it faces for this to happen. There is no cricket in schools apart from the odd ‘taster’ session and club cricket is losing playing time to football and hockey. Young cricketers are being tempted away by other sports that take less time to play and cost less money for their parents.

Roland Lefebvre said that in his role as high performance manager at the KNCB he hasn’t seen ‘athletes’ coming through the age-group programmes. Those boys and girls are taking part in other sports. The question for the KNCB is how it makes cricket an attractive option as a young person’s summer sport. By 2018 it wants 80 per cent of the team to be players who learnt the game in the Netherlands. That is a target it will have to move mountains to achieve.

On-field success is one of the ways that you draw people into the sport and by getting in ‘hired guns’, as Peter Borren has described them, is one way that you can do that. However, that is a short-term solution that doesn’t address the real issue – playing numbers. With so few people taking part in the game, the other associates that are coming up on the inside of the Dutch will fly ahead and disappear out of sight.

Dutch cricket is run by good people but if they want to stay as one of the big boys outside of the mainstream, or even still challenge to get inside the club, they need to make the game a mainstream choice for Dutch kids. For Borren, Test status has no interest for him. They don’t play four-day cricket in the Netherlands and the chances are they never will. He wants his side to get permanent ODI status and regular high-class opponents to play against.

There is no reason why cricket cannot do this. There is constant harping about ‘preserving records’ as if that is what the sport is for. As if cricket is about filling up dusty yellow books with numbers so that they can be brought down once in a while and looked at. In other sports there are no such fears. Football is no worse off with the leading international goalscorer being Ali Daei of Iran. Rugby still has context with Daisuke Ohata of Japan as its leading international try-scorer.

Cricket is so much more than that. It is a sport that you can truly fall in love with, and with every passing year, you learn more about it and yourself. We should want to spread that joy, not tell ourselves that other countries are not worthy of it. Don Bradman played against weak sides, so did Garry Sobers, Brian Lara, Shane Warne and Sachin Tendulkar. To suggest that by keeping the footprint of cricket as small as possible helps the sport is blinkered and illogical. Look at what the Dutch have done with virtually no money and some 5,000 players. Think what they could do with some extra cash and 10,000 players, or 20,000. Open the door, let them in, fund them, and watch the sport we love grow.

Kenya by Tim Wigmore

PRIVATE security companies in Nairobi employ over 100,000 people. Tranquillity is hard to come by in Kenya’s capital but the Gymkhana Club, a ten-minute drive north of the city centre – notorious traffic permitting – provides it. It is a private members’ club opened by a former British Governor of Kenya that has all the features of exclusive establishments the world over: swanky restaurants, tennis courts, a swimming pool, a snooker room and much more.

Encircled by jacaranda trees, the Gymkhana Club Ground is a magnificent setting for cricket and has staged games for over a century. Yet it has not hosted an international match since 2010. For one glorious day, on 24 February 2003, the Gymkhana Club Ground was the fulcrum of the cricketing world. Kenya were hosting their first game in the Cricket World Cup, against Sri Lanka. ‘Just the fact that Sri Lanka were playing us at home was a big, big thing for us and the cricket fraternity,’ captain Steve Tikolo reflected. ‘Imagine a World Cup match being played in your own backyard.’

Although the game was played on a Monday, it was a sell-out: supporters were turned away even before the match began. It was quite a sight for the press corps to enjoy in the plush media centre. Along with new stands, the media centre was built in time for the new century: a symbol of Kenya’s advance into the cricketing elite. It had everything a journalist could wish for: even an open bar, thanks to East Africa Breweries’ sponsorship.

Dry and sweltering, it was a typical Nairobi day in February. But it did not seem as if it would be marked by a Kenyan victory. Although Kennedy Obuya batted with gusto, going down on one knee and smiting Sri Lanka’s opening bowler Chaminda Vaas for six over midwicket en route to 60, Kenya stumbled against Muttiah Muralitharan. He took 4-28 and Kenya reached 210/9. It did not seem like a score likely to test Sri Lanka’s powerful batting line-up, but Kenya retained a quiet confidence. ‘Knowing the ground so well, when we set 210 we knew we could defend it,’ remembered Collins Obuya, Kennedy’s brother and team-mate. ‘The pressure was on the bowlers to step up – as a team we knew what the nation expected from us. We could not settle for anything less than a win.’

As they reached 71/2, Sri Lanka appeared to be cruising towards victory. While Kenya did not have Muralitharan, they did have a 21-year-old leg-spinner. After Shane Warne was sent home from the World Cup for failing a drugs test, Collins Obuya became the tournament’s leg-spinning star. His bowling would later disintegrate, but for a day he bewitched Sri Lanka. Unusually tall for a spinner, Obuya made up for a lack of prodigious turn by getting the ball to grip and bounce off the surface. He also varied his pace: it was a quicker ball that snared Aravinda de Silva, the only Sri Lankan to look in command. By the time de Silva was dismissed, Sri Lanka had slid to 112/6. They subsided meekly thereafter.

In ten unchanged overs, Obuya took 5-24. ‘That was magical bowling, to beat the masters at their own game. Everybody knows that Sri Lanka facing spin was bread and butter for them,’ Obuya’s team-mate Maurice Odumbe told me. ‘It was nice to see a young African lad bowling leg spin just like Shane Warne. I don’t think I’ve seen any leg-spinner outside the Test-playing countries bowling like that.’

Obuya bowled so well that the victory lacked a dramatic denouement. Sri Lanka lost by 53 runs. In front of an official capacity attendance of over 8,000 – though plenty more seemed to be crammed in, including future captain Rakep Patel, who had skipped school – Kenya’s players did a lap of honour at a pace that would not have shamed the nation’s marathon runners. World Cup fever was spreading. ‘During that month and the two months afterwards everybody was talking cricket. If you walked down the street everyone would salute you,’ Tikolo remembered.

In the aftermath of the victory, Tikolo was asked who his Kenya side would overturn next. The answer came in their very next match. Kenya beat Bangladesh by 32 runs to secure their qualification for the Super Six stage.

The first recorded match in Kenya took place in Mombasa in 1896, between a local team and the crew of HMS Sparrow. Cricket was strongest in Nairobi, the capital and the heart of the British colonial administration. It thrived in elite private members’ clubs whose members did not even try to maintain the pretense that they wanted to play locals.

The two highlights of the summer – the Asian XI v European XI fixture which was played from 1933; and the Officials v Settlers fixture, which began in 1910 – reflected this underlying truth. It was only in the 1950s that the running of the game became non-racial although, in practice, this merely meant that those of Asian and European background ran it together rather than in two parallel organisations. ‘Cricket was a non-sport in the black community,’ said Tikolo, who was born in Nairobi in 1971. ‘When we were growing up cricket was a sport for the elites – it was mainly played by the whites and Asians.’

After Kenya gained independence in 1963, the sport slowly became Africanised. In 1976, Kenneth Odhiambo Odumbe became the first black African to play for Kenya. Four of his brothers would later represent the national team too.

For black Africans, cricket was not just a sport but an escape route. The Odumbe family was raised on an estate for government employees in Nairobi and lived next to the Sir Ali Muslim Club. Out of curiosity, they started to go and watch matches there, and to play themselves. The Odumbes used a plank of wood as a bat and maize coir as a ball. They used dustbins as wicket and played in between the streets of the estates. They practised on the boundary edge during games, and worked as ball boys.

The Odumbe brothers got the chance to train and play for the club. Soon, the Sir Ali Muslim Club agreed to pay for their school fees. The story of the Tikolo family, who contributed three players to Kenya, including two captains (Tom and Steve), is almost identical. They also grew up near the Sir Ali Muslim Club, where they watched matches with the Odumbes. The only significant difference was that a benefactor from the Swamibapa Cricket Club spotted the Tikolos, and signed them to play there.

Asian benefactors helped cricket gain a foothold in Kenya in other ways. During the 1980s, Indian Test players including Sanjay Manjrekar, Kiran More and Sandeep Patil all played for clubs in Nairobi. The significant Kenyan-Asian community attended in considerable numbers; crowds of several thousand were typical. For young Kenyan players, it ensured a high calibre of cricket, the opportunity to learn from Test players, and a decent grounding for international matches.

‘The really good Kenyan players suddenly raised their games and were able to compete,’ David Waters, who has been involved in Kenyan cricket for over 30 years including as chairman of selectors, told me. ‘Instead of being overawed by these international stars, we were playing with them week in and week out – and it was that that gave us the springboard to do well in those World Cups. They transformed our game.’

Collins Obuya is just one case in point. ‘Every time there was a match I would go to the ground and help players carry their kits and I would learn a few things.’ He attributes learning to bowl to working with the former Indian Test bowler Balwinder Singh Sandhu.

Yet Kenya did not appear in the first five Cricket World Cups and did not even join the ICC until 1981. Before that, Kenya had been absorbed, along with Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia, under the umbrella side East Africa. Kenyan players dominated the side that qualified for the 1975 World Cup, but they had been unceremoniously thrashed in all three games.

In 1994, Kenya hosted the ICC Trophy, which would decide which three associates would qualify for the newly expanded 12-team World Cup. It was an opportunity the players were too good to miss. A squad dominated by the Tikolo and Odumbe families, who each provided three brothers, won eight consecutive games to qualify, although they then lost to the UAE in the final. It meant that, in 1996, Kenya headed to their first World Cup.

There, they provided a hint of the mayhem they were to inflict upon the 2003 World Cup. For all except Steve Tikolo, who played for the South African first-class side Border in the winter of 1995/96 – having resigned his courier job to take up the chance – training before the tournament was limited to weekends and evenings after work. When the players requested white balls to train with before the tournament, the board could only afford to give them red balls painted white. During the World Cup, they were paid only a $10 a day allowance.

This made Kenya’s game against the West Indies all the more remarkable. ‘We were playing against our heroes,’ Steve Tikolo remembered. ‘A month earlier we were just idolising them on TV. You couldn’t believe it that you were actually facing Courtney Walsh, Ian Bishop and Curtly Ambrose.’

And Tikolo was not to be overawed: he flicked Walsh for six over midwicket, a shot brimming with wristy chutzpah. His 29 was Kenya’s top score. Their 166 did not seem like much of a competitive target. But both Caribbean openers fell to the new ball and Brian Lara nicked his 11th ball behind.

Still, no one really expected wicketkeeper Tariq Iqbal to claim it: he had already dropped a catch and conceded four byes through his legs. He was a ridiculous sight with his spectacles, blue headband and permanently furrowed brow after rudimentary blunders. Yet somehow he clung on to the ball between his legs. After Lara was dismissed, the West Indies subsided: all out for 93. It was the last of Iqbal’s three ODIs.

The day was especially memorable for the captain Maurice Odumbe, who took 3-15 with his off spin. Two years earlier he had asked Lara for his autograph after a Warwickshire game in Swansea, where Odumbe was playing for a club. Lara had declined. Odumbe now went up to him in the changing room after the game and handed him his autograph. ‘I asked for your autograph and you wouldn’t give it. Now I am saying you can have mine.’ Most of Odumbe’s team-mates were more respectful, preferring to have their photographs taken with Lara and the rest of the West Indies side.

Other international stars would soon become familiar with Kenya too. Although they lacked Test status, leading nations were not reluctant to tour Kenya; a few months after the 1996 World Cup, Pakistan, South Africa and Sri Lanka played against Kenya in a quadrangular ODI tournament in Nairobi. In 1998, the national squad became professional and developed a fixture list that would be the envy of leading associates like Afghanistan and Ireland today. Kenya defeated India in two ODIs.

For Canada, Namibia and the Netherlands, the other three associate nations at the 2003 World Cup, a chasm existed between the Test sides and their own amateur set-ups. This was not the case for Kenya: while cricket was a minority sport in the country, the top international sides were familiar opponents. This regular exposure underpinned Kenya’s success in 2003. ‘Those matches really helped our games,’ explained Tikolo. ‘The effect showed in how we performed in the World Cup. By 2003 we had become a very good team.’

At the start of every Cricket World Cup there is a familiar ritual. Journalists who have never seen, or even followed, the game outside Test nations are forced to take an interest. Rather than discuss the teams on their own merit, there is only one issue deemed worthy of debate: whether the associates should be allowed to compete on the world stage at all. It is indicative of the insularity that still afflicts world cricket.

Despite their steady performances before the 2003 World Cup, which included two victories against India, some still considered Kenya a tedious distraction from the real spectacle of watching the top teams playing against each other. ‘When we got to South Africa, there were questions from journalists about whether we had come to make up the numbers,’ Tikolo remembered. ‘I bluntly told them we were here to compete. That is how confident I was with my players.’

For all the ebullience of Kenya’s victory over Sri Lanka at Nairobi, the ground hosted an equally significant game three days earlier. It was significant because it did not happen. Owing to security fears, New Zealand refused to play. Kenya were awarded a walkover win and t-shirts were printed mocking New Zealand’s fear before the game against Sri Lanka. Points from the New Zealand ‘victory’ would prove very handy in the Super Six stage as both Test teams Kenya secured points against – New Zealand and Sri Lanka – progressed to the next stage, meaning Kenya carried forward the points gained from these wins.

Kenya needed to win only one of their three games in the Super Six stage to reach the semi-finals. They gave India a fright in Cape Town but 12 March was the day that Kenya had been waiting for. They faced Zimbabwe, who had not defeated any Test side and only owed their place in the second stage to a walkover against England and a rained-off game against Pakistan. It represented an extraordinary opportunity for Kenya to reach the semi-finals, though Zimbabwe were still justifiable favourites: they had beaten Kenya in all 12 completed ODIs between the sides.

In Bloemfontein, Kenya ended the sequence in the World Cup – and how. Theirs was a ruthless victory: after an immaculate spell of new-ball bowling from Martin Suji, Zimbabwe were bundled out for 133. Kenya reached their target for the loss of only three wickets – and with 24 overs in hand. They had beaten three Test sides in the World Cup; Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe were all beaten comprehensively. ‘Today is the biggest day in every Kenyan’s life,’ Tikolo asserted after the victory over Zimbabwe.

Intoxicating as these wins were, the indelible memory of Kenya’s World Cup was their defeat to Australia – and the spellbinding bowling of Aasif Karim.

Before the 1990 football World Cup, Roger Milla was playing out his career at Réunion when he received a phonecall from Cameroon’s president urging him to come out of international retirement. He went on to score four goals in Cameroon’s run to the World Cup quarter-finals. Karim is perhaps the closest that cricket has ever come to an equivalent.

After captaining Kenya in their disappointing 1999 World Cup campaign, Karim announced his retirement from cricket. For the previous 19 years he had played for Kenya alongside his business career. He even played for the Kenyan tennis side in the Davis Cup. Into his 40th year, Karim’s time as an international cricketer was four years behind him. Then a few months before the 2003 World Cup the board asked him to return. ‘There was a lot of acrimony and problems to be sorted.’ It proved a harbinger of the strife to come for Kenyan cricket.

His comeback did not begin well. After a wait of 1,354 days, Karim was selected for Kenya’s World Cup opener against South Africa. His two overs were thrashed for 17. He was unceremoniously dumped.

Kenya’s progress to the Super Six stage gave Karim the chance to end his career on a more triumphant note. Recalled after a month, his nine overs against Zimbabwe went for only 20 runs. Three days later, he faced Australia in Durban. There is a good case to be made for the Australian side in the 2003 World Cup being the finest in ODI history. They would win all 11 of their games in the tournament. But for 48 glorious deliveries, Karim reduced Australia to a quivering wreck.

After restricting Kenya to 174/8, Australia were hurtling towards their target. They had reached 109/2 from 15 overs when Karim was handed the ball. Ricky Ponting was on strike. It did not seem like a fair contest, but Karim thought rather differently. ‘With my second ball I saw that there was turn on the wicket and that he was a little bit shaky.’

A classic left-arm spinner’s delivery gripped and bounced, and kissed the edge of Ponting’s bat. A sharp chance was put down by slip, diving to his left. Karim was not to be deterred. ‘I kept putting the pressure on him and every ball he was struggling.’ With his fifth delivery, Karim bowled a faster arm ball that went straight on. It thudded into Ponting’s back leg before he had time to get his bat down: plumb lbw.

So began one of the most enchanting spells in the history of the game. After Karim had fizzed a ball sharply into the left-hander Darren Lehmann in his second over, commentator Barry Richards sensed what was about to happen. ‘He’s got a slip in place for the one that goes on with the arm,’ Richards said on air. ‘You bowl one that really turns a lot and surprises the batsman. The next one goes on with the arm, he looks for the turn and nicks it to slip.’

Richards was wrong. Lehmann didn’t nick Karim’s next ball to slip. He edged it to the wicketkeeper instead, deceived by a delivery straight across him from over the wicket. Three balls later a slower delivery swindled Brad Hogg, who was too early on the ball and got a leading edge back to Karim, who dived to snare the chance with an agility the envy of 39-year-olds the world over. His figures read 2-2-0-3. No more wickets followed but he continued to vary his flight, pace and turn with mastery: after eight overs he had only conceded two runs.

Kenya were still defeated, by five wickets, but Karim’s performance was established as one of the most remarkable in the history of the World Cup. ‘After the game I must have done at least 50 interviews from CNN to Sky to all the Indian channels. I think any cricketer would dream of my performance against Australia. It came from nowhere. That is something that I treasure every day including today. Whenever it comes up there is a smile.’ So keen is Karim to remember it that he personally uploaded his entire spell on to YouTube. Few better examples of the guile and skill of orthodox spin can exist.

The World Cup semi-final was billed as Karim v India. After Kenya’s defeat Karim retired, this time for good. He and his team-mates were greeted by President Kibaki when they returned to Kenya, believing that their opportunity to play Test cricket was imminent. After their semi-final defeat to India, Michael Holding told Tikolo that the ICC had earmarked Kenya as the next Test-playing country.

The notion was not a new one. In the 1990s, the International Cricket Council belatedly recognised the need for cricket to become a more inclusive sport. South Africa were readmitted to Test cricket while Zimbabwe were granted Test status in 1992. More controversially, Bangladesh were awarded Test status in 2000.

