Fri, Feb 13, 2015 page18

• Cricket underdogs grasp rare opportunity

  • NY Times News Service, NEW YORK
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  It would be hard to find two words that seem so ill-matched as “Afghanistan cricket.”

  Yet this month, the national team of that war-torn country will begin play in cricket’s biggest international tournament, the World Cup, which is being hosted by Australia and New Zealand. It is a huge opportunity for the Afghan team, who have never before made the cut, but have earned the praise of both the Taliban and former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.

  The stories of cricket in Afghanistan and in other former outposts of the British Empire and beyond are the subject of Second XI, a new collection of essays edited and mostly written by the cricket journalists Tim Wigmore and Peter Miller. (In cricket, the first team is known as the first 11.)

  

  Indian and Afghanistan supporters sing and dance during their one-day international World Cup warm-up cricket match in Adelaide, Australia, on Tuesday.

  Photo: AFP

  Avoiding the well-known national teams, Wigmore and Miller focus on the development and prospects of cricket in Ireland, Kenya, Papua New Guinea and Nepal, among others, as well as efforts to make the game more popular in the US and China.

  To play cricket for one of these nations can be an experience in frustration, infighting and scarce opportunity. However, the picture that emerges in the book is familiar to fans of underdogs everywhere: Against long odds, coaches and players balance cricket and full-time work (Khurram Khan, the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) captain, has a job as an airline purser) to pursue their dreams of sporting glory. However, one difference from those classic underdog stories is that the deck is stacked against these nations in several important ways.

  In international cricket, there are three national teams that really matter: India, England and Australia. (Some might argue that only India really matters, at least financially, because a match pitting India against anyone else, anywhere in the world, will attract paying fans.)

  Those three, as well as 11 others, will play in the World Cup, a tournament not unlike soccer’s that is held every four years. Matches in the World Cup last about eight hours and are known as one-day games, in which both sides bat once.

  While richer nations tend to field better-trained teams, international cricket has a peculiar quirk: It has “full” member nations, like the big three, and “associate” members, which include countries like Scotland, Kenya and Afghanistan. These other squads do not get to play the full members very often and are relegated to their own tier within the sport. They do not host lucrative tours by India. Some struggle to pay their players or to keep them from leaving for other countries.

  Some of the associate nations have rich cricketing histories. The Netherlands has had a national team since 1883, and last year it defeated England in a match in the game’s shortest format, which lasts about three hours. The British brought cricket to Kenya (and Zimbabwe, just barely a full member), and for a time the Kenyans looked close to gaining Test status, which allows countries to play one another in the longest form of the game, lasting up to five days. However, both Kenya and the Netherlands have slipped back, and neither will play at the World Cup this year.

  Instead, the excitement is over Afghanistan, Ireland, Scotland and, to a lesser extent, the UAE. All four are in this month’s tournament, although none are favored to advance past the group stage.

  Ireland’s relationship with cricket is like its relationship with England; during the Troubles, cricket’s British nature meant it was discouraged outside Dublin and Northern Ireland. Yet to gain international experience, some talented Irish players have chosen to play for England. One of them, Eoin Morgan, is England’s captain for the World Cup.

  The UAE’s team is mostly composed of foreign-born players who moved there to work, and local support for the team is weak.

  “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,” Miller writes.

  To increase the game’s popularity, the International Cricket Council (ICC), the organization that oversees the international game, has invested in cricket in unlikely places, like Papua New Guinea. That nation’s progress, although uneven, tops that of the US.

  Cricket has a long history in the US, and until the early 20th century, Australian and English teams visited to play local teams. Today, the US national team is populated by immigrants from the Caribbean, which dominated the sport in the 1980s, and South Asia, yet Miller describes a virtually closed society among local clubs.

  “Americans who are not members of expat communities have long found that trying to get a game is an arduous task,” he writes. “E-mails to clubs go unanswered; phone calls are full of obfuscation rather than excitement of getting someone new involved.”

  It may not matter; the leadership of US cricket is in such disarray that it is difficult to imagine its team qualifying for a World Cup anytime soon.

  Why does the ICC continue to prop up US cricket? For the same reason that it invests in China, where the game has virtually no history: If it can make the sport popular in these two countries, it will have enormous commercial opportunities. China’s adoption has been slow, in part because cricket is not an Olympic sport, although the game has long been played in Hong Kong.

  Still, the commercial potential has gotten the attention of US broadcasters. ESPN is offering live streaming of the World Cup’s matches online for US$99, hoping to lure cricket fans living in the US willing to stay up late to watch their favorite teams.

  Those hoping for an upset by one of the four associate nations in the tournament may want to tune in now; the next World Cup, set for 2019, will have only 10 teams, meaning it is possible that none of the traditional underdogs will even qualify.
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