Sports - Sir….Now it’s cricket Made in China

Cricket and China….. Well……you cannot name them as two peas in a pod. Nevertheless ICC’s recent exercise to take the game beyond the established boundaries is taking effect well enough globally.

Crouching on the bed in my hotel room in Beijing after a busy day of other allied matters suddenly I stumbled upon some clippings on a cricket match played in China between two all Chinese teams for the first time on their own soil.

Having seen the game played at the highest level in many other lands, the quality of what was been projected was not of genuine quality, but, the effort and the fact that the game was been played in an alien country to whom the game of cricket is as alien as Sri Lanka taking part in the Football World Cup was what really impressed me.

To protrude the fact….. A bowler runs in and rolls his arm over aiming to deliver the ball to the batsman, but he manages only to get the ball to roll somewhere near where the square leg umpire would be perched at. However, in real terms the game was cricket in all its earnestness was on show.

The next day China’s popular English daily carried a full length article about the proceedings of the previous day. Given below are some excerpts from the article:

Fei Zhen was disappointed to make just one run in his innings but given his short acquaintance with cricket his score was quite an achievement. A week before taking the pitch at Beijing’s Tsinghua University in China’s first national cricket championships, the 15-year-old- from Shanghai was, like most Chinese, completely unaware of the game.

“I’d never heard if it, never seen it, never played it before. I just did it because the teacher asked me to,” the Heng Feng middle school pupil told reporters.Seven days of practice later Fen and his classmates were taking on Beijing Science and Technology middle school in a tournament the Chinese Cricket Association (CCA) hope will unearth enough talent to field an under-15 national team. Despite the enthusiasm displayed on the converted football pitch, it will be a long time before a Chinese team take on England at Lord’s, Australia at the Gabba or Sri Lanka for that matter.

“On a scale of one to 100, Australia are maybe a 98, Sri Lanka a 95,” said Asian Cricket Council (ACC) development officer Rumesh Ratnayake. “Here in China we’re talking of a three or a four.”

Although cricket was brought to China by the British as long ago as 1858, the game was never taken up by the locals and, beyond a few expatriate tournaments, did not exist in the world’s most populous nation until the start of this century.

The CCA was founded in late 2004 but receives no funding from a state-run sports administration directing most of its resources at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The association does, however, have ambitious plans and has roped in the ACC and Cricket Australia to help it to fulfill them.

It started by taking the game into China’s most prestigious universities such as Tsinghua, Peking University, the Renmin University and Fudan University as well as their associated schools. “In Britain, it has always been regarded as a sport for gentlemen so we’ve decided to position it as ‘the noble game,” said CCA development director Calvin Leong.

The CCA hopes China will have 30,000 players by the end of 2007 and 150,000 by 2020. If it achieved such targets across a wide enough geographical base it would then be able to press for government funding.

“The concept is to train the teachers and send them back to the schools and colleges,” Ratnayake said. “On day one, they are very skeptical but by the end they are more enthusiastic than those we train in more developed cricketing countries.

“It’s amazing,” the former Sri Lanka test bowler said, pointing at the schoolboys bowling and batting in the blazing sun. “Their teachers did a course in May and they’ve already got teams playing. They’ve never even seen cricket played on TV so for them to put teams together is unbelievable.

“These guys are keen so if the infrastructure is right, the pitches in place and so on, then cricket can just take off.”

Some 70 men and women have undertaken coaching courses so far, with half of those having been through a Tier I course and the other half taking it in August.

The next step is to enter an under-15 team in the plate competition at the ACC Trophy in Thailand in December.

“I was skeptical and thought it was too early,” Ratnayake said. “But the authorities and coaches are keen so we said ‘let’s get ready,’

“We hope they can make a mark and later they can go through the under-17s, under-19s and then on to senior cricket”

Li Zhen, a teacher at the Shangai Sports Institute, said his students had taken well to the game.

“Generally, they are very fond of cricket,” he said. “There are some problems with them understanding the more technical features of the game which makes it difficult for them to get excited when they play.”

Indeed, there were very few leg before wicket appeals in the match, which the Beijing school won by 53 runs.

Fei Zhen described the game’s notoriously complex rules as “very simple,” saying that in his single week’s initiation there was not enough time to deal with every sub-clause.

The CCA knows they have much work to do to put cricket on the map in China. Leong, when asked how long it would take to have a national team competing at the senior level, replied: “Don’t hurry us, we only started nine months ago.”

At the same time the entire Beijing City is pregnant with the tasks of hosting of the 2008 Olympics. An uncounted number man hours and billions of dollars have gone into this project and yet the balance work is going on. However one question that really intrigues me is the lack of knowledge in the English language among the Chinese people. English is considered the global communicating tool whether we like the idea or not. With only a little more than 700 days to go it is really going to be a daunting task.

Maybe the athletes and the other officials who will be housed within the Olympic City may not find things that hard. But, if you happen to be a tourist flag bearer of your respective country (other than a Chinese Speaking nation) you might find it difficult to post from point ‘A’ to ‘B’.

It would be a very prudent idea if the Chinese authorities look into the matter and take timely action. If not a lot more than one person is bound to get lost within the Olympic euphoria in the Chinese Capital and the scenario will be like Christopher Columbus arriving in Colombo instead of discovering the New World.