This justifiably irked Kenya. On playing performance, Kenya would have been more deserving. ‘It was very frustrating,’ Tikolo reflected. ‘Kenya were playing better cricket than Bangladesh.’

Indeed, after beating Bangladesh in the 2003 World Cup, Kenya had won six of the seven ODIs between the sides. The explanation that one member of the Kenyan board got when they made the case to an ICC official was, ‘You do not have 100 million people.’ It says much about cricket’s attitude to expansionism. Yet the feeling was not that Bangladesh were granted Test status instead of Kenya but that, in time, both sides would have it. After all, when Bangladesh were formally awarded full member status, it was after a unanimous decision from the ICC Annual General Meeting at Lord’s.

On 17 October 2000, Kenya applied for Test status. Their case was proposed by the West Indies and seconded by Zimbabwe: in theory, Kenya just had to meet ICC criteria and pass inspections before being admitted as a full member.

Two days earlier, Nairobi hosted the final of the ICC Knockout Trophy. The tournament featured all ten full members as well as the hosts: an indication that Kenya were on the verge of being admitted into cricket’s most exclusive club. ‘The tournament has come and gone, leaving Kenyans with fond memories of a world-class event at their doorstep,’ wrote an editorial in the East African Standard. ‘This was the start of a positing journey, that could see Kenya given much bigger events to host before finally taking her place among Test nations.’

But the success of the era was built on unstable foundations. For the Kenyan Cricket Association, the 2000 ICC Knockout Trophy and 2003 World Cup were chances to show off the national side to the world – as was needed if Kenya were going to earn Test status. ‘They were showcases,’ reflected the future chairperson of Cricket Kenya, Jackie Janmohamed. ‘It was very, very important for the world to notice us. And therefore everything had been invested in the players.’ Future generations were forgotten. ‘From 1994 to the 2003 World Cup it was the same core of players,’ Karim explained. Fundamentals of the sport, the development of players and the quality of domestic competition ‘became weaker as we became stronger internationally. The repercussions were seen after the 2003 World Cup.’

David Waters, at the time involved in the board of the Kenyan Cricket Association (KCA), urged that 25 per cent of all revenue be explicitly ring-fenced for developing the game. It was the sort of thing that countries planning for the long term would do. And it was completely ignored. ‘We missed out, we missed the boat,’ Odumbe told me. ‘Cricket remained a closed shop, just for a few elitists. If you don’t belong to a club, forget playing cricket.’

‘Unless you have a good structure it’s very difficult to produce quality cricketers on a regular basis,’ Karim reflected. ‘You don’t find them on the street.’ After the World Cup, the KCA were furious with him when he publicly doubted Kenya’s Test aspirations on the basis of their lack of a multi-day domestic structure (though Bangladesh did not have one before being awarded Test status). The problem was not the strength of Kenya’s squad at the start of the century, but the lack of attention placed on developing further generations. ‘We had other cricketers who could have done well but what happens after those cricketers? What would have happened in Test cricket? We’d have been a laughing stock.’

Karim was part of a generation of players accustomed to hard cricket. They had learned the game in Nairobi clubs in the 1980s and 1990s, and had a reliable stream of fixtures, against not only A teams but also full members. This golden age for Kenyan domestic cricket proved fleeting. The growth of satellite television meant that expat cricket fans had no reason to attend matches when they could watch India and Pakistan play on TV.

The increase in the volume of international cricket, along with domestic competitions like the Indian Premier League, has meant players have less time to play in outposts like Kenya: even journeymen Indian and Pakistani first-class players, who were staples of every top club in Nairobi into the new century, are no longer found. And the exponential increase in the earning power of cricketers meant that Kenyan clubs could no longer afford to sign them. The Gymkhana Club Ground and others in Nairobi regularly attracted thousands of paying spectators in the 1980s. They seldom attract more than a few dozen today.

A weak domestic structure was not the only problem for Kenya. After the 2003 World Cup, the ICC brought forward the date when there would be a vote on Kenya’s bid for full membership by a year, to 2005. To help prepare Kenya, the ICC announced that it would give the country’s association an extra $500,000 a year for two years. Sharad Ghai, the former chairman of the KCA, told me that the ICC actually only gave $400,000 a year. ‘I don’t want to say it’s an insult. We were grateful that it did come, but that was nothing. We went on tour to West Indies, and our team went because they said to get Test status we need the exposure. That cost us an arm and a leg. $400,000 might look big in Kenyan standards, but in the real world, $400,000 is nothing.’

According to an ICC source, Kenya ‘did well too fast, and the system wasn’t able to cope, and they hadn’t got the fundamentals to have a sustainable programme moving forward’. Of course, in theory the ICC’s role was to provide Kenya with those fundamentals, but it did not grasp the extent of the challenges involved in establishing cricket in the country. ‘The ICC visited us twice a year, promised the world, handed out a few t-shirts saying “Bringing Cricket to Africa”, made lots of promises about more equipment at schools, and that’s the last you would hear of them,’ Waters reflected. ‘What we needed more than anything was personnel – a person to run development structures in this country. The ICC just paid lip service to supporting Kenyan development.’

After the World Cup, Kenya needed two things: sound administration and regular matches. The KCA ensured they did not receive the first; and the myopia of the Test nations ensured that they did not receive the second. In the 18 months before the 2003 World Cup, Kenya played 18 ODIs, including a tri-series with India and South Africa and another with Australia and Pakistan. It amounted to a solid base, but Kenya needed more to build on the achievements of the World Cup. Instead, they got almost no fixtures.

It seemed as if sides were afraid of losing to them. An intrusive example came in 2005 when a tour was scheduled for Zimbabwe. Kenya hoped that this would feature official ODIs; instead they played against a Zimbabwe A team that was the full side in all but name. Kenya won, but they did not gain the ranking points or prestige of defeating a full member. In 35 months after the World Cup, Kenya played a meagre five ODIs. No wonder that they were thumped twice in the 2004 Champions Trophy.

Through a combination of inertia and impotence, the ICC did nothing to swell Kenya’s fixture list. Request after request was sent for ODIs. Request after request was turned down. ‘Three months down the road everything went quiet,’ Tikolo lamented. All Kenya received was an invitation to play in the Caribbean first-class competition, the Busta Cup, in early 2004.

In any other sport, their rewards for reaching the World Cup semi-finals would have been far greater. After Argentina reached the semi-finals of the 2007 Rugby World Cup, a feat almost as unexpected as Kenya’s 2003 success, the International Rugby Board agreed a series of measures to make sure it would not prove a one-off: Argentina were given more rugby Test matches, given help developing a professional domestic structure, and subsequently included in the prestigious annual Rugby Championship alongside Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Kenya’s cricketers can only have looked on enviously.

Even if it could have done more, the ICC’s cash handout after the 2003 World Cup still amounted to sums unimaginable in the previous 50 years of the KCA’s existence. Therein lay the problem. ‘When we left Nairobi for South Africa we were told whatever prize money you win, it is for the players,’ Tikolo remembered. ‘In their minds they never believed we would get to the semi-finals! Getting to the semi-finals, the pot of money got bigger. We ended up collecting half a million dollars. There was no way they were going to leave half a million dollars for the team to share.’

Even before 2003, there had been murmurings of corruption in Kenyan cricket. In 2001 Kenya suffered from player strikes, as the side complained about not being paid enough or on time. ‘The administration would probably give 95 per cent to cricket and keep five per cent for themselves, which in itself is not right, but they did well for themselves and the team,’ the journalist Clay Muganda told me. The governance of Kenyan cricket was to deteriorate rapidly after the 2003 World Cup.

Corruption has long been endemic in Kenya: it was ranked 136th out of 177 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index in 2013. ‘It’s our turn to eat,’ was the author Michela Wrong’s summation of the mentality that different groups manipulate resources for their allies whenever they get the chance.

After 2003 the newfound riches inspired some unsavoury characters to take an interest in running the sport. Corruption became so widespread that Tikolo called it ‘an open secret’. He had several discussions with the sports minister to alert him to what he knew. The disarray of Kenya’s cricketing administration undermined all the team’s sterling performances. ‘Our cricket management let us down big time,’ Tikolo lamented.

‘All of the hard work from 2003 went down the drain. People just wanted to benefit themselves in terms of taking the money that was supposed to be for cricket, developing the game and all that. People turned it into a business where they made money rather than promoted the game.’

By 2005 the turmoil afflicting all facets of the running of Kenyan cricket had created a system utterly unconducive to elite international sport. The chairman Ghai, who had earlier displayed vision to attract Test teams to Kenya for ODI series and the ICC Knockout in 2000, now became the embodiment of their problems. The KCA became a pariah. He suspended elections, fiddled the constitution and oversaw a regime in which there was no accountability for how money was spent. He allegedly diverted vast chunks of the KCA’s revenue into his own companies and was accused of stealing $3.3m from the KCA, including putting gate receipts into bags to take home.

‘There was nothing of the sort,’ he told me. ‘What corruption? There’s no money in it; even with the new lot, there’s no corruption in cricket.’ He attributed the case against him to ‘a camp that basically wanted to get rid of our administration’ who had resorted to ‘playing politics’.

The Kenyan government took a different view and, although Ghai was never found guilty, the KCA was suspended in 2005. The ICC, who had been convinced that the KCA was corrupt since at least late 2003, followed later in the year, effectively forcing the board of Kenya to be reformed for the national side to continue playing.

Yet greed was not the preserve of the Kenyan administrators alone. In August 2004, Odumbe, who had averaged 42 in the 2003 World Cup, was banned from all cricket for five years for associating with a known bookmaker. He returned to Kenyan club cricket at the age of 40, when his ban expired, and enjoyed tremendous success, but did not play for Kenya again. When I eventually obtained his number I assumed that he would refuse to speak with me.

To my surprise, he was not reticent at all. I found Odumbe courteous, charming and incredibly generous with his time when I called him out of the blue. He also continued to deny any wrongdoing. All he was prepared to admit was that he had a friendship with a man pretending to work in the movie industry who was actually a bookmaker, though the explanation is less convincing given that Odumbe admitted to knowing him for eight years. ‘We were not bosom buddies, it was just once in a while, that “Hi”, “Hi, how are you?”, you know, that sort of thing.

‘I never stole anybody’s money, yet I was given five years,’ he complained. ‘I was banned for inappropriate contact, it was never match-fixing, but they don’t seem to want to get it right. I think match-fixing sounds much sweeter.

‘The only way probably I would have known is if he had approached me, and said, “Look, can you do A for me?” In fact there was a time even when the investigators came talking to me, they asked me the same question, how could you not know that he was a bookmaker? I said “Ah, well it’s not written on his forehead.”’

Odumbe finds enemies everywhere in the case against him. He feels wronged by the ICC; other corruption hearings were chaired by local judges, whereas he had to contend with a judge flown in from overseas. He also feels wronged by his board. ‘If you look around, all over the world, the local boards have always stood by their players. But, in my case, my local board, they left my head on the chopping board. Sometimes, people even wonder, is it a question of colour, or what is it?’

And he feels wronged by past girlfriends. ‘If you look at the witnesses that they brought in my case, 99 per cent of them were former girlfriends, so obviously they had a bone to pick with me.’

Not unreasonably, Odumbe also feels his punishment was harsh in comparison with that received by some more high-profile cricketers. ‘If you look at Shane Warne and Mark Waugh, they accepted giving information to a bookmaker, and what happened to them? It was just a slap on the wrist. In my case it was inappropriate contact – just being friends with somebody who is a bookmaker.’

He is still desperate to clear his name, hoping that he may yet be involved in the running of the game in Kenya. ‘The only wrong I did is befriending the gentleman. When it comes to the integrity of the sport I think I gave it my best, I gave it my all, and the good thing is, I sleep easy knowing that whatever happened to me, I was wrongly accused, I was wrongly sentenced, without any mercy, without any chance of an appeal. And it would be prudent for me to still pursue this matter to its logical conclusion.’

No other Kenyan was ever found guilty of corruption, but Odumbe asserted that this is no proof of innocence. ‘I’ve heard rumours and I know for a fact that the investigators were down here to talk to a few players.’ Other players I talked to hold a similar view. Karim believed, ‘There was greed among the players. I always used to explain to them that don’t run after success because when you are successful money follows you.’ He blamed greed on the side’s ‘lack of education’.

At the start of 2006, the KCA was disbanded for good. By this point it was an organisation with no assets and a considerable overdraft, and was not even running a national competition. The legacy of this turmoil is still felt today. ‘Cricket has become a tainted game because of the corruption of the previous regime,’ Tikolo reflected.

In 2006, Cricket Kenya took over the running of the game. The logic behind this was irrefutable: so tarred was the KCA with corruption and chronic mismanagement that the game could not advance otherwise. But this rebirth did not lead to an upturn in fortunes. Off the pitch, allegations of financial impropriety remained: Tom Tikolo, the older brother of Steve, resigned as chief executive in 2009 after claiming an allowance of $10,000 in cash which was left unaccounted for.

On the field, the national team continued to get worse. Kenya performed poorly in the 2007 World Cup and, in 2011, lost all six matches – including a comprehensive defeat to Canada. A new nadir arrived in 2013/14. First, the side finished tenth in the World Twenty20 qualifiers. And in January 2014, Kenya missed out on the World Cup – and lost their coveted ODI status. To skipper Rakep Patel, it was ‘heartbreaking’. He lamented, ‘It’s the only big stage we get every four years as we rarely play against the big teams.’

The tournament brought home just how far the side had fallen since 2003. ‘Kenyan cricket has gone backwards,’ Tikolo admitted. ‘When you look at the quality of players we have used in the last four or five years a number of them are not up to the standards of international level, simply because we never had development programmes nurturing youngsters coming through. The blame should not be on the players – they did not get the proper coaching.’

The upshot of the lack of development is that the side continued to be over-dependent on the class of 2003, even as they aged and declined: seven members of the 2003 World Cup semi-final team were already in their 30s. Waters, chairman of selectors from 2005 to 2007, reflected, ‘When I was chairman I barely needed to call a meeting. No one was pushing for a place in the team – the players picked themselves.’

It may be even worse today. ‘You’re picking players on the basis of their performances in the league – but the league is not even competitive. The structure is not strong,’ asserted Tanmay Mishra, who played in the 2007 and 2011 World Cups. Attempts were made to address this through the creation of the East Africa Premier League in 2011, featuring four Kenyan teams and two from Uganda. After three years the idea stalled, with a feeling that too many substandard players were playing, diluting the competition’s quality.

Perhaps even more damning than the loss of ODI status in New Zealand in January 2014 was the presence of Steve Tikolo. At the age of 42 he made a comeback, a more rotund and slovenly figure than when he top-scored with 65 in Kenya’s first ODI, against India at the 1996 World Cup. For almost a decade he was considered the finest cricketer outside the Test world: a batsman fusing grit with a little of the flair of Tikolo’s batting hero Viv Richards, and a very serviceable off-spinner to boot. He is the leading run-scorer in the Intercontinental Cup, the multi-day format created in 2004 as part of Bob Woolmer’s vision to prepare associates for Test cricket, with 1,918 runs at 64.

But Tikolo was more than just an associate titan: he hit 90s at better than a-run-a-ball against Sri Lanka and the West Indies, as well as ODI centuries against Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. ‘Had he been born in Jamaica, with good coaching and fitness discipline he really could have been something special,’ the journalist Martin Williamson said.

‘It was humbling that I could perform the way I did against the bigger teams,’ Tikolo reflected. ‘I used to work a lot at the gym and those were the fruits of working hard.’ Too few younger players shared Tikolo’s voracious appetite for self-improvement. ‘I remember as a kid watching Ravindu Shah [the former opening batsman] or Steve Tikolo,’ one recent player told me. ‘After national team training they used to spend another hour and a half just to come and groom the young kids. The intensity at that time was worthy of admiring – but now it’s fallen off massively.’

When Tikolo returned, he was still among Kenya’s best players. It was testament not only to his talent and desire but also Kenya’s complete failure to replace the 2003 team. ‘There was a sensationally good isolated pocket of players produced at the same time that managed to get them where they got to,’ an ICC source reflected. ‘The underlying system wasn’t there, and to a large extent still isn’t there.’

Signs of hope are hard to find. Kenya have not merely endured a ‘lost decade’ but 12 years in which all facets of the country’s cricket have collapsed. ‘The cricket fraternity missed an opportunity to take cricket to the next level,’ Tikolo lamented. ‘I wish they had used 2003 to take cricket to the next level and all over the country.’ Still, at least the desolate state of the national side means that there is no room for disputing that long-term development must be prioritised, regardless of the immediate pain that will follow.

In 2012, Janmohamed was elected as chairperson of Cricket Kenya, becoming the first woman to head a country’s cricket board. A lawyer by trade, she was inculcated with a love of the game by her father and has, in the past, donated money to Kenyan cricket. Her position is honorary and unpaid, reflecting the paucity of funding in Kenya, but her ambitions have not been tentative. ‘It’s time that we all recognised the fact that to build cricket in Kenya it’s not about a particular association. It’s every Kenyan’s duty and responsibility, because when the team goes out there it plays as Kenya. Blame games don’t help,’ she said.

Janmohamed’s aim is nothing less than to inculcate a culture of cricket in state school. As of 2014, some public schools in England – like Cranleigh, which the Kenyan players Duncan Allan and Seren Waters attended – had more cricket nets than all the state schools in Kenya combined. Cricket Kenya has made tentative steps in developing grassroots cricket. The new Kenyan state constitution, which came into being in 2010, could help. By decentralising power in the country, it provides hope that Cricket Kenya may be able to work with newly empowered counties to spread the game.

The country is now divided into 47 counties and there are pilot projects to spread the game in five. This may not sound like a lot, but it amounts to a significant improvement. ‘Kids will play any game you give them – you give them a ball and a bat and they’ll play,’ Janmohamed told me. ‘You should see the happiness and the war dances after taking a wicket. It’s not a lost cause – it’s just if people expect results overnight, that is an impossibility.’

