Second XI Read online

  First published by Pitch Publishing, 2015

  Pitch Publishing

  A2 Yeoman Gate

  Yeoman Way

  Durrington

  BN13 3QZ

  www.pitchpublishing.co.uk

  © Tim Wigmore and Peter Miller, 2015

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or here in after invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library

  Print ISBN 978 178531-013-3

  eBookISBN: 978-1-78531-025-6

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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.r />
  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.