The question about expats comes up, and questions are raised about ICC’s development process whenever a result comes about like the recent WCL Div 2. UAE and Oman finished in the top 2 spots, while Uganda, a promising team with a development programme including 30K kids, and completely indegenous team, got knocked out.
About a year ago, we were essentially talking on simillar lines. The occasion in that case was Norway getting into European Div 1, at the expense of Jersey. Norway had, and probably still has 250 cricketers, with all of them being Pakistani expats.
Upon looking at the performance of UAE and Oman in WCL Div 2, I looked up ACC Trophy 2006 results. Saudi Arabia came pretty close to beating UAE, while Bahrain and Singapore both beat Oman, which had almost the same team as they do now. This makes you ask the question about what would happen in case Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain were also in WCL Div 2; would they have upstaged the likes of Namibia, Denmark and Uganda as well?
At some level all of this is very disappointing. Let us, rather sinfully, ignore the fact that UAE was playing 8 born and bred players this time. I will try to explain the thought process without making any judgements on those who think otherwise (that seems to be ICC at this point in time).
Cricket expansion basically means that people of different countries are actually playing the sport. In a game like cricket, which is country based, the team is not a franchise, its a team comprising of players from that country. The team represents a lot of the characteristics of the country by itself, and also the way the game is played over there. In Pakistan, where the game is mostly learnt in the streets, the batsmen will be technically challenged, but with excellent hitting abilities, and great hand eye coordintion. Good spin bowlers will be rare, but pace bowlers will be aplenty … and very quick. The players are very inconsistent, with the ability to start fighting back from an absolutely hopeless situation, to also sometimes create a hopeless situation for themselves from a position of strength. In addition to that, the stories about the players and their rise to the top are identifiable by the locals, which fosters interest amongst the general public. Most importantly, the fact that the team is made of indegenous locals means that there are enough people playing the sport that the ‘expats’ are marginalized, because, really, if your team is made up of expats, you cannot go higher than a certain standard.
A promosing UAE u15 player, when asked about what his future plans are, mentioned that his dream is to play for India. Another promising UAE player from the same team (or maybe U17) mentioned that he would like to play for Pakistan. There is a reason why UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia cannot get any crowds to come and watch their games, while Nepal can get 20K people to come and watch their U19 team, and Afghanistan can get 10K people to come and receive the team after beating emerging teams ! A year or 2 back, Maldives gave their team a presidential honour for winning a tournament featuring Thailand and some other asian team. The team was paraded through the streets, with the president coming out to receive them on a red carpet ! UAE players like Khurram Khan can sometimes not get time off from work because their employers ask them what cricket is !
Standard cannot be everything. Common Sense also needs to be used. Countries like Ireland, Kenya, Scotland, Nepal, Afghanistan and Uganda are the ‘real’ developing sides. They are the ones that have done something right for a while in terms of development, or have something in them which demands a little more attention. Countries like Canada, Oman etc are perhaps not the way forward, or at least, should not be the way forward. ICC always points to the fact that the game historically spread like this everywhere. First of all, something that happenned 150 years back, or 100 years back, does not mean that the world will work exactly in the same way today. Secondly, it was not a successful model. It may have worked in SA and Aus, but it did not work in USA, Canada, Argentina, African countries like Siera Leone/Uganda, and even some Gulf countries, where, the fact that these were not sports played by the locals caused their demise.
About 2 months ago, Pakistan played a 20 20 game against Uganda. I was surprised to see a few people asking about the Uganda team, because they probably read the scorecard and were interested to know about how and why the game was played over there, and what level. I never saw anyone looking at a Pakistan-UAE match seriously, not even those in the UAE (except for maybe Athar Laeeq from Pakistan bowling to his brother, Arshad Laeeq in the UAE team!).
If all of this doesnt matter, then why does Ugandan Cricket excite people more than Oman?
Lets say that Oman gets ODI status….. exactly how are they going to make the next step? They have not reached that level because of sound development or anything like that. The only way they will try to step up is to import ‘better’ players from the subcontinent.
About 1 year ago, the captain of the Hong Kong cricket team give someone an interview and he mentioned something on these lines as the ’strategy’.
This is about as sad as reading a match report once in a Bermuda newspaper titled, “The Arabs did not let the Bermudans settle and skittled them cheaply”.
What Arabs?