‘Cricket is not ingrained here,’ Waters noted. ‘It has never really been introduced into the schools.’ Cricket has fundamentally failed to take hold among the black Kenyan population; the black cricket journalist Clay Muganda told me there is a running joke that only Indians and him like cricket. Kenyan-Asian-run private members’ clubs in Nairobi do not formally exclude black Kenyans, as they historically did, but there are economic and cultural reasons why black Kenyans seldom play. Waters remains optimistic. ‘What is amazing is the natural hand-eye coordination of so many Kenyans. Given the right schools and youth development programmes, there is no reason that Kenya won’t be able to compete again at the highest level.’

It had long been a source of complaint that, even after the Africanisation of the Kenyan side, the game continued to be run by Kenyan-Asians. It is a criticism that no longer holds. Tikolo is now Kenya’s coach and leading black players including Martin Suji and Thomas Odoyo are involved in coaching. Tikolo is as defiant as one would expect a man who has given his life to Kenyan cricket to be. ‘There is a lot of goodwill from the government and the public. It is just a matter of giving them some time and seeing how they go. Cricket has become a tainted game because of the corruption of the previous regime.’

Still, no one is too optimistic about where cricket goes next. There is the unmistakable sense that the ICC has given up on Kenya for good, considering nurturing the game there more trouble than it is worth. ‘They need to get more cricketers and they need more support from the corporate world in Kenya and the government,’ an ICC source reflected. ‘With the current state of that country, it might be a bit difficult at this point.’

Sharing a border with Somalia makes Kenya acutely vulnerable to Islamic terrorism. The security situation adds another further complication. Home games have repeatedly had to be moved, postponed or cancelled, and no international team has played in Kenya since 2012. Cricket Kenya’s attempts to host events like the World Cricket League, the Under-19 World Cup qualifiers and even the ICC Conference have all been scuppered by security concerns.

This makes it impossible for cricket to get the exposure it needs to inspire the uptake of the sport. Understandably, the government cannot justify investment in a niche sport like cricket with almost half the population living on under a dollar a day. To both Karim and Odumbe, Kenyan cricket today is ‘dead and buried’. Karim even predicted that Kenya could lose their associate status. ‘It is beyond sad and painful. I am sure you can feel it in my voice, even now.’

Shorn of ODI status until 2018, at least, a sense of despair pervades Kenyan cricket. ‘When you lose your status teams look at you differently, because your value has gone down,’ said Suji, who played in three World Cups and is now a coach. Kenya are no longer allowed to play any ODIs, making matches harder to market and sponsors harder to attract. ‘The only time a sponsor wants to come in is when we’re going for a World Cup or something,’ Janmohamed reflected. ‘Who would want to play a game that doesn’t have ODI status because it no longer goes into the record books?’ She believed that having ODI status ‘would help us get sponsorship’, even if Kenya’s ranking was the same. It is an indictment of the ICC’s arbitrary decision to limit ODI status to 16 teams.

The reduction in the World Cup to ten teams from 2019 is the cause of further vexation. ‘The ICC are talking about reducing the teams on one hand and about globalising the game on the other,’ Tikolo reflected. ‘It inspires youngsters to play the game if they know that if they do well they would be playing in the World Cup.’

Children today are not only turning to football in cricket’s place. Since Kenya qualified for their first World Cup in 2001, rugby sevens has become increasingly popular. Cricket is going the other way. ‘Once they reduce the teams I am not sure whether the associate countries will be looked after,’ Tikolo feared. ‘At some point you will be forgotten.’

That means underdog stories like Obuya’s 5-24 against Sri Lanka will be impossible. ‘We are in 2014, we cannot be speaking of spreading the game and at the same time decide to reduce the number of teams playing the World Cup,’ Obuya said. ‘The more teams play, the more we get people talking and interested in learning more about our game.’

Cricket Kenya cannot even afford to keep its best players. While Nairobi clubs are dominated by middle-class players, especially those of Asian origin, the national side has a very different character because cricket has nothing to recommend itself as a career for middle-class Kenyans.

Seren Waters, the son of David, was once a beacon of hope in Kenyan cricket. At the age of 18 he made 74 in an ODI against South Africa. Yet before he turned 22 he effectively abandoned his international career; he now works as a teacher in London.

A contracted cricketer in Kenya today earns around 50,000 Kenyan shillings a month – around $560. It does not make cricket a remotely attractive option for the middle-class.

Tanmay Mishra, an attractive strokemaker who scored 72 against Australia in the 2011 World Cup, is another example. At the age of 26 he moved to India to build his cricketing career. ‘My main reason was that there were basically no fixtures and club cricket is not good,’ he reflected. ‘You want to be playing competitive cricket and you want to keep yourself busy. It just never worked out. After the 2011 World Cup it just became really difficult – the only thing you’re looking forward to is the Intercontinental Cup every five or six months.’

The tales of Mishra and Waters stand as a warning to Kenya and the rest of the associate world. Without a regular fixture list that can generate sustainable revenue for Cricket Kenya, the organisation will not be able to make cricket a viable career option and will be doomed to fielding under-strength sides. Kenya have tried to arrange more games but no side is compelled to play them. In December 2013, Zimbabwe cancelled a planned series at ten days’ notice. So Kenya remains locked in a vicious cycle that many low-ranking associates could relate to.

To grow the game, investment in development is fundamental. But this has to be paid for by reducing players’ wages. Without the prospect of decent salaries, the best cricketers will not commit to playing the game professionally – and the national side will not be able to achieve the results necessary to get the prize money and sponsorship necessary to drive cricket forward.

Perhaps the remarkable thing is not the collapse of Kenyan cricket but how players were once able to overcome the failings of the ICC and local administrators to reach the World Cup semi-finals. That will remain cricket’s apex in Kenya. Barring a radical transformation of the game both in Kenya and in the boardrooms of the ICC, Kenya will never qualify for a World Cup again. For all its splendour, the Gymkhana Club Ground is deserted today. The media centre is still stubbornly standing, a relic of unfulfilled promise.

Local Dreams

PNG by Gideon Haigh

THIS book would not have been complete without a detailed analysis of Papua New Guinea. Gideon Haigh published the definitive take on the topic in June 2013 in The Nightwatchman, and he very kindly allowed us to reproduce the piece in full here.

The PNG story remains largely as it was when Gideon penned this piece, although there is perhaps now even more grounds for optimism. In January 2014 PNG came fourth in the World Cup qualifiers, giving them access to extra funding from the ICC and making them one of 16 teams in the world with ODI status. On 8 November PNG played Hong Kong in Townsville, Australia (no ground in PNG is ICC-approved to host ODIs). In the process, they became the 23rd international side in history to play an official ODI. The story of PNG cricket may still have a long way to run.

Greg Campbell’s office at Cricket Haus in sweltering Boroko, Port Moresby is kept habitable by three whirling ceiling fans – turning on the air conditioning unit behind him shorts the electricity. The landlines have not worked for 12 months, to the apathetic bemusement of a PNG Telikom technician who has just arrived after the payment of a bribe, and left without changing anything.

Petitioners are coming and going. The utes need filling up. The ground staff need lunch. For each, Campbell fishes colourful kina from a sturdy petty cash tin. He is careful, he explains, because things have a tendency to go missing round here. Over the last two years, he estimates having bought about 120 coffee cups. He reckons he is now down to about eight.

But if it’s difficult to credit, we’re actually in the headquarters of one of global cricket’s most remarkable success stories. At the turn of the century, despite a heritage of more than 100 years, cricket in Papua New Guinea was in disarray, short of money, of facilities, of purpose – the same might have been said of the country, which had turned over five prime ministers in five years and was routinely numbered among the world’s most unliveable places.

Today PNG is ranked 19th in the cricket world, having joined World Cricket League Division Two just over two years ago. It will play off in October’s World Twenty20 qualifier in the UAE and next year’s World Cup qualifier in New Zealand; later this year it will also participate in South Australia’s new Premier League, alongside four teams from Adelaide and a fifth from the Northern Territory.

In the last five years alone, PNG has gone from a cricket backwater into a poster country of the International Cricket Council’s development programme. ‘With an ever-expanding junior base, a crop of very talented national team players and a strong off-field administration, PNG is what development is all about,’ says ICC’s global development manager, Tim Anderson. ‘Turning cricket from a game played by a traditional few countries into a genuinely global, mass-participation sport.’

To savour some of the passion for the game you need to hit the road, which in Moresby is a memorable experience in itself, there being no speed limits, no obvious road rules, and no apparent fear among pedestrians. For a few months after arriving, Campbell took the red stains on roadsides for blood stains. They were actually expectorated splashes of the ubiquitous betel nut, but you can understand the misapprehension as you weave through the chaotic traffic. Pavements are crowded with street stalls, corners with people waiting patiently for buses that aren’t exactly regular.

In free use, applied to everything from mowing grass to shaving, are long-bladed machetes – ‘the PNG pocket knife’, as they are colloquially known. Fences are tall, sturdy, and topped with generous coils of barbed wire to discourage marauding raskol gangs – after a while, in fact, the coils comes to seem like a form of vegetation, growing as universally and inconspicuously as lantana in Australia. The housing types are deliriously varied, from fibro shacks that it looks like it would take one shove to demolish to the husks of modernist houses previously occupied by the colonial administrators who began moving out after PNG’s independence in September 1975.

About 20 minutes north-west of Port Moresby, a turn off the main road reveals a village’s picturesque panorama. Historically, Hanuabada is where Captain James Erskine of the HMS Nelson hoisted the union flag in November 1884 to declare Papua, the south-eastern portion of the island of New Guinea, a protectorate of the Queen of England. Nowadays it is a fishing community with a population of 20,000, and a cricket community with a history of having provided over the years almost three-quarters of those who have represented Papua New Guinea – a kind of junior Barbados or south seas Pudsey.

While larger, older dwellings line the narrow foreshore, most residents occupy simple but sturdy homes on piers out over the water. A closer look reveals a sorrier scape – a shoreline thickly carpeted with plastic debris. But walk the long jetties and, strange as it may sound, you’re in cricket country. My guide was PNG Under-19s coach John Ovia, a native son man and boy, who lives with his wife, mother and three young children about three quarters of the way along a jetty called Border, because it separates Hanuabada from nearby Eleva. They all play cricket and, after a while, it seems that everyone does.

We stop to pay our respects to a cricket personage at every second house, from a Moresby quick of the 1970s, Morea Gau, to the mother of PNG’s promising young opening bowler, Ray Haorda. ‘And this man,’ says Ovia proudly as he introduces a slight, white-haired, shyly-smiling figure, ‘he was the master of the single. By the time you looked up, he was at the other end.’ I ask Pala Ura, PNG’s wicketkeeper in the 1982 ICC Trophy, the secret to good running. ‘You must always run the first one hard,’ Ura replies solemnly. I tell him a few Australians would benefit from the advice.

One thing, Ura adds: PNG finished that tournament in third place, with only the winner, Zimbabwe, going through to an eight-team World Cup, sans exiled South Africa, the following year. I do a quick mental calculation: this means, in effect, that 30 years ago, PNG was the tenth-strongest team competing in international cricket. And most of the players were from this village. Smiles all round. Quite something, eh?

That it is, agrees Bill Leane, Campbell’s predecessor at Cricket PNG, when I meet him in his home town of Melbourne – and that’s good and bad. ‘No coaches, no sports science, no fitness programmes, just raw passion, and they were tenth on the world,’ he says. ‘It’s amazing, but where did that go in between times?’ So this is not so much a development story, as a redevelopment story, and also a speculation – for where does PNG go from here?

Captain Erskine’s proclamation 129 years ago completed a three-way carving of the island of New Guinea, the west forming a province of the Dutch East Indies, the east dividing British Papua to the south from German New Guinea in the north. Cricket reached Papua as part of the cultural baggage of missionaries, and among several fathers of the game one stands out: Rev Charles Abel of the London Missionary Society, and also of the Hertfordshire County Cricket Club, who arrived in Moresby in October 1890, aged 28. He soon found the game useful when shortly after arriving he was temporarily marooned in the village of Orokolo, 270km north-west of Moresby, surrounded by restless natives.

‘There was no time to lose [wrote his son]. With his usual resourcefulness he gathered the village children together and at once began to teach them cricket…The play relieved the tension considerably and soon the older people began to gather round, intrigued by the strange new game. Finally whatever the sentiments of their elders might have been, the children made friends with the white stranger. Hostility gave way to curiosity, the truculent attitude disappeared, and the danger passed.’

In August 1891, Abel was posted to the LMS’s easternmost head station on Kwato Island in the China Strait, a waterway growingly busy with traffic from Australia to goldfields ports to the north. This 28-hectare speck was another dicey posting. Abel’s predecessor had succumbed to malaria; nearby natives had recently murdered a sea captain and only been subdued by some exemplary hangings. Encouraged by his Orokolo experience, Abel threw himself into bringing cricket to Kwato. No sooner had the church, mission station and student dormitories been erected than he enlisted his Papuan acolytes in transforming a malarial swamp into a cricket ground.

Abel’s only published work, a book for Christian youth called Savage Life in New Guinea (1902), contains something to offend every modern sensibility. The Papuan, in his experience, occupied ‘a very low position in the scale of savage peoples’, being slow, lazy, dirty and base, ‘guided in his conduct by nothing but his instinct and propensities, and governed by unchecked passions’; there were times, wrote Abel tremulously, when ‘unbridled passion seizes and masters him, the man becomes a fiend; and then there are no limits to his barbarity’.

Yet Abel wrote as much out of fear for Papuans as contempt for them. Purportedly the only LMS member to read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Abel foresaw disaster where Papuans were exposed to the full onslaught of occidental ways. Only ‘hard work and healthful sport’, he thought, as he looked down at last on the cricket ground it took four years to complete, could fortify them.

‘Their own amusements are often vicious. You cannot take away the pastimes of a race and give them nothing in their place…The spirit of prophecy was fulfilled when we transformed our spears into wickets and our shields into cricket bats…Most people will be able to appreciate our satisfaction as we sit in the shade of the citron trees sometimes after the day’s work is done and watch the boys at cricket, with their wickets pitched on the very spot where a short time ago the stagnant water and oozing mud exuded vapours which poisoned the air.’

Besides elementary subjects and Bible study, carpentry for boys and sewing for girls, the Kwato curriculum was heavily oriented to cricket, for its moral efficacy in instilling good technique, good sportsmanship, and good deportment. Abel insisted that his young Papuans play in crisply laundered flannels, setting the standard with a natty bow tie, and with Victorian orthodoxy, seldom evaluating youths in his diaries without an assessment of their cricket prowess (‘a clever youth and a fine medium bowler’; ‘nice serious lad, very clever behind the sticks’).

He was no less demanding of his white colleagues, once dismissing a young teacher sent out by LMS for sporting ignorance (‘Mr Hallows plays no cricket,’ reads the diary entry. ‘He is leaving by the next boat’) and scorning a well-meaning government anthropologist (whom Abel dismissed as ‘out of his depth’ after a mild suggestion that the mission curriculum involve ‘less cricket and more Christ’).

The only time this incurably active man paused was when his edition of Cricket: A Weekly Record of the Game arrived, wrapped for appearance’s sake in editions of The Christian World; eyes glistening, he would pore in silent rapture over its scorecards and match reports. After a while, too, Kwato Mission began playing against outsiders. Regular games commenced with Europeans in nearby Samarai, who had built their own cricket ground, and against passengers on passing ships, including in 1910 a team from the steamer Matunga including Australian Test all-rounder Frank Laver and Tasmanian keeper George Gatehouse. Only rain prevented the visitors’ defeat after Kwato’s star googly bowler, Aleadi, bowled Laver for nought and had Gatehouse caught for seven.

By then, too, cricket was no longer confined to Papua’s eastern extremity. Interest was sufficient among Port Moresby’s European community by Christmas 1906 to invite Samarai to send their team, while former Tasmanian leg-spinner John Watt wrote in The Referee soon after reporting that the game had a strong vogue in villages surrounding the city, ‘If you visit any native village about Port Moresby, small boys can always be seen playing cricket right on the water’s edge, with material of their own make. Every other hit the ball goes into the water, while the two batsmen “run them out”. The Papuan is never stuck for a cricket ball, for as soon as he loses one he taps the nearest rubber tree, and makes another.’

LMS evangelists here were as often Samoan as English, but preached cricket with little less enthusiasm, an Australian expeditioner recruiting bearers for a sojourn into the interior in 1910 finding the game a serious inconvenience:

‘We had some trouble in getting the carriers, as all the villagers, including the Samoan missionary, were engaged in playing cricket. The craze for cricket seems to have spread from village to village all over civilized Papua. Wherever we entered a village we invariably found a cricket match in progress. The singular feature about the play was that young natives who could not speak English had most of the English terms used in the game by heart. Thus one would hear “Play!” “Run!” “Stop!” “How’s dat, umpire?” “Out!”

‘I must say that many of them handled a bat well and gracefully. The bowling was good and very swift, and as for the fielding it was quite up to the average. The worst of this cricket mania, my guide told me, was that if carriers were wanted and they were playing a match no inducement would make them move until the game was over. It was becoming, be said, the curse of New Guinea.’

Nowhere was the vogue more ardent than Hanuabada, thanks to a Samoan emissary of LMS, Fa’vae. The game was well established by the time he was succeeded by an Englishman, Rev. Robert Lister Turner. A rather more orthodox missionary than Abel, Turner would complete the first Motu dictionary and grammar, plus a translation of the New Testament. But he was also the brother of a Leicestershire county cricketer, and made Hanuabadan cricket famous enough by the 1920s to feature in a series of cards for Namo and Papuan Beauties cigarettes sponsored by the British Papuan Development Company, the prowess of its early champions Reautau Mea, Toka Gaudi, Gavera Arua and Kohu Dogoda making it a serious rival for Kwato and Samarai.

One final eastern champion, nonetheless, would outstrip all in fame. Born in Milne Bay in 1914, John Guise taught himself cricket by clipping pictures from Australian newspapers, including one treasured image of Learie Constantine hitting a six at the SCG, and imitating them in solitary drills with a tennis ball and a self-made bat on the docks at Samarai where he worked as a basket carrier. He cultivated a habit of massive scores, including 253 in Milne Bay and 346 in Samarai, after which he was approached by representatives of a Melbourne grade club – only, to his bitter disappointment, to be forbidden from accepting the offer by Papua’s lieutenant-governor Sir Hubert Murray.

His cricket thwarted, his life took different directions. Thirty-five years after Murray’s death, Sir John Guise would become the inaugural governor-general of an independent Papua New Guinea under a constitution whose preamble was drafted by Rev. Charles Abel’s son Sir Cecil Abel.

There actually emerged many crickets on the island of New Guinea. There were expatriate competitions, the original being a triangular in Port Moresby played for the Freezing Company Shield; expatriates also began playing among themselves on the north coast in Lae and Madang in what the First World War had left as Australian territory. There were also Papuan competitions, maturing in Moresby into a league in 1937, with four of the seven teams coming from Hanuabada.

Most numerous were spontaneous local variants, one described by a correspondent in the 1928 spring annual of The Cricketer as involving players wearing ‘little more than is demanded by the laws of decency’ using ersatz equipment in irregular numbers with elastic rules(1).

‘There may be as many as 20 natives fielding, such is the enthusiasm for the Papuan game…Wearying of fielding, point, cover-point, long-stop and other betake themselves to cool groves, there to pluck the scarlet hibiscus…All laugh at hits and misses, for in merry Papua all is jest….Scoring is a strange affair, the losing side increasing its score by adding sufficient runs to the scoring book to render defeat honourable.’

Yet what often looked riotous to outsiders contained strong ceremonial aspects, integral to inter- and intra-village relations. Anthropologist Cyril Belshaw documented both 60 years ago in his encyclopedic ethnography of Hanuabada, The Great Village (1954). As an example of the former he recorded the arrival of a men’s team from the village of Kido to thank Hanuabada’s Taoro Club for laying a pitch and performing some coaching, bringing with them a festive board of pigs, bananas and yams minutely apportioned.

‘At five o’clock in the evening….the bananas and yams were brought out and unwrapped, the principal cricketers foregathered on the verandah of the club captain and ate the entrails and other pig tit-bits. At six o’clock the cricketers distributed the yams, bananas and pig cuts…they carried out the whole procedure with much argument and confusion and disagreement before everyone agreed that the allocation was satisfactory.’

To illustrate the latter, he observed the female Laurabada Club incorporating elaborate cricket matches into their community-building activities, laced with socially approved sledging.

‘Though there was much horseplay and good fun, there was a great deal of determination. Women on the sideline kept proper score, and over the ground flew a large green flag embroidered with “L. B. C.”. Regular teams developed for both cricket and evening games: women without children played women with children, married women played single women, or old women played young. As one side carried the day they would break off to dance triumphantly to a Polynesian song, or to sing a couplet of abuse, or to make humorous or obscene gestures.’

These complex antecedents did not begin blending until about half a century ago, and then only little by little, after the expatriate Papua New Guinean team was invited to play its first games abroad, in north Queensland against a Cairns XI and a Tablelands XI in January 1954 – what became an annual visit.

Moresby’s colour bar was a fragmentary one: some companies, like Burns Philp, distinguished between expatriates and indigenes; other, like Steamships Trading, did not. In 1958, the PNG team visiting Cairns included two Papuans: Babani Momo from Kilakila, and John Ovia’s father Uduru. Nobody seems to have been overly fussed. And over the next five years, the expatriate and Papuan competitions merged as a prelude to deeper integration.

The 1960s and 1970s leading up to independence were actually a prosperous period for Papua New Guinean sport. Australian rules football produced champions such as Herea Amini and David Haro. Rugby league’s Friday night competition, reinforced by quality players from Australia, was the highlight of the Moresby sporting week.

Cricket kept pace. Around a thriving sports club in Moresby’s premier expatriate suburb of Boroko were clustered three fine grounds with concrete pitches including picturesque Colts, home to a successful club team of the same name. Former Australian umpire Col Hoy, an executive with Ansett Airlines, organized the first visit from an Australian XI of first-class players led by Queensland’s Sam Trimble in March 1972. When a Papua New Guinea Cricket Board of Control was formed the following year with representatives from Moresby, Lae, Mt Hagen, Rabaul and Bougainville, the International Cricket Conference admitted the country as its eighth associate member.

Inspired by PNG hosting its first rugby league international against a Lions team en route to fulfilling World Cup away fixtures in Australia and New Zealand, the PNGCBC invited Clive Lloyd’s West Indians to play two one-day games on their way to the 1975-6 Worrell Trophy series. So it was that just five weeks after the last lowering of the Australian flag, the World Cup’s inaugural winners played, confusingly, two different ‘Papua & New Guinea’ teams selected locally in Moresby and Lae.

After the first ball from Andy Roberts soared from the concrete wicket at Moresby’s Murray Stadium over the keeper’s head, the visitors settled mainly for bowling part-timers. But a new cricket nation had arrived. Well, part of it had anyway.

For the teams pitted against the West Indies represented the last efflorescence of expat cricket. In the first game, Richard Unsworth, a Wollongong accountant, gained a lifetime’s bragging rights by dismissing Viv Richards. In the second game, Charlie Harrison, an Indian-born Australian previously resident in Pakistan, made 34, and dismissed Roy Fredericks, Alvin Kallicharran and Lawrence Rowe.

But cricketers henceforward would be home-grown, if initially still led by a post-colonial elite. Brian Amini, the first Papuan to captain the national team when PNG beat Fiji by eight wickets in 1977, became chairman of the Papuan Community Development Group. His successor Nigel Agonia, a public servant from Moresby, went on to serve as Secretary for Minerals and Energy; Agonia’s deputy Ilinome Tarua, a lawyer raised in Kwato, would later be PNG’s permanent representative at the United Nations.

At first, this new model prospered. Having won the gold medal for cricket at the first South Pacific Games, PNG went on to that remarkable 1982 ICC Trophy, held in Britain’s Midlands. Led by Api Leka, they lost only to Zimbabwe, a class above everyone else, Kenya and Bermuda. They comfortably beat Canada, a participant in the previous World Cup, as well as Hong Kong, Israel and Gibraltar, then finally Bangladesh in a play-off for third place. They played, moreover, flamboyant cricket with a flavour of the West Indies, who whenever televisions were turned on in PNG in the 1980s to pick up the Channel 9 signal wafting across the Coral Sea seemed to be knocking lumps off Australians.

Whether PNG regressed, or the rest of the world advanced, that promise remained unfulfilled. The national team did not play another international game for four years and when they did, in the next ICC Trophy, experienced a rude awakening: Netherlands cruised to 271/6 and bundled PNG out for 52. Fifth in their group, they went home early. For countries containing professionals and semi-professionals, such as Zimbabwe, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Kenya, UAE, USA and Canada, all-amateur PNG was no match.

Taking on the chairmanship of the PNG board that year, Veari Maha, a leading light in local Australia rules football, did little to change that. A word you hear much of in PNG is ‘wantok’ – pidgin for ‘one talk’, it conveys the idea of reciprocal obligation based on shared blood, shared clan or shared language. Maha was the patriarch of a large sporting family: in due course, his cousin William would become coach, his son Navu become captain, his other son James and nephew Rod key players. It was not a family one offended lightly.

There were still glory days. The South Pacific Games came to Moresby in September 1991, and PNG again secured cricket gold. Victoria led by Matthew Elliott came to Moresby in April 1995 and lost to PNG by six wickets. The PNGCBC rolled out an adaptation of Kwik Cricket, called Liklik Cricket, promoted by Dean Jones.

But the peculiar difficulties of PNG now made themselves felt: the distance between cricket centres, the distance from the rest of the cricket world, the growing heft of rugby league exemplified by the Australian achievements of Adrian Lam, Arnold Krewanty and Elias Paiyo, and such infrastructural shortcomings as the continued absence of turf wickets. ‘Wherever the English went round the world, they left behind beautiful turf wickets,’ PNGCBC’s long-time secretary Wayne Satchell would lament. ‘The Australians in Papua New Guinea left behind only concrete.’

Satchell was one continuous thread throughout this time. His father Bruce had arrived in PNG in 1956 to set up local operations for Trans Australia Airways; his mother Daphne was an ebullient cricket lover; Wayne himself married a girl from Hanuabada.

A patient opening batsman for Lae’s successful Morobe Cricket Club, he was the epitome of the dedicated amateur administrator: his office was the boot of his car, and his office hours when he was not required as a general manager of Gibson Chemicals. For a time, Satchell and the board were so indivisible that he slipped into the habit of covering expenses of the national team at the ICC Trophy himself: some of them in 1990 and 1994; nearly all of them, which involved mortgaging his home, when the tournament came to Kuala Lumpur in 1997. ‘We’d always sent a team to ICC events,’ he says. ‘I wanted us to maintain that record.’

Ask about this period in PNG’s cricket history, however, and the answers grow somewhat vague, perhaps not surprisingly given what was happening elsewhere, with the collapse of the resources economy, the deterioration of security in Moresby, Lae and worst of all on Bougainville, and a succession of chaotic and violent elections. For some, it was not an entirely bad time to be away, including for PNG’s two best players at the 1997 ICC Trophy.

John Ovia accepted the opportunity to train at the AIS Cricket academy in Adelaide, where among other things he enjoyed the thrill of batting to Brett Lee in the nets and became a lifelong Australian cricket supporter. ‘My father, he always supported West Indies,’ says Ovia. ‘But I couldn’t support anyone but Australia. It would be stealing.’

Charles Amini, whose family rivals the Mahas as Papuan cricket’s most fecund, spent the late 1990s in Melbourne on a posting with Shell, becoming indispensable to St Barnabas CC. Charles and son Chris played in the seconds, wife Kune in the fifths, sons C.J. and Colin in the Under-12s and Under-14s; all had or would represent PNG. For Chris, now national captain, it was an invaluable first exposure to two-day cricket. ‘I learned how to bat in Australia,’ he says.

Local efforts, however, to raise standards were fitful. Veari Maha and Wayne Satchell promoted a plan to upgrade Amini Park, welcoming Allan Border to Boroko in September 1999 to turn the first sod. It was a prestigious, high-visibility event: Border was presented to the prime minister, governor-general and local dignitaries, providing the focus for days of media coverage. Yet disappointingly little happened afterwards; indeed, the ground started slipping into disrepair. Any shelter in Moresby will over time attract squatters.

Cricket’s precinct offered a number of instant accommodation opportunities including the old Boroko Sports Club and a curator’s house. Squabbles broke out among local administrators chafing at the long Maha ascendancy, a lack of information around finances and a want of resources for teams. PNG players arrived for the Under-19 World Cup in New Zealand in January 2002, for instance, with neither equipment nor footwear nor uniforms. Cricket PNG, as the board was now known, even lost its patron, which since Sir John Guise’s time had been the governor-general, when the country went for six months without a vice-regal representative because of two politicians wrangling over the job.

Yet it was out of this chaos that came the first important step to reviving cricket in PNG: the appointment as patron of Sir Brian Bell.

Bell, born in the Darling Downs township of Chinchilla in 1928, would in earlier times have been a south seas merchant adventurer. Reading a magazine story about the infamous ‘Telefolmin incident’ in November 1953, when four Australian patrol officers were bloodthirstily killed by tribesmen in the northern province of Sanduan, Bell decided PNG must be ‘an exciting place’ and moved there. Over the next half a century he built a vast family retail conglomerate, sealing everything with a handshake. He brought a similar goodwill to the role of patron, available to endow senior tournaments, Under-19 tournaments, women’s cricket challenges alike.

Things would get worse before they got better. Bell’s deputy on the board of Moresby’s general hospital was Mick Nades, a savvy Sri Lankan-born accountant who had come from Sydney with Steamships Trading in 1976. When Nades was drafted to provide Cricket PNG with an overdue and thorough audit, troubles emerged. Satchell was claiming to be owed tens of thousands of dollars for personal contributions to Cricket PNG; Bank of PNG was expressing concerns about K250,000 borrowed to redevelop Amini Park, whose title itself was unclear, being vested in a trust on which Veari Maha sat.

Unfathomable liabilities; uncertain assets: Cricket PNG was on a financial brink. It pulled back thanks to Bell, who quietly retired the bank debt, and Nades, who succeeded to the chairmanship and watched every cheque for the next few years until the finances stabilised.

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 Tests 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 sport 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.

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 that 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.

An increasingly development-focused ICC was seeking to bridge the gap between the Test nations and the best of the rest. A symbol of this commitment was the launch of the Intercontinental Cup, a multi-day format given first-class status and in effect serving as a barometer for readiness to play Test cricket, although a pathway to Test status did not exist. Nepal remained in the competition in 2005, but then lost a play-off to Namibia to lose the right to compete in the 2006/07 tournament.

Perhaps this had all happened too quickly. Such opportunities implied a readiness that had not yet been attained by this fledgling cricket nation. Dias had overseen a rapid development of cricket in the country, but fundamental constraints remained that stopped Nepal reaching the next level. The country may have been playing first-class cricket, but the domestic set-up was still deeply flawed. There was neither the quality nor the quantity of cricket in Nepal to sustain this progress.

It seems amazing that Nepal played in the Intercontinental Cup in 2004 without any structured, regional domestic tournament; their inexperience was painfully revealed in the five years that followed that competition. Until recently, most Nepalese players went into an international tournament having played only two or three competitive matches in the preceding six months.

It was not just geographical, logistical and structural issues that Dias faced: there was also the question of finance. Finances and career viability are among the hardest challenges for an associate nation. While the rest of the world wondered whether Nepal would turn youth team brilliance to international dominance, Dias faced the more urgent problem of keeping his young stars.

Kanishka Chaugai, one of the best players from the 2006 Under-19 World Cup campaign, was set for a sparkling international future. Performing on the cricket field is one thing; securing your financial future quite another. With no prospects of making a living out of cricket in his homeland, he accepted a scholarship to study in the USA. Others followed, undermining Dias’s plans. ‘I don’t blame any cricketer in Nepal for going abroad,’ Dias admitted in 2008. ‘For them cricket is secondary because they can’t make a living out of it.’

Dias’s solution was an interesting one. He wanted leading companies to employ a member of the national team squad. They would need to accept flexible working patterns to enable the players to train and play, but in return they would receive a marketing boost of a patriotic gesture and a star in their midst. Intelligent and pragmatic, but sadly not, as it transpired, a workable solution.

One challenge associate teams face that full members don’t is genuinely must-win fixtures; encounters that define the fate of a cricketing nation. Bangladesh may lose a dozen games in a row, but they will remain a full member, retaining their financial and structural stability. Associates have no such luxuries. Moreover, they must face these crucial games with amateurish preparation.

It is this that made the embarrassing and baffling defeats to Qatar and Fiji so devastating. They meant Nepal failed to qualify for the 2005 ICC Trophy. As with the Dutch debacle against Kenya in the 2014 World Cup qualifier where the Netherlands lost everything, these were dark days.

The timing was a disaster for Nepal: the ICC Trophy was the tournament used to grade and reward the associates through the High Performance Programme (HPP) and the World Cricket League. There would be no threefold increase in ICC funding or glamorous ODI outings for Nepal. Instead, they lined up against Japan and Germany in World Cricket League Division Five. From that lowly position the prospect of qualifying for the next ICC Trophy, let alone the World Cup, looked depressingly bleak.

It was a humiliating fall from grace, and fans started to believe that Dias’s orthodoxy prevented them from reaching the next level. Respected and revered as he was, could his textbook dogma propel Nepal to success in the age of Twenty20? ‘He doesn’t teach them to score boundaries,’ one exasperated fan told me on the boundary at World Cricket League Division Five.

When Nepal hosted World Cricket League Division Five two years later, this passion and frustration boiled over. Angered in equal measure by the reliance of visiting nations on expatriates and the lack of flamboyancy in their own team, the 12,000-strong home crowd grew restless during the game against the USA as Nepal looked set to miss out on promotion on net run rate.

Irish cricket writer and photographer Barry Chambers was there and tells a darkly amusing anecdote. Having chatted to a local fan beside him earlier in the match, he saw his new acquaintance return to his spot wearing a motorcycle helmet. Chambers asked if he was preparing to leave, as it seemed an odd time to do so with the match and the tournament so delicately poised. ‘I’ll need it shortly, you’ll see,’ the man replied.

Moments later, both men ran for cover as a shower of rocks hailed down on them from the banking above as the crowd went wild. The press fled the media tent under the bombardment. The police pushed the fans back, some reports claiming with tear gas, while players and the media circumnavigated the ground with wheelbarrows clearing up rocks.

To the ICC’s shame, rather than penalise the hosts it restarted the game, giving Nepal a favourable adjusted target and enabling them to scrape through to promotion at the expense of Singapore.

Having been in charge for ten years, Dias stood down in 2011 and was replaced by his compatriot Pubudu Dassanayake. A former Test wicketkeeper, he had coached Canada to the 2011 World Cup and a much-coveted place in the HPP.

When Dassanayake arrived, Nepal were a respected side at regional level but they had yet to make the global impact the fans demanded. He encountered an amateurish cricket administration in which political interference was rife, as well as a haphazard and uncoordinated domestic structure. Nepal had talent, but they lacked many of the prerequisites needed to develop as a cricket nation.

CAN was an antiquated organisation, ill-equipped to make the far-reaching reforms necessary for Nepalese cricket to become a global presence. With officials appointed and discarded at the whim of government ministers who knew little about cricket, in reality the sport was run by regional volunteers. ‘The structure blocked professionalism of the sport,’ recounted Devendra Subedi, vice-president of the Nepal Sports Journalist Forum and a local umpire.

In many associates, where the hegemony of football is total, the professionalism of cricket is an almost laughable prospect. But with the popularity and potential sponsorship opportunities Nepal offers, it is the amateurism of officials, rather than a lack of public interest, that inhibits progress.

Such root-and-branch reforms take years, and in the short term Dassanayake had to focus on the resources he already had available. He arranged scholarships to Sri Lanka to increase the exposure of the players and arranged for the captain, Paras Khadka, to play a season in the Canadian League. Yet these were only token measures. Dassanayake pinpointed a lack of ‘bench strength’ as the main issue he faced, a result of the failing system that he inherited.

In his first full year in charge, Nepal qualified for the World Twenty20 qualifier, which was help in Dubai in March 2012. It was an important milestone for the country, but with only two qualification spots available Nepal were never close to competing for a place in the tournament proper. The experience was to sharpen his resolve.

CAN has always lagged behind the ambition of the country’s fans. Many lampooned the governing body as a politically driven relic, devoid of ideas and innovation. By now, the organisation was managing an annual budget of around a million dollars, drawn from an ICC grant, government funding, sponsorship and TV deals. More was being invested in training camps and pre-tournament tours. Regrettably, the fundamental weaknesses were still being ignored.

There seemed to be no solution, at least not in a time-frame short enough to appease the fans. Possible salvation came from the ICC’s restructuring of their major tournaments. Although the future model for the 50-over World Cup was frustratingly limited to ten teams, the Twenty20 format was opened up, with six out of the 16 teams from the qualifier progressing to a preliminary round of the World Twenty20, which would include full members Zimbabwe and Bangladesh.

It was, said many, a deception which only appeared to present opportunities for aspiring nations while ultimately protecting the commercial interests of sponsors and the top eight full members; for Nepal, it provided a realistic chance of qualification for a global event for the first time in their history.

The change transformed the 2013 World Twenty20 qualifiers, giving more teams something to compete for. Nepal’s quarter-final against regional rivals Hong Kong was one of those must-win associate fixtures. It needed a heroic all-round performance to pull Nepal through. With 13 required in the last over, Sharad Vesawker hit a four and a six to win the match, World Twenty20 qualification and his own place in the Nepalese sporting pantheon.

For Vesawker, it would lead to a diary full of chat show appearances and a glimpse of the adoration his captain enjoyed. On one show the presenter ended the 30-minute interview with a deft attempt at expectation management, concluding, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day after all…it took several years.’ As for Dassanayake, he was hailed as the hero for creating a winning culture and achieving what Dias never could.

The euphoria proved short-lived. The reality is that without the format change, Nepal would have finished the tournament frustrated and demoralised once again; their semi-final defeat to Afghanistan would have prolonged their wait for an appearance in a global tournament. While the glitz of Twenty20 was undoubtedly attractive, the real prize was a place in the HPP through the World Cup qualifier, held in New Zealand in early 2014. Despite the fans’ expectations, it was an unmitigated disaster that recalled the heartache of 2005.

In the opening game they were dismantled by the UAE; in the second humbled by Scotland; in the third humiliated by ten wickets by Hong Kong. Their fans had suffered disappointment before, but not when expectations had been so realistically high.

A perennial problem for Nepal has been the absence of a genuine match-winner. It is telling that in a country where the domestic structure has struggled to produce a player of international quality, so few players have had experience of playing outside Nepal. Fans went into frenzy when leg-spinning all-rounder Shakti Gauchan, known for his football-style knee-slide wicket celebration, was selected to train with Rajasthan Royals in 2012. Training was all he did, however: he did not receive a contract, let alone play a single match in the IPL.

Seamer Binod Das, now a coach at the National Cricket Academy and popular chat show host, was the first star of Nepalese cricket. A bowler who relied on line and length rather than express pace, he played a starring role in Nepal’s 2004 Intercontinental Cup campaign. Debonair, intelligent and softly spoken, he is arguably the most respected authority on cricket in the country and many believe that he will one day coach the national team, but he does not have the dynamism to develop a profile overseas.

Dassanayake’s time in Canada had shown that to win key matches, star players had to dominate. The feats of Canada’s John Davison, who scored an extraordinary 111 off 76 balls against West Indies in the 2003 World Cup, were testament to that. His mission is to make heroes out of consistent performers.

Basant Regmi may never achieve the global profile of Kevin O’Brien or Ryan ten Doeschate but his recent performances have been extraordinary. A promising left-arm seamer in his youth, who could swing the ball both ways, he once uprooted Suresh Raina’s off stump in an Under-17 contest, an anecdote he still relishes recalling. But tragedy struck a few years later, when he almost died in a terrible motorbike accident. ‘After the accident was a difficult time. I felt as if the sky was falling in,’ he recalled. ‘I started again from scratch turning to spin which proved a game changer for me. I tried to imitate Daniel Vettori and learn how a spinner gets batsmen out.’

He soon became twice the bowler he would ever have been as a seamer. By the start of 2015 he was the all-time leading wicket-taker in the World Cricket League with 96 victims from 46 matches. He has more wickets in fewer matches than the great Afghan quick Hameed Hassan, with a significantly better economy and strike rate. His average of just 11 is truly remarkable.

Regmi proved too much for Mozambique in 2008 when he demolished them with the extraordinary figures of 5-8. Crucially, he has remained dangerous as Nepal have risen through the divisions, constantly improving as the challenge of out-foxing batsmen has driven him on. He is still young for a spinner and Dassanayake, not one for a throwaway compliment, has stated that Basant has the ability to be the best bowler in associate and affiliate cricket.

While Regmi has provided the platform for success, the recent rise of Nepalese cricket can be ascribed to one player: the inspirational Paras Khadka. Seldom before has the fate of a cricketing nation been so dependent on the form of one man. He embodies Nepal’s chances of success.

Khadka became interested in cricket as a schoolboy. At the age of seven he carved his own bat in order to play in the nets after lessons. His talent was spotted at an inter-school tournament from which he was selected for his region and then for the national training camp. Inspired by the giant-killing heroics of the 2002 Under-19 team and the idolisation of their captain Binod Das, he set his heart on playing for his country.

He did not have to wait long, making his debut as a raw but confident 16-year-old; he soon established himself as the leading all-rounder in the team. He assumed the captaincy in 2009 and has shown himself an astute leader. With responsibility, his own game has flourished. He can bowl both medium pace and off spin. He turned 27 in October 2014 and is already into his second decade as an international cricketer.

Khadka’s value is perhaps best reflected not in his statistics, impressive as they are, or even his star turns, increasingly frequent in recent years, but in how Nepal fare when he is unavailable. In November 2013 he steered Nepal to the World Twenty20. In March the following year, he was injured as he watched his team capitulate at the World Cup Qualifier. For Nepalese fans ‘P & P’, Pubudu and Paras, are the dream team of coach and captain. The captain is now beginning to earn the money his profile warrants, through CAN payments, match fees, sponsorship and a lucrative sideline in modelling. So far he has not pursued cricketing contracts elsewhere in the world, such as Bangladesh and India, but that remains a possibility.

While the 2013 World Twenty20 qualifier was a major milestone as far as the cricketing public were concerned, 2014 saw a fundamental reform in the domestic game. Within the existing, archaic structure, players earned a pittance and could not make a living out of cricket. Established stars such as Das and Gauchan managed to pay their bills through a sponsorship deal with a noodle company, but others struggled.

Slowly, the players began to realise the power they had and used this to shape a game in which good performances were rewarded. Into this impasse entered Zohra Sports Management and telecoms giant NCell with the concept of a lucrative, player-focused Nepal Premier League (NPL), inspired by the popular model south of the border. Launched in a two-day format, squads were to consist of established national team players, the cream of Under-19 talent and two overseas players. It was a pared-down version of the IPL, with a player auction for the franchises to build their squads. Players were paid per match in a sliding scale ranging from 5,000 Rs (£31) for the captain to 1,000 Rs (£6) for Under-19 players. Admittedly a far cry from the millions on offer at the IPL, but a captain’s match fees for seven games was the equivalent of six months’ salary for the average Nepalese person. The principle that cricketers should be treated as professionals was more important than the level of payment.

Fans thought the creation of the NPL heralded a new dawn of professionalism, but these hopes were thwarted by the perennial problem in Nepalese cricket: the amateurism of the governing body. On the eve of the tournament, CAN withdrew its endorsement citing a lack of transparency around income and expenditure involving Zohra Sports Management. CAN alleges there was a breach of ACC and ICC principles. It transpired that players had refused to accept that their match fees were managed by CAN, who had failed to honour payments due to them in the past. It was inevitable that players with a global profile would outgrow the parochial governance of CAN.

The 50-over tournament went ahead but without the headline-grabbing foreign players as proposed. It was not as successful as the sponsors and organisers anticipated for an inaugural season. A precedent had been set, though, and Nepalese cricket will never be the same again. The question is whether the best players will still be available as figureheads for the new league or will they be tempted by better offers from abroad? A similar issue faces Irish, Scottish and Dutch players in their own interprovincial leagues.

One potential model for the development of cricket in Nepal involves the support of local Test-playing nations. There is no doubt that both Ireland and Scotland benefitted from integration with the English county system. This proximity has led to many Irish and Scots signing full-time county contracts and using their professional experiences to boost the performances of their national sides.

Cricket Australia has been extremely influential in the development of Papua New Guinea in recent years, through integration into state tournaments and coaching and development initiatives. This raises the question as to why India, the richest and most powerful cricket nation in the world, has not reached out to its northern neighbours. Many feel that it would be a constructive development if the Nepal national team could be incorporated into the Indian domestic List A or first-class structure.

With the BCCI ignorant of or indifferent to Nepal’s development and deep-rooted flaws in CAN, the role of the ACC has been crucial. ACC development officer Rumesh Ratnayake has been heavily involved, helping to expand coaching support, providing facilities assessment and giving guidance on high performance. Supporting and guiding a cricket organisation stuck in the past rather than looking to the future has not been an easy task for the ACC, but it has performed a vital role behind the scenes: Dassanayake referred to it as the ‘backbone of Nepal cricket’. But with the remit and financial independence of regional development offices left uncertain in the most recent ICC shake-up, it is not yet clear whether organisations such as CAN will be able to rely on it as much in the future.

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.

Beneath worthy ideals of charity was more hard-nosed pragmatism. Cricket in China, even as a marginal sport, meant cash. Lots of cash. ‘As soon as China breaks through,’ declared the then ACC chief executive Syed Ashraful Huq, ‘I foresee the total global revenues for cricket increasing by up to 30 to 40 per cent.’

How he arrived at the figure was never really clear but it looked good on press releases. Sports business ‘experts’ like the Australian Ian McCubbin were quoted in international newspapers talking up the prospects for cricket in China. Like India, China has a mammoth and growing middle-class population. Alongside a clutch of billionaires and masses of people living in poverty. In the emerging classes, though, riches reside and these skin-deep similarities between the nations seemed enough to convince many of cricket’s commercial potential in China.

China is indeed a tantalising prospect that could fix cricket’s hopelessly lopsided finances. Belying the sport’s global pretensions, wealth is concentrated in the Big Three nations. The BCCI’s justification for the 2014 power-grab was simple: Since the Indian market bankrolls the sport – 80 per cent of cricket’s global revenue comes from the Indian market – they should control it too.

If the China dream were ever to become a reality it would free up the economics and dilute India’s dominance. It would allow for a true governance revolution. ‘If just ten per cent of China’s population played, that would be 100 million new fans,’ said Shahriar Khan (no relation to Shaharyar Khan mentioned on page 104) of the ACC. The Woolf Report, commissioned by the ICC in 2011 to investigate the way the game was governed, concluded that an independent board should run the game and a stronger role be granted to non-Test-playing countries. That the precise opposite has happened is entirely due to the structure of the game’s economics.

Mei Chun Hua had barely played cricket before she captained China. It was 2007 and her team had travelled to Malaysia for the Asia Cup. She had been introduced to the game at university the previous year and was soon discovered by Rashid Khan, China’s coach, who’d been scouting the country for players. ‘When he saw me bowl for the first time he said, “This is the girl we need!”’ Mei recalled in 2013. ‘He saw my personality and told me I was a leader for our team.’

Mei was an all-round sportswoman. Her entry into the specialist Shenyang Sports University came from her prowess in javelin throwing, but the transition to cricket made her an international-class athlete.

Success for Mei and success for China was immediate. China won their opening fixture, against Singapore, with Mei scoring an unbeaten 26 and taking three wickets. Her team then went on to beat the UAE, a well-established associate nation, en route to the semi-final where they lost to Nepal. ‘We knew so little about cricket and had no experience,’ she said. ‘So to reach the semi-final was good but we should have played better.’

From that early success China women have continued to improve. They made the semi-final of the 2010 Asian Games, losing only to Bangladesh, and have since reached the final of the Asia Twenty20 tournament three times. It’s not a crowded field but the women are among the best non-Test nations in Asia.

Mei is also an example of how the development strategy can work. Her introduction to cricket came from a university teacher who had attended a one-off training day with ACC development officer Aminul Islam, and returned with a bag full of ACC-funded kit and brimful of intent. As Mei conceded her school teacher did not really know the game, but he was still able to enthuse a few students to take it up.

Soon after, the touring national coaching set-up identified Mei’s talent and trained her more seriously. She was then invited to Shanghai where she was introduced, through the Shanghai Cricket Association, to the Shanghai Cricket Club and the group of expats who could further enhance her game. It was enough to translate her talent into results.

The comparative success of the women compared to the men in part reflected the attitude towards women’s cricket that still prevailed in many Asian cricketing countries. It also hinted at a divide in Chinese society.

Cricket is an explicitly alien presence in China. According to those involved in the game in China, women, rather than men, are more willing to embrace the unfamiliar. Partly it’s out of necessity. China’s welcoming of global capitalism has come from a generally female workforce in textile and manufacturing production. It is women workers driving China’s development story and they who have had to break with old institutions and practices. In what remains a paternalist society, women also have more to gain from pursuing change.

Mei’s story also speaks to the obstacles facing cricket. She was forced into retirement in 2011, aged just 26, as her studies were over and there was no career to be made in the game. She now works full-time in teaching, and despite being a qualified coach the has little opportunity to pursue the sport.

There is no meaningful recreational cricket in most of China. The two leagues that exist – in Shanghai and Guangzhou – are both expat-run, largely male and despite efforts to develop links with local schools and universities, do not offer enough of a chance for grassroots development. The bug has bitten, though, and Mei is still obsessed with the game. She dedicated her one week of annual leave last year to watching China women in the Asia Cup. ‘I really wish the team to go well,’ she said. ‘So I keep following them.’

Since her retirement, and the team’s continued success on the international stage, more resources are being put into women’s cricket. In 2014 the women’s team went on a two-month tour to New Zealand, funded by the Shandong provincial government, and were sponsored to tour England as part of the preparations for the Asian Games held in South Korea in September. The sports university in Shenyang is now offering pre-graduate diplomas, alongside undergraduate and masters degrees, which allows them to take 16-year-olds and give them a decade in the game. Though not perfect it is a useful way of delaying the inevitable moment when real life must take over.

I caught a glimpse of live Chinese cricket during the women’s tour to England in July 2014. Playing on the nursery ground at Lord’s against an invitational MCC XI, they lost, but it was their only defeat all tour. What struck initially was the noise. China women were the loudest cricket team I’ve heard. There was no sledging as such, just constant, well-drilled encouragement. ‘Jayou’ (literally, ‘add oil’) was one familiar shout. The bowling and fielding was intensely well organised as players walked in during every run-up, clapped every ball, backed up every throw and skipped quickly between overs.

Such textbook skills made China a strong fielding side but proved part of their weakness as a batting team. All upright elbows and full bat faces, they were technically strong but outdated. Coaches in China argue that this technical proficiency separates them from other fledgling sides and has underpinned their relative success. Yet the predominance of the limited-overs format, alloyed to the physical strength of professionals in the full member nations, has made women’s cricket a fast-paced sport at the highest level.

Claire Taylor, the great England batsman, who was playing for MCC against China, forged her prolific batting career on a bottom-handed technique drawn from her hockey-playing days. To win short-form games and chase large totals, women cricketers especially needed to embrace unorthodoxy and find ways to muscle boundaries.

China regularly beats fellow affiliate nations during the group stages of tournaments, only to lose heavily to teams like Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. It might be that China’s textbook approach is hindering their jump to the next level. It is actually a trait that captures a deeper problem with cricket’s development in China. In whatever small way China hastried to develop cricket, it has been an elite project. Ex-Test players like Aminul, or Rashid Khan are hired as coaches instead of group organisers that might be more suited to the kind of work needed in Chinese cricket at this stage.

Even domestic matches are played to international standard rules which judge wides harshly and end up slowing down the game. Zhang Tian has been known to describe China’s approach to cricket as ‘fostering the elite-level game’ which is fine in theory, but as cricket-obsessed British expat Matt Smith put it simply, ‘There is no elite cricket in China.’

It was when he’d sat down that Matt Smith realised how familiar the faces felt. He’d been in China for eight years, having left Lincolnshire to teach English at Shenyang Aerospace University. Five years ago he’d started a cricket team at his university and in the time since he’d become a central figure in China’s fledgling cricket story. At a dinner in Shanghai celebrating the 2014 edition of the national cricket championships he noticed that China had developed something of its own cricket establishment.

The tournament is an annual event that started eight years ago made up of primary school, middle school and university sides. For many teams it is the only proper cricket played all year. The university and middle school teams are where the national squads are drawn from and the 2014 edition had six women’s and men’s sides. The core group of teams – though not the players – have remained largely unchanged for the past seven or eight years and so have the administrators, umpires and scorers.

At the dinner was Ge Tao, who would be coaching the national squads in a couple of weeks and Dr Liu, who’s written cricket’s only Mandarin coaching manual along with a clutch of others Smith recognised. ‘I’ve got to know them,’ said Smith. ‘We see each other every year, probably get drunk once, commiserate, encourage and sweat profusely. Shanghai in July and August is no place for mad dogs.’

This emerging cricketing community in China was a promising sign but, for Smith, an all-too-rare beacon of hope. Despite his years in China he remains the kind of pessimistic Englishman authors write cliches about. He’d fallen out of love with cricket, until one day deciding to try and introduce the game to some of his students. The struggle to make cricket legible to people who lacked even the most basic grasp of its core concepts forced him to reflect on the sport. ‘It was that effort to really communicate the game which made me really think about cricket and my affection for it grew again,’ Smith said.

Smith’s involvement in Chinese cricket is entirely independent. Given no financial or administrative support from any of the game’s authorities, and with no charity or company to shill, his is an amateur mission fuelled by love. It gives him a more pragmatic perspective than many who prefer the grand stories of potential. ‘The game has made next to no impression in China,’ said Smith. ‘It’s difficult to appreciate how alien the sport is. Even if you don’t follow sport or cricket in England you will have some basic idea of the shape of the game. You don’t have that here. You could throw all the money in the world at cricket in China and it wouldn’t make a difference.’

Smith described how even after an introductory session from an international coach, well-respected sports teachers would return to his university asking ‘so the bowler and batter are on the same team are they?’ The complete miscommunication between those familiar with cricket and the many people in China who don’t know the game, is what Smith dedicates hours of his spare time to tackling. ‘It’s taken me seven years but I’m beginning to understand how to explain cricket and anchor it in Chinese culture.

‘It’s by looking at the underlying ideas of cricket. So if table tennis is a duel, football might be a pitched battle, but cricket is a siege. Once you understand it, it’s obvious. Cricket is a siege-type situation and one man is there to defend his castle from the attacking bowlers and fielders. We even talk about “getting castled”, and that is something Chinese people can easily understand.

‘I think what’s happened is people have tried to explain too much in far too much detail.’

Smith is convinced that the cadence of the game would appeal to the Chinese psyche and has seen how years of pushing the sport in his own university has helped establish it as one of the main cricketing centres in China. During the summer he holds weekly coaching sessions and keeps in regular contact with ACC development officer Aminul Islam, and local coach Ge Tao. His devotion to the cause also helped him take Jiang Shuyao to his Lincolnshire cricket club Cleethorpes as an overseas player in 2012.

Smith had seen Jiang playing for Shenyang Sports University against the Aerospace University and by then Jiang was probably the best player in China. Smith paid the travel costs (later reimbursed by the ACC) and Jiang’s family put up nearly £5,000 for him to have six months in England, playing for the Cleethorpes second XI only because first-team overseas players had to have had first-class experience.

Jiang – who named himself ‘Jonty’ in light of his fielding prowess – impressed, making 72 not out in his first game and ending the season with 776 runs at 31.04.

‘English beer I liked,’ he said. ‘The food? Hmm. Less.’ Prices were also a worry. By the end of the season he said, ‘I have spent 30,000 RMB since I have been here – that’s a year’s wage for my parents and most Chinese.’

Beyond a liking for beer and distaste for English food and prices, Jiang is clear how the time in England enhanced both his technique and broader understanding of cricket’s culture. Yet he has barely had a chance to prove this on the field for China since.

The trouble for Jiang, and the men’s side more broadly, is that their lack of success means they don’t have many opportunities to play international cricket. Until the 2014 Asian Games Jiang’s last international match was in 2012, ending ingloriously with a 13-ball duck as China finished sixth out of seven teams in the ACC Trophy Challenge.

That China did not have a chance to play any cricket for two years between 2012 and 2014 is testament to the vagaries of affiliate cricket organisation and the lack of interest from cricket’s authorities. With no clarity over scheduling of tournaments and limited scope for playing against leading teams with big potential TV audiences, it is difficult to generate sponsorship. ‘We get our shirts paid for,’ said CCA’s Zhang Tian, ‘but there is no other interest for cricket by private companies.’

The Asian Cricket Council was an organisation born of frustration and ambition. Indian officials had been denied a fair share of complimentary tickets to watch their country’s 1983 World Cup miracle win against the West Indies at Lord’s, as the MCC member stands were stuffed with the familiar pink faces instead. On-field triumph demanded off-field change and emboldened by the success of Kapil Dev’s team the Asian countries – India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Singapore – established a formal Asian bloc, the Asian Cricket Conference, to push their case for a greater say in how the game was run.

It is ironic now that in achieving its goal, the ACC could well now die off. When it was set up the ACC was not a part of the ICC but was an outsider, lobbying organisation. It aimed not just to give Asian countries enough complimentary World Cup tickets, but the chance to host the entire tournament itself. Raging against the myopia of the game, it was an internationalist body. Duly, the 1987 World Cup was held in India and Pakistan and cricket’s eastward march began.

Even as India’s administrative hold strengthened through the 1990s, the ACC was still pushing for a more inclusive game. The organisation, based in Malaysia (though ‘incorporated in the offshore island of Labuan’), was also a useful outpost for ambitious administrators. IS Bindra, Jagmohan Dalmiya, Sharad Pawar and N. Srinivasan are among recent history’s most powerful cricket administrators and have all headed the organisation at varying points in between holding top positions in the BCCI and ICC. Dalmiya was for a time a genuine internationalist, and it was during his stint in charge from 2004 to the end of 2005 that the ACC made a significant push for cricket in China.

‘It was being left to countries to drag themselves up to world level before they were given recognition,’ he said when ACC chairman. ‘It should be the other way round. We should recruit other countries and help them develop.’

As such the ACC channelled ICC funds among members in the region, but also organised its own tournament to generate development funds. ‘Every two years we’re able to present the Asia Cup, usually in one of the full member countries and that generates funds through broadcast right sales,’ says John Cribbin, vice-president of the ACC in 2014.

‘Obviously the full members are paid for participation in the event but also a significant amount, which has grown over the years, is allocated for development to supplement ICC funds. In the last round around £2m was designated for development.’

Whether resources could have been better spent remains a relevant question. Certainly one England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) official told me, ‘Money allocated through the ACC doesn’t seem to get very far.’

It is perhaps that suspicion that threatened the future of the ACC when the Big Three formalised their takeover. England were aware that a European lobby made up of a single Test playing country lacked the muscle of an Asian competitor. Australia too felt there was no need to push Asian interests any further. The BCCI, and accordingly the ICC, whose chairman N. Srinivasan also chairs the financial committee of the ACC, were happy to reduce the scope of the organisation.

In August 2014 it emerged that the organisation would focus more on where cricket was already established. Nepal and Afghanistan had qualified for the 2014 World Twenty20 and were the kind of development cases the ACC could support. China, less so. As with the other changes instigated by the Big Three takeover, the associate and affiliate nations had little idea or no say in the move. Instead a general wish to cull administrative excess was offered. Cricket is indeed overburdened with administrators, but as always with ‘efficiency’ changes the powerful seemed to escape the cut.

‘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 series. 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 tournament 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.’

The other issue is that sport, and cricket especially, is not a viable career path for many in China. Parents don’t encourage children to play sport for sport’s sake. If at all, sport can be tolerated if it aids career development. For Newton there is a clear opportunity for cricket here. If China’s affluent classes saw in cricket a way to connect with the culture of universities in the Commonwealth then there is more chance of them supporting it. ‘Cricket allows you to become a global citizen,’ said Newton. ‘That’s how you market it.’

The authorities are failing in this respect. The ICC’s model is to hook cricket to schools and universities with the hope that the state sport apparatus will do the rest from there. Aside from the one-off $5m grant arranged by Speed in 2006 the ICC spends £30,000 a year arranging equipment and training teachers. The idea is for development officers like Aminul Islam to hold one-off group sessions training teachers in the basics of the game in the hope that they go back to their schools and introduce children to the sport.

The ACC and CCA insist that 30,000 school, college and university students have learned the game this way. But the model spreads resources too thinly to make any real impact. At the most generous estimate there are 7,000 people who still play the game once a year or so but the number of teams competing in the annual national cricket championships has not really changed since 2007. Even the ICC now concedes that China is a ‘50-year proposition’. As it is cricket’s chances of growing in China depend on the national team, most likely the women’s team, suddenly finding enough international success to unlock state resources.

The Guangdong International Stadium in Guangzhou is a state-of-the-art, modern cricket ground. ‘Incredible,’ Zhang Tian described it. It is still the only turf pitch in China, it has an electronic scoreboard, media facilities and a capacity for 6,000 spectators. Though it was the first ground in China, it wasn’t the first time Chinese money and labour power had been mobilised for cricket grounds. China’s government spent $132m – and employed thousands of Chinese workers – constructing stadiums in Antigua, St Lucia and Dominica in time for the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies.

The sum is remarkable. By comparison the best associate country, Ireland, receives only around $2m a year from the ICC. China’s interest was, as Zhang put it, more a case of foreign policy than anything to do with sport. China was keen on developing regional links, ahead of rival Taiwan who were doing the same, and cash-strapped Caribbean governments were only too happy to accept. It may be that the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium in Antigua becomes China’s only significant cricketing legacy.

The Guangdong International Stadium was constructed at a typically Chinese pace. Work started on the stadium in May 2008, in August 2009 the ground was ‘little more than a flattened patch of mud’ and by November 2010 it was hosting the opening match of the Asian Games. Since then, however, there has only been one more tournament played on the ground, the 2012 Women’s Asia Cup. The ground has stood unused thereafter. Occasionally the national squads would train there, but that was rare. Eventually the ground was leased by NForce who used the ground to host an expat league along the lines of that in Shanghai. It features no native Chinese players.

The fortunes of the International Cricket Stadium since it hosted the 2010 Asian Games captures the stilted progress of cricket in China. Four years on, Jiang Shuyao was captain of the men’s team. ‘My hope is that we can win one game,’ he told me a week before heading off to the 2014 Asian Games. ‘Malaysia are a good side but South Korea we can beat.’

The tournament didn’t work out for him or his team as China lost both games and Jiang failed twice. Though there were bright moments – leg-spinner Zhong Wenyi took four wickets in four balls against South Korea – China finished bottom of their group.

China’s women were better, again proving that they were among the best associate nations in Asia. They easily beat the hosts, before a more significant victory over Hong Kong and Japan en route to the semi-finals. But at the first sight of strong opposition, they were thrashed. Bundled out for 37 against reigning champions Pakistan, they did not give a chance for their stronger suit, fielding and bowling, to shine.

It spoke of the limits facing the Chinese game. They need more opportunities to play against better teams, they need more resources to experience different conditions and most of all they need a domestic set-up that allows them regular cricket. None of that looked any closer in 2014 than it did in 2010.

USA by Peter Miller

IT is October 2012 and word spreads among the cricketing blogosphere that something remarkable is happening on Facebook. Normally the site is full of photos of your friends’ children and people telling you about having a really nice cup of tea. This was different.

The official page of the United States of America Cricket Association (USACA) was the focus. In a thread that included over 2,000 comments spread over seven days, the then-executive secretary, Kenwyn Williams, set about making his organisation a laughing stock. Some would argue that USACA had long been sniggered at by the people who knew it well, but suddenly everyone was talking about it.

Cricket in the USA is the very definition of a niche sport. While there are cricket fans among the expats and immigrants from cricket-playing countries, those that are interested in American cricket are not easy to find. This social media meltdown brought it to the attention of many across the world.

The post that caused so much interest was Williams accusing Peter Della Penna, a journalist who has covered USA cricket for a number of publications, of being biased. This accusation seemed to stem from the fact that Della Penna was attempting to hold the organisation to account for its failure to deliver on its ‘100-day plan’, which had already been extended to be 196 days long. Della Penna had obtained some leaked e-mails from a source within the USACA and Williams seemed to feel this was breaching some sort of ethical code. A sporting governing body taking to social media to deride a journalist for reporting on them was remarkable in itself. The way Williams went about it was even more so.

In a series of personal attacks, Williams accused Della Penna and Martin Williamson, ESPN’s managing director of digital content in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, of being bloggers and of not understanding journalistic ethics. Both Della Penna and Williamson are well thought of in journalistic circles and both have many years of experience. That did not stop Williams posting the following:

‘Unfortunatelly [sic] your obsession and lack of journalistic credentials do not support you [sic] overly obsessive cult like reporting on USA Cricket. You are a blogger and no portection [sic] is afforded to you under the law. As you will soon find out.’

This comment was quickly followed by a legal threat from Williams, who claimed he was a lawyer. It later emerged he was a paralegal for a New York law firm. Despite condemnation from almost every corner, Williams would not be deterred. He accused several posters of being alter-egos of Peter Della Penna and continued his rants without the aid of spell check or logic. It also seemed that Williams was unaware of how important journalists and bloggers are in promoting any sport. The word needs to be spread or the game dies through lack of the oxygen that is publicity.

Those commenting on the post included the editor of The Cricketer magazine, Andrew Miller, and former New Zealand bowler Iain O’Brien. O’Brien even offered to come out to America to do some coaching. This offer drew a rather enigmatic response from Williams; in a private message to O’Brien on Facebook, he said ‘I am a marketing and brand expert as you can well see. It looks bad but its [sic] intended. USACA needs a wakeup call. I think they got it. When we normalise we will discuss. I am only interested in youth and women cricket.’

The USACA wagons took a while to start circling on Williams (five days to be precise) but the response was unequivocal when it came. Williams was suspended and told to cease all activities that related to his role within the USACA. A message was posted on the organisation’s website which stated that the comments made on Facebook did not reflect the views of the board and that the matter was under investigation. We learnt of Williams’s suspension from his one ally on Facebook throughout all of this, a ‘Rozay Chardonnay’, who agreed with everything that Williams had to say. The identity of Rozay was never confirmed but some suggested that it was Williams’s wife, Pauline. She too was subject to some controversy. She was a member of the USA women’s side when she walked out on her team-mates.

It was this incident involving his wife that first saw Kenwyn Williams enter the murky world of American cricket politics. He leapt to Pauline’s defence after she fell out with team management at an ICC qualifying event against Canada in July 2010. The argument stemmed from Mrs Williams’s insistence that she should keep wicket. The coaches at the tournament decided that she was not best suited to this role, not least because she was not standing up to the stumps for the spinners. Mrs Williams told DreamCricket about her displeasure at her treatment, ‘Actually, they put me to field in a position that I’m not used to fielding. They were actually punishing me.’

The sanction that Mrs Williams received for her behaviour was a 12-month suspension from the USA team. Not long after the suspension had been handed out, Mrs Williams received a letter from the president of the USACA, Gladstone Dainty, lifting the ban. There was only one problem: Dainty said he never wrote any such letter. Enter Kenwyn Williams, stage right. He jumped up and down, claimed this letter was genuine and commenting on a blog post on ondriveupdate he stated, ‘It’s amazing that so many people are trying so hard to keep one HIGHLY qualified woman from playing cricket.’

Williams put his name in the ring for the role of USACA president, but eventually stood for election as executive secretary instead. His campaign was a successful one. At one point during his campaign he offered iPads to the first ten league presidents who voted for him. It is unclear if anyone ever got one of these Apple devices. Those at the USACA seemed to decide it was better having Williams in the tent pissing out than getting their shoes wet from the outside.

So there he was, executive secretary of the USACA and causing a storm. He was suspended from his role, but not before both he and the mysterious Rozay had leaked all sorts of private correspondence from within the USACA. One of the problems he had with the Della Penna article that began his Facebook fiasco was that it contained leaked e-mails. That he then went on to leak e-mails himself meant that the irony was even more obvious than Williams’s foolishness.

So how did cricket in the USA get to that point? We need to go back a long way to find cricket’s beginnings in the USA.

The USA had all the ingredients needed for the creation of a Test-playing nation; a history of the game dating back to the early 18th century, ties to the United Kingdom through Empire, trade links and immigration. Cricket was played by the ‘common folk’ on holidays such as Whitsuntide, Boxing Day and New Year’s.

Dr Tim Lockley of Warwick University told me, ‘The cricket field was a place where all men were welcome.’ It was played all over the colonial United States in Virginia, Georgia, Maryland and New York. By the 19th century, tours to the USA from visiting teams were not common, but profitable and well attended. Why then is baseball the ‘American pastime’ when it could have been cricket? Why has cricket never taken hold of the public imagination?

In an alternative world the New York Yankees are a Twenty20 phenomenon, the World Series fixing scandal of 1919 was about no-balls bowled to order. Babe Ruth scored the record number of sixes and was a world-class all-rounder. The present-day money-making power of the BCCI is dwarfed by the economic powerhouse that is the United States of America Cricket Association.

The first international cricket match took place in September 1844. Not only was this the first fixture of its kind, it was the first contest in any sport between two countries. While there were the Olympics of ancient times, this cricket match is considered to be the first time two modern countries competed. It wasn’t England playing Australia; it was billed as The United States of America versus The British Empire’s Canadian Province. Some 10,000 people attended the event and somewhere close to $2,000,000 in present-day terms was wagered on the match. Canada won by 23 runs.

When the first tour by an English side took place in 1859, it was a big deal. It caught the imagination of press and public alike. John Wisden was a member of a side that played the United States three times and Lower Canada twice. Despite the home teams fielding sides of 22 players, England won all five matches easily, two of them by an innings. Even with the lack of home team success there was strong local support with as many as 25,000 people watching the matches according to some reports. The England players were paid £90 each for the two-month trip – a considerable sum of money at the time.

In a paper for the International Journal of the History of Sport, Dr Lockley wrote that as the Industrial Revolution took hold, there was a move by moral reformers to promote sport as a distraction from the gambling dens and brothels that sprung up in the fast growing cities. Cricket was considered the most suitable for the purpose of moral reform.

‘Of all the sports then played in urban America, cricket lent itself particularly well to the intentions of moral reformers and the muscular Christianity movement. Players and spectators alike accepted cricket as a game which encouraged honourable behaviour, sportsmanlike conduct, and discipline – the ideal Christian game.’

Dr Lockley goes on to quote a letter to the sporting press of the time that said, ‘One of the noblest features of our great national game is that it draws together all classes and conditions, who take rank upon the cricket ground according to their talents in the game.’ Cricket was a way that those of the higher echelons of society might successfully spread their values among those lower down the social pecking order.

Of the sports that were available at the time, cricket was relatively cheap. In comparison to hunting with firearms, boating or horse racing the money you needed to take up cricket was affordable. While a boat would cost you several hundred dollars the cost of a bat and a ball was within the reach of the common man. This added to its appeal to those in the aspiring middle classes as a leisure pursuit.

Another advantage was that it allowed young men to show themselves off in a masculine way to the opposite sex, with Dr Lockley stating, ‘In part the attractiveness of cricket as a sport to young single men was that it would show them off in an ideal light to young female spectators.’

By the time that the American Civil War began, cricket started to take hold. It was increasing in popularity. According to some historians it was far and away the most popular sport in the USA, much more popular than the upstart baseball. After the war had ended cricket never again reached those heights.

The reasons for this are much discussed. Dr Lockley writes, ‘Those who have studied the post-war decline of cricket in favour of baseball in the North have highlighted a variety of causes. Some argue that cricket was simply too slow and uninteresting for spectators, in comparison to baseball; others point to the general desire of Americans to find an American sport, rather than an English one to claim as a national pastime.’

Dr Lockley believes that in the South the way that young men could appear ‘manly’ was fulfilled by military service for the Confederacy rather than on the sports field. By the time the war had finished wreaking havoc across America, the world had changed. Cricket had begun to decline. As the South came to terms with the new economic realities of the abolition of slavery there was little time for leisurely pursuits. Survival was the main aim. In the North, cricket retreated to its heartlands. Philadelphian anglophiles and wealthy New Yorkers still played the game, but they were not interested in expanding the sport.

Baseball began its rise to dominance. A continued tinkering with the rules made it much more of a spectator-friendly pursuit. It was billed as the American game, and as America’s sense of identity sharpened, this idea of a unique pastime had appeal to the public. This is despite baseball having its roots in the folk games of England. Baseball was great at finding a way to market itself.

As the take-up of radio skyrocketed in the early 20th century, baseball grew with it. The games were broadcast live and this helped to spread the sport far and wide, rather than it being restricted to those in urban areas that could make it to the ballpark to watch it. Heroes were created. Charles ‘Old Hoss’ Radbourne, John Clarkson, Albert Spalding and George ‘Babe’ Ruth became celebrities. Baseball was a game for the common man and it knew how to sell itself. It wanted to expand, it wanted to be loved. It was as American as the First Amendment and the Stars and Stripes.

That is not to say that cricket disappeared overnight. There were a number of American cricketers in the late 19th and early 20th century of some renown. John Barton ‘Bart’ King was the greatest of those by some distance. A fast bowler who could get the ball to move late, he impressed all who saw him on his three tours to England in 1897, 1903 and 1908. On the last of those tours he topped the first-class bowling averages, taking 87 wickets at 11.01 in just ten matches.

He was a member of the Philadelphian side that in the period between the end of the 19th century and the outbreak of the Second World War were playing cricket of a very high standard. King played in the Gentlemen of Philadelphia side that beat the touring Australians in 1893, taking seven wickets in the match. The Philadelphians won by an innings.

Tours to America were a profitable business and the Australians were regular visitors on their way home from touring England. The last time that they visited the USA to play first-class cricket was in 1913, but they did visit the USA again for a two-month tour in 1932 where they played 33 exhibition matches. It was a strong Australian side with Don Bradman featuring for the tourists. England also toured fairly regularly, as MCC, the last of which to feature first-class cricket taking place in 1907.

Perhaps the end of the idea of expansion of cricket in America came in 1909 with the formation of the Imperial Cricket Conference. As the name suggests this organisation had its roots in the British Empire. The USA was not part of that particular club and they were not invited to join. As the organisation of international cricket was becoming more regimented the USA was excluded, despite the fact that many observers have said that the cricket that was taking place in America was of a higher standard than that being played in South Africa. While the Commonwealth roots of cricket are often seen as a catalyst for development, in this instance they actually prevented it. The ICC began as an inward-looking organisation and that hasn’t changed.

The USA did not have a cricket association until the 1960s and it did not join the renamed International Cricket Conference until 1965, when it was among the first of the associate nations invited to join. Cricket had lost its battle, but mostly because those that had the chance to fight for it hadn’t bothered. Baseball was America’s game, cricket the reserve of immigrants who brought the game with them.

While there were some Americans who took up the game they were the minority. Those that arrived in America from the Caribbean and the Asian sub-continent brought their love of the game with them and passed it on to their children. Pockets of English players created clubs to play the game, but facilities and opposition were limited. Even then there was no real interest in spreading the game to the population at large. Cricket was a little bit of home, sharing it with the locals was out of the question. By 2010 the then CEO of the USACA referred to cricket as an ‘underground’ sport.

This is a history of missed opportunities and unfortunate happenstance for cricket in America. There was a love of the game in the middle of the 19th century, a steady influx of people from cricket-playing nations and a growth of interest in the game among Americans. It is a story of what might have been. America could have been a place where cricket was a mass participation sport. The reasons that this did not happen are manifold, far too many for it to easily overcome. But no one ever really tried.

Cricket in America today is administered by the USACA. It has been this way since 1965. The formation of the USACA also saw the entry of the USA into what was then the International Cricket Conference. Despite the near 50 years that the USACA has existed there has still not been a resurgence in the fortunes of cricket in America. Instead the history of the USACA has been one of infighting and stagnation. Over the years those that run cricket in America have been accused of fiduciary failure on almost every level.

While there are several centres of cricket, they are far from evenly spread. Florida and Texas have a large cricket-playing comhmunity whilst in other areas there is none. The size of America hasn’t helped with this insular administration. While other associate nations are relatively small and close-knit communities, in the USA the players are spread thinly and rarely come across each other. This has further cemented the desire to promote players that you know to the exclusion of others and made funding expansion even more difficult.

While the ICC has long backed this organisation, anyone close to the USACA views it as either an obstacle to getting things done, a waste of time and money or a laughing stock. No matter how many times USACA gets backing from those running the world game it repays it with more ineptitude.

From the start of 2013 until March 2014 the USACA was led by a new chief executive officer. Darren Beazley took the helm at the organisation and began a process of reform. His time in office was used to put together six pillars to rebuild American cricket. His strategic plan for cricket in the USA set about introducing sustainability and good governance.

He was a well-qualified man for such a role, in fact he was approached to do it at the behest of Tim Anderson, the head of associate development at the ICC. Beazley had worked for the Western Australian Cricket Association, the Australian Football League and, most recently, been an executive in the energy business. He had a sporting background and business acumen.

It was not in the least surprising that it took just 14 months for him to resign from a three-year contract. Speaking in January 2014 while still in the post, Beazley was upbeat about what he had planned for cricket in America. He believed that he was moving cricket in the USA in the right direction. He said he wanted to deal with the big issues. He talked of how fixing the dysfunctional nature of USACA was the big job. ‘When I arrived the biggest thing that I said to the board at the first meeting when I met with them in New York was that the big challenge for US cricket is the move from volunteerism to professionalism.’

The biggest challenge for Beazley was to get the board to understand its role. Rather than running US cricket the board needs to be overseeing the activities of those who do. Volunteer administrators have run the sport as their personal fiefdom. There has been a vein of self-interest that has run through so many of the decisions that it has reached. Expansion of the game has all too often conflicted with the agenda of those in charge.

Beazley made it very clear that the success or failure of his vision for cricket in America was this correction in governance structures. He talked of how the success or failure of the USACA as an organisation depended completely on the ability of the board to implement radical change in its governance structures. The motivation for doing this was to get locals playing cricket. Beazley said, ‘Until we get Americans playing the game and administering the game you are not going to reach your potential.’

Stakeholders in American cricket have become so disenchanted with the administration of the USACA that it has led to the formation of a rival organisation. The American Cricket Federation was created by those who felt that cricket in America could be offered more than the USACA was giving them. The current man at the head of this rival entity is Jamie Harrison. He has long argued that the relationship that cricket in the USA has had with the ICC is one of a colony rather than that of an equal.

According to Harrison, the USA is a marketplace to sell the existing product, not to allow America to develop its own. When you see USACA putting on showcase events between full members in Florida rather than getting kids playing the game it looks like Harrison may have a point. Those fixtures between established teams represent a great pay day for those that run the international game, but they leave very little in the way of legacy going forward. Once the circus has moved on there are empty beer cans and money for the organisers. American cricket has nothing.

‘This explains the ICC’s unwavering approval of USACA,’ Harrison said. ‘Which by being the ICC’s functionary in the American marketplace, does just enough to keep the ICC happy. If the ICC really cared about the USA becoming a cricket powerhouse, or even a major associate nation, it would have jettisoned USACA years ago. The ICC’s propping up of USACA is its ultimate statement of contempt for the American cricketer.’

Many Americans who are keen to play the game are frozen out of participation in organised cricket. The cricket teams in America have become clubs, in every sense of the word, with restriction on who gains entry and who doesn’t. For cricket players outside of the USA this would seem remarkable. The criteria for getting a game for most teams in the UK is the ability to turn up. It is about getting a team out. And if you have too many players for one team you create a second.

This sense of exclusivity is not just restricted to club cricket, but extends all the way up to the highest echelons of the sport in the United States. Author and US cricket blogger Tom Melville, writing for DreamCricket, relayed some of the frustrations faced by those that would like to see the game expand.

‘A long-time administrator of a local league had expectations that his son would one day play for the national team. But as we talked I asked that if he were truly committed to making cricket a more mainstream American sport was he willing to dedicate himself (at least in the long run) to seeing mainstream Americans one day holding his position, or seeing (again, in the long run) an American taking his son’s position on the national team. A noticeably troubled expression came over his face once I turned the conversation in this direction.

‘But this is exactly the role the expat community must assume if cricket is to move forward, not a role of cultural preservation but transition, committed to a, perhaps slow, but dedicated, self-dissolving of cricket’s cultural insularity into the melting pot of mainstream American culture.’

Americans who are not members of expat communities have long found that trying to get a game is an arduous task. E-mails to clubs go unanswered; phonecalls are full of obfuscation rather than excitement of getting someone new involved. Even when those contacting them are able to say that they have some skill at the game, having learnt it abroad or at another club, there is no enthusiasm to get them playing. A cricketer born in America explained it as follows:

‘They love saying they want cricket to spread to “mainstream Americans”. That’s garbage, because their actions demonstrate the exact opposite. This is their thing, they don’t want somebody coming along kicking them out of the team on a Saturday because this is the thing that they look forward to, they don’t want to share it.’

This is the same problem that existed in the Antebellum era. Cricket has never wanted to expand. As much as people talk of growing the game, increasing take-up and creating a strong national team, their actions speak of the exact opposite. Remember, it is a stated aim of the ICC to grow the game, and the USA is one of the areas in which it is desperate for cricket to take hold. The ICC mission statement is pretty clear, ‘A bigger, better, global game targeting more players, more fans, more competitive teams.’

Just as the Gentlemen of Philadelphia closed the door on potential expansion, so too do cricketers that have brought their love of the game with them from India, Pakistan and the West Indies. It remains a piece of home that they want to keep to themselves. When they take to the field on a Saturday they are not doing so in the hope of creating cricket as a sport with a national presence, they are doing so because this is something they love.

While still in post as CEO, Beazley recognised this as an issue. He said he understood that the spread of cricket in the US was a ‘top-down approach’ where immigrants from a particular country come to America and play the game, but as adults. There is no attempt to teach their American-born children about the game. Instead cricket is something that Dad does on a Saturday, the youngsters might be taken along, but it is as disinterested spectators, not as active participants.

There have been efforts to spread the game but more often than not that has come in the form of ‘sampling’. That is where you go into schools or clubs and give kids a chance to have a go. These often last for less than an hour and are unlikely to get kids desperate to play the game. Often at the end of the sampling session some cricket equipment is left behind, the issue is that no one has left behind the knowledge of how to use it once the trained cricket coaches have moved on to work with the next group. Beazley was keen that there is a more concerted approach to get youngsters playing the game, not just getting excited about the numbers that have held a bat for just a few minutes and calling that a success.

So what of playing numbers? There are often massive figures quoted for the number of cricket fans, often circa ten million, living in America. Of those how many are playing the game? Beazley told me that the number of players is on the increase, but considering the playing base for a country with a population of over 300 million it is a paltry number. The target that Beazley’s six pillars set was 50,000 people playing cricket regularly by 2016.

At the end of the 2012 cricket census carried out by the USACA there were 32,000 cricketers. By the end of 2013 that was up to 41,000. The target should be met, but there is still a huge concern over these playing numbers. ‘The issue that we have got is that in that 41,000 people there are only 980 kids aged 19 and under that are playing organised cricket,’ Beazley revealed.

In one of the most populous countries on the planet fewer than 1,000 young people are playing organised cricket. The moves that Beazley discussed, and those that Jamie Harrison of the ACF are putting in place, should move this figure up. It is, however, representative of just how far cricket has to go in the United States to make any inroads. This is something of which Beazley was aware.

Increasing the impact of US cricket is paramount to any success. It isn’t an easy path, but it is one that is built on foundations far more solid than the ambition to spontaneously turn America into a cricket-playing country by getting the West Indies and New Zealand to play a few games in Florida.

Beazley understood that to grow the game cricket in America needs to have an identity of its own, not one that stems from the cricket structures of other countries. ‘There needs to be a brand for US cricket,’ Beazley told me. ‘The ICC will tell you there are ten million cricket fans within the US. I don’t know how many of those ten million are US cricket fans. When we played most recently in Dubai we had the game streamed live through our website. I expected the viewing numbers based on our experience with Under-19s up in Canada to be through the roof. And it hardly rose from the numbers that we got in Canada.’

There are cricket fans in America but they are not fans of American cricket. They will identify themselves as lovers of the sport but they are not going to go out and buy a USA team jersey. They are not going to go out of their way to watch the team play matches, regardless of the standard of the cricket being played. There are fans of Pakistan, India, the West Indies and England in the US, many of them American citizens. However, their primary focus is on the team of their previous country, not their new one.

This brings us back to the infighting and the politics of the board. While Beazley is very careful to paint his organisation in the best possible light there is an undercurrent of frustration. Speaking to other cricket-playing Americans there is a belief, whether true or not, that jobs and playing spots are sewn up based on membership of one immigrant community or another. There is the allegation that those of a West Indian background will push the case of their players while those originally from India or Pakistan will do the same. As with Mrs Kenwyn Williams, your personal connections are often a more compelling argument for your progression within the USACA than either playing or administrative ability.

Perhaps the most pertinent case of this in recent times is Ryan Corns. Born in South Africa, Corns starred for the USA in the Under-19 World Cup qualifier in 2009. He was player of the tournament, taking wickets and scoring runs and outperforming players like Ireland’s Paul Stirling that have gone on to have significant success. Since then he has had injury issues, but nowhere near enough to justify his continued absence from the USA set-up. Some of those that have been following the game have alleged that his absence can be attributed to his origins.

Peter Della Penna has said that Corns should be an automatic selection in national squads. ‘While he hasn’t always justified a place in the starting 11, he is good enough to be in a 15-man squad for ICC events. Why has he been left out? Because he is South African. In a land where you have the administration rife with self-interest there are interest groups.’

Della Penna says that the cricket administration in the country is full of cliques, mostly supporting the claims of cricketers who have roots in Asia and the Caribbean. Corns’s South African heritage means there is no one fighting his corner based on his family background. ‘He only gets a game if there is somebody that rises above this stuff to get him in the team. But there aren’t enough people like that in USA cricket. There is no defined American cricket identity.’

This insular attitude is apparent from the grassroots up in American cricket. Jamie Harrison of the ACF, when first in the post, talked of leaving the ICC altogether. When he took on the role in June 2013, Harrison said that this colonial relationship with the ICC brings far more harm than good. For Harrison the ICC is not interested in America beyond the dollars it can produce for the full member boards. It is an untapped resource, not dissimilar to the ones that the empires of the past exploited. It is the cricket fans in America that interests the ICC, not American cricket.

For Harrison, the ICC’s actions betray any public pronouncements they may make about expansion, but his attitude and that of the ACF has thawed a little in recent times. The realisation that the ICC is the only chance that cricket in America has of gaining the legitimacy that it needs means the ACF stance has changed.

In February 2014 the ACF issued a statement that said, ‘It has always been the intention of the American Cricket Federation [ACF], a recognised governing body for cricket in the United States, to seek a relationship with the International Cricket Council, as it is our belief that we can do justice to America’s associate membership, whereas USACA has only wasted it.’

The ACF have come to see themselves as a viable alternative to the badly malfunctioning USACA, and they may well have a point. The issue will be that they cannot prove that they are any better placed to run the game in America than those currently in charge unless they are allowed to try. It is very easy to offer explanations of how you would do things differently while you are in opposition. You get to react in hindsight. The real test comes when you are the ones that have to make the decisions in the first place.

The dust had settled on Beazley’s time in office by August 2014 and he said he is happy to talk about all that happened. In fact he seems happy in general. He makes it very clear that he isn’t some sort of disgruntled ex-employee out for revenge. He felt he had something to give USA cricket; he is an experienced sports administrator with four academic degrees. The problem he had was that while he tried doing what was best for cricket in America, there was resistance from ‘two or three key board members’. When asked to identify them he is reluctant, but he said that those who know USACA well would be able to join the dots.

What he thought he was there to do, namely to make radical changes to the governance and management structures at the board, was not what the board wanted him to do. Beazley said that around the time of the AGM he had some serious doubts, ‘I just wasn’t convinced they were serious about making change.’

A job opportunity came up that meant Beazley had a chance to return to Perth, a move that his family were keen for him to take. The timing seemed right and he decided to move on. He said his family were aware of his long-term concerns about the future of USACA. While he was there one of his two staff members was laid off, with the board citing financial constraints as the issue. Despite the assurances that the proposed Twenty20 league that has been talked of for years bringing in big bucks, nothing ever materialised.

He said that it was not an easy decision, but one he is comfortable with. He wishes US cricket well but he is not convinced that the board wants the same. ‘I was serious about what I was doing; I am just not convinced that USACA were serious about becoming professional.’

There are few people better placed to talk about what is stopping cricket’s growth in America than the man who was tasked to run it by the ICC and the USACA. He said the world governing body is the biggest stumbling block facing cricket in the USA. It doesn’t have the will to do anything about the USACA’s intransigence and refusal to change.

It was the ICC’s global development manager who was instrumental in getting Beazley into the post. Beazley told me if it was not for the intervention of Anderson he would not have taken the job. After his first interview he was ‘singularly unimpressed’ with the USACA board. Anderson persuaded him to take the chance. ‘At the end of the day, USACA has been going since 1965. What have they achieved in 50 years? It is staggering how little they have achieved. Look what I did in 15 months.’

People were telling Beazley that they were buying into him, but they were not convinced that USACA had the capability to go with him. Cricket’s brand is tarnished. The combination of bad experiences of dealing with the USACA and the stories of match and spot fixing around the world meant that people were turning away from the sport even before they had given it a chance. He felt that his credibility was on the line, but there was not the same commitment from others.

‘The answer lies in getting in good administrators that have got the experience and understand the market and can work with mainstream sport. And that has to be led by the ICC. You have the right to protect the sovereign borders of a governing body so long as they are acting in the best interests of cricket. I think it has been clearly established now that neither USACA nor the ACF nor anyone else are acting in anyone’s interests other than their own.’

Beazley said the ICC has intervened in other countries when it has needed to, citing Zimbabwe as an example. The issue isn’t one of power; it is a lack of willingness. The market is there for cricket to make inroads, especially if moves are made to Americanise it. As much as that may be anathema to the traditionalists, finding a way for the game to take root may require some changes. American cricket doesn’t have to be exactly the same as what is played on village greens in England, just as alley and tape ball cricket in the sub-continent is a vibrant alternative. To grow, the sport needs to make sacrifices.

So what kind of person ends up playing cricket for the United States of America? How do you end up being a good enough sportsman to hack it at that level, but choose a minority sport as your path?

It is rarely people who were born in America. It is people that have come from cricket-playing countries and made the USA their home. Of the current crop of USA players, the most successful and exciting talent is Steven Taylor. He is almost unique in that he was born in the USA. What is disappointing is that he wants to play for the West Indies.

Speaking to the Jamaican Observer while in the Caribbean for a training camp he was unequivocal about his ambitions. He said, ‘The main reason I am in Jamaica now is to qualify myself to make the Jamaica team and to play for the West Indies.’

So immigrants are where the USA finds its players, and one such person was Usman Shuja. A Pakistani by birth, he came to America as a 19-year-old to study in Texas. When he headed to America he thought that was the end of his dream of playing professional cricket. He was on the fringes of the Pakistan Under-19 squad when the chance to go to America arose.

When he travelled back to Pakistan for the holidays he got to play at a pretty high standard. He bowls quick and he got to play the game with some real stars, at one point turning out for Misbah-ul-Haq’s club. He showed enough promise to get a visit from Waqar Younis to his house for a chat about what is needed to be a top-class fast bowler. This was in late 2000 during a Christmas break. Usman’s father got hold of Waqar’s number and the Pakistani great showed up for a chat with the young man. Playing cricket at this standard left Usman with a desire to play as competitively as possible. Maybe there was a way for him to both study and play.

Then 11 September 2001 happened. Immediately trips from the US back to Pakistan started to become much more difficult. Travelling from Pakistan back to the US was even harder. There was a decision to be made. Would Usman pursue his dream of playing cricket professionally, or would he try and get hold of the ethereal American dream that lay in a land where the chances of a world-class cricketer turning up on your doorstep were remote?

Usman chose America but he did not give up on cricket altogether. He had a trip to Australia in an attempt to improve his cricket, and then once back in the USA he started getting in his car and driving the three hours from his home in Austin to Dallas and Houston to get a game. Both cities had a pretty well established cricket infrastructure. There were about 40 teams, and according to Usman some of them were actually a decent standard. The best players from Dallas and Houston would feed into the Central West team which goes on to compete against other regions.

Usman bowled with enough pace that it did not take long for people to notice him. Balls flying past batsmen’s noses are enough to get even the most disinterested observer to sit up and take note. He made it into one of the better Dallas teams and then on to the Central West. Even before he had completed his seven-year qualifying period to become an American player he was given a spot in a ‘probables’ squad of around 30 of the most promising players. From there he was selected for the national team once his qualification period was complete.

Many have said that the selection process for the USA teams is opaque and unwieldy. Usman said he always knew where he stood when making his way into the side; ‘In my experience the process was very transparent and very fair and very clear to me. I had to play for either Dallas or Houston, I had to perform on those teams, and then for the Central West team to get recognition for the US.’

Since then he has been told that newer players have not found it anywhere near as clear. The route map for getting to play for the USA has never been more muddled than it is today. ‘Things have gone very confused. I have talked to a lot of people, a lot of youngsters that want to play for the US team and the today the way that you make it into the national set-up is not very obvious or very clear.’

Currently there is no selection process. There is no defined pool of players or any criteria that a youngster would be able to tick off on his path to the national set-up. The rise of shadow and unofficial leagues has made the waters even murkier. Players do not know which runs count and which don’t. Some would say that only playing for an official USACA league would count, others contend that runs and wickets are just that, a measure of your performance regardless of where they were achieved.

However, if you are a person the selectors know and like, you can get a game irrespective of where you ply your trade. In theory playing outside the auspices of the USACA you cannot be selected. In practice things are not that straightforward. There is no real oversight of the selectors. What they say goes.

The problem the selectors face is that the majority of teams are poor. A player could score thousands of runs or take hundreds of wickets but what does that actually mean? Usman told me it doesn’t mean a lot.

‘You couldn’t just put that guy in front of Ireland and expect him to succeed because the gap is so humongous that they are bound to fail. They could end up picking a guy from the Seattle league for an international tournament and he won’t be prepared. I got lucky because I had to work through the ranks. That is not what happens anymore. In the last five or six years there hasn’t been a national tournament.’

There are lots of issues but Usman is clear about the solution. Be smart, get people playing the game. ‘There has to be a smarter approach to cricket in the USA as it is not a cricket-playing country which is playing the game to increase the quality of your players.’

So while increasing the number of Americans playing needs to be the long-term goal, perhaps using the immigrant population to spread the game is the answer. Rather than allow cricket to remain a fractured hotchpotch of leagues, shadow leagues, pick-up games and sampling sessions, the governing body needs to create some homogeny. Whether it remains the USACA or if it is usurped by the ACF, whoever is running cricket needs to make everyone welcome.

Between 2012 and 2014 three former West Indies cricketers qualified to play for the USA. The most recent is Jermaine Lawson who played for the West Indies between 2002 and 2005, and appeared in county cricket from time to time. Lawson’s selection for the ICC World Cricket League Three tournament in Malaysia in October 2014 caused some consternation as he has not appeared in a USACA-sanctioned tournament since 2011. Again, the question of which performances count is raised.

The other news that arose from the same squad announcement that saw Lawson picked was that Usman Shuja was back in the USA fold. He was delighted to be back. In the first game against Bermuda he became the leading 50-over wicket-taker in the history of the US national team. He went past the previous record of former USA captain Zamin Amin.

The lead-up to the tournament was typical of the USACA and its organisational skills. A planned warm-up tour to Jamaica had to be cancelled as the board could not afford for them to go. There was a hastily arranged practice in New York but not all of the team were able to attend. Coach Roy Singh would be meeting most of the players for the first time when they arrived in Malaysia.

The 2014 USACA national championship was no less chaotic. The event was supposed to be in Indianapolis but the USACA fell out with local authorities and at the last minute the tournament was moved to Florida and plagued by poor weather.

The semi-finals couldn’t take place and several players walked away from the tournament before its conclusion, despite having travelled at their own expense. This compared very unfavourably with the ACF’s national championship in Orlando, which went off without a hitch. In the aftermath of this Orville Hall, an inductee to the USA cricket hall of fame, said that the future of the sport was with the ACF.

Infighting and politics has been allowed to fester for too long, an inclusive approach is what is needed. Ultimately the question needs to be why the massive cricket-loving immigrant population are not interested in the achievements of the USA cricket team. This is a team made up of people just like them, newcomers to America that love the game. Yet there seems to be nothing more than a passing interest in them.

Subash Jayaraman is a USA-based cricket blogger and podcaster. He is an immigrant from India and brought his love of the game with him. He told me that following cricket in America involves a lot of sacrifice, but more than that it is a connection to the old country. Cricket is something that is about where you are from, not where you live now. While there is a USA cricket team, it is not one that engenders a real sense of belonging.

This in a way is strange and also understandable. Strange in that there is no connection despite the team representing the average cricket fan, and understandable in that the team is not one that has achieved any on-field success. The way that cricket is administered in the US means that this is unlikely to change any time soon.

Assimilation is the key for an immigrant to the US. You want to fit in, to prove your Americanness. Having a love for some strange sport that belongs to America’s former colonial masters is no way to prove your love for the US of A. It is the kind of thing you have to leave behind when you start on the route to integration with your new neighbours.

To be a cricket fan in the USA is not easy. It involves paying for subscription services that often only stream online. Almost every match is either during the working day or in the middle of the night. Actually, the middle of the night is far and away the most likely. That takes commitment. It involves having to go out of your way to find coverage. It isn’t going to just appear on your TV while you channel-surf of an evening. You need to be committed enough to search.

Subash points to the lack of sponsorship as just yet another example of failing to make the most of opportunities that exist to spread the game to outside these immigrant communities. He said companies and corporations are falling over themselves to get on the ‘Team USA’ bandwagon and still the national cricket team is short of a sponsor.

The chances of a person who is not a member of an immigrant community finding the game of cricket, deciding to spend the time to learn the game or investing in the USA cricket team are negligible. Even if they wanted to there are so many obstacles in their way anyone bar the most motivated will just give up. While cricket exists as it does it will remain the reserve of the immigrant community and their children.

Cricket in America is a story of missed opportunity, self-interest and inaction. There is talk of the ‘American market’ that gets greedy administrators excited. There are millions of fans waiting to spend their money, but they are never going to be the way the sport will grow. The only way that will happen is if participation numbers are increased and those new players raise standards domestically and in the national team. There are people that want this to happen. Unfortunately they are all too often pushed aside by those that are motivated by self-interest.

This is far from unique to the USA. Acting for themselves rather than the good of the sport is common with cricket administrators worldwide. The difficulty they have in America is that it is a minority sport without a cricket-loving public with money to spend that will save those running the game’s blushes. The USACA is a shambles, and the Facebook meltdown of Kenwyn Williams is just the most public example of this. If not for the ICC bailing it out the USACA would have folded years ago, and its passing would not be mourned by those that care about cricket.

It is close to being suspended from the ICC for the third time in seven years. There is enough opposition against it for people to be motivated to create a viable alternative in the ACF. That in itself shows how far the USACA has sunk in the estimation of those that play the game.

Cricket can grow, but as ever expansion is tempered by those who are myopic enough to think that long-term growth can be sacrificed for short-term gain. The growth of non-American sports is not impossible in America. Football, or soccer as they insist on calling it, has shown a massive increase in participation at every level. The national team is succeeding on a global stage reaching World Cup quarter-finals in 2002 and 2014, youth participation continues to rise, and fans are falling in love with the game.

Cricket isn’t going to reach the level that football has, and it would be foolish to think that it could compete. That is not to say there isn’t space for another sport in America but it needs to grow organically. The parachuting in of international teams will not grow the sport, it will only generate interest with those who are already a fan.

There were Twenty20 matches in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, between New Zealand and Sri Lanka in 2010. New Zealand took on the West Indies in 2012. These were well attended, but when the matches were over the fans that came to watch went back to their lives without a thought about expanding interest in American cricket.

There has only been one time that the USA have competed on the global stage. At the 2004 Champions Trophy they were surprise competitors having won the qualifying tournament by a net run rate margin of 0.028.

Getting there was an achievement but once they were there it was clear that they had a long way to go. In their second match they were bowled out for 65 by Australia. Following the defeat the Australian captain Ricky Ponting said he ‘wasn’t sure this was the place for teams like this’.

This poor showing was despite the USA team having drafted in former West Indian cricketer Clayton Lambert in their middle order. Lambert was 42 by the time he turned out for the USA, and he looked his age. Homegrown players are the key but they are 20 years in the making. Handing kids cricket equipment is the first step in a massive journey. Without the organisation and infrastructure in place to nurture talent that will never happen.

An ICC source told me that there are two elements to cricket in the USA, the commercial one and the cricket-playing one. Where the ICC has focused on growing the game, those in charge in the US have had different priorities. ‘We’ve probably tried to focus more on the cricket-playing or at least the structural stuff, where a lot of focus does tend to go on to the commercial side of things.’

That a team finds it hard to step up to the highest level is not a surprise. The only way they get better is by playing at the highest possible level. The disappointing thing is that in the decade since this breakthrough to a major event the USA have failed to emulate this achievement. The sport has become even more marginalised thanks to the short-sighted and incompetent administration of those that run it.

The issue any associate nation will have is that those who run the sport, the boards of England, India and Australia, are not interested in growth. Cricket has a delineated footprint and those in charge are happy to keep it that size. With this in mind the only solution is to concentrate on cricket within their own borders. Get kids playing the game, and find people that love the sport to run it. If that doesn’t happen it won’t be long before there is no sport left to run.

Bibliography

This project would not have been possible without the brilliant online resources of ESPNCricinfo and Cricket Archive, both of which have been used extensively. We have also used a number of old editions of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack (always referred to as Wisden in the chapters).

What follows is not a comprehensive bibliography, but a brief list of sources that have proved especially helpful to us.

Books

Tim Albone, Out of the Ashes: The Remarkable Rise and Rise of the Afghanistan Cricket Team, Virgin Books, 2011

Anthony Bateman and Jeffrey Hill, The Cambridge Companion to Cricket, Cambridge University Press, 2011

S.J. Connolly, The Oxford Companion to Irish History, OUP Oxford, 2011

Peter Oborne, Wounded Tiger, Simon & Schuster, 2014

David W. Potter, The Encyclopedia of Scottish Cricket, Empire Publications Ltd, 1999

Gerard Siggins and Kevin O’Brien, Six After Six: Ireland’s Cricket World Cup, Brickfields Press, 2011

Films

Tim Albone, Out of the Ashes, Bungalow Town and Shabash Productions, 2010

Paul Davey, Breaking Boundaries: Ireland’s Extraordinary Cricket World Cup, Zanzibar Films, 2011

Maurice Sweeney, Batmen: The History of Irish Cricket, Setanta Ireland, 2013

Journal Articles

Bairner, A. and Malcolm, D., ‘Cricket and national Identities on the Celtic Fringe’ in C. Rumford and S. Wagg (eds) Cricket and Globalization, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010

Afghanistan celebrate winning the World Cricket League Division Five tournament in Jersey in 2008. The coach Taj Malik is in the middle of the second row, just behind the trophy. (Barry Chambers)

Hameed Hassan celebrates a wicket against the United States in the 2010 World T20 Qualifier. (Barry Chambers)

Mohammad Nabi (left, with stump) and Hameed Hassan celebrate winning the 2010 World T20 Qualifier tournament after beating Ireland in the final. (Barry Chambers)

The victorious Afghanistan squad after winning the 2010 World T20 Qualifier. (Barry Chambers)

Cricket played in the promenade of the Darul Aman palace in Kabul. (Saumava Mitra)

Women cricketers have led the way in China (ACC)

University teams at the National Championships in Shanghai (Matt Smith)

Sun Jianxin, an umpire from Beijing, watches over a practice session (ACC)

Foreign coaches have helped boost Chinese cricket (ACC)

Ireland celebrate as they secure a dramatic tie with Zimbabwe (Barry Chambers)

Ireland’s fans get World Cup fever in 2007 (Barry Chambers)

What might have been – Eoin Morgan and William Porterfield after sharing a 131-run partnership in the 2009 World Cup Qualifiers. Six weeks later, Morgan made his England debut (Barry Chambers)

Stormont Cricket Ground in Belfast (Barry Chambers)

Kevin O’Brien opts for pink, in aid of the Irish Cancer Society, before the 2011 World Cup. His hair would soon become very famous (Barry Chambers)

India play South Africa in the semi-final of the 2000 ICC Knockout Trophy at the Gymkhana Club Ground in Nairobi (David Waters)

The Mombasa ground (David Waters)

Nepalese kids getting ready for a game of cricket (Birat Raya)

Basant Regmi bowling for Nepal, Tribhuthan University Ground, Kiritpur, WCL 5, 2010 (Barry Chambers)

Paras Khadka training at the National Cricket Academy (Cricketlok)

Backyard cricket – Nepal – 2014 (Birat Raya)

Pulchowk Engineering Cricket Ground – Lalitpur – National U19 tournament (Cricketlok)

Tom Cooper hits one of six sixes during Netherlands’ incredible chase over Ireland at the 2014 World T20 (Barry Chambers)

Wesley Barresi is congratulated on hitting the winning runs against Ireland at the World T20 (Barry Chambers)

Cricket in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea (ICC)

Former England wicketkeeper, and current PNG player, Geraint Jones coaching in PNG (ICC)

The squad celebrate winning the East Asia-Pacific Trophy in Auckland in 2013 to qualify for the ICC World Twenty20 Qualifier (ICC)

Games being played in Hanuabada, the hub of Papuan cricket (ICC)

Games being played in Hanuabada, the hub of Papuan cricket (ICC)

Games being played in Hanuabada, the hub of Papuan cricket (ICC)

The Scotland & Australian teams being entertained at Balmoral Castle by King George VI and the Royal Family in 1948 (Neil Leitch)

The programme for Don Bradman’s last game in the UK – he scored 123 not out for Australia against Scotland at Mannofield, Aberdeen in September 1948. (Neil Leitch)

George Salmond models the new Scotland strip prior to the 1999 World Cup (Neil Leitch)

Dougie Brown in the 2005 ICC Trophy Final, when Scotland beat Ireland (Barry Chambers)

Scotland’s greatest side? With the ICC Trophy in 2005 (Barry Chambers)

Coaches Craig Wright and Paul Collingwood with Preston Mommsen and the World Cup Qualifying trophy in 2014 (ICC photo)

Cricket in an Abu Dhabi car park (Del Leu, www.DelsJourney.com)

Cut to the boundary by the UAE’s Khurram Khan (Barry Chambers)

UAE celebrate winning 2014 World T20 qualification (Barry Chambers)

Kevin Pietersen plays cricket with kids on a Dubai street (Adam Wheatley)

American seamer Usman Shuja meets Australian fast bowling legend Dennis Lillee while playing grade cricket in Australia (Usman Shuja)

Bart King, the finest cricketer in the USA at the turn of the 20th century. (Photo of Bart King courtesy of C. C. Morris Cricket Library and Museum and used by permission)

Usman Shuja is held aloft by his USA team-mates (Barry Chambers)

Bharat Jataprolu of the MCT Chargers keeps wicket as Krunal Bhange of the Florida All Stars hits a boundary at the American Cricket Federation Championships in October 2014. (American Cricket Federation)