STICKING UP FOR THE LITTLE GUY
When the winning runs had been hit Peter Borren fell to his knees, disconsolate. He looked like a man who had lost something much more precious than a game of cricket. Ravi Bopara allowed himself a quick grin, then simply tucked his bat under his arm and trotted briskly from the pitch, pausing only to exchange a perfunctory fist-thump with Paul Collingwood. As embarrassed as they would have been had they lost, England's players felt that win far less than the Dutch did their defeat. It was only a group match after all, the first of many. For England it was just another game. For the Netherlands it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as the respective reactions of Borren and Bopara showed.
In 2015 the ICC will sling the Associate nations out of the World Cup, or at least, that is their plan. The competition will be pared down to 10 teams. While the horrendously one-sided turkey shoots like the shocker between New Zealand and Kenya last Sunday will not be missed, the World Cup will still lose more than it gains from that cut-back. It is the length of this competition that needs to be trimmed, not the breadth.
While the best of the Associate players are able to earn a living through the playing the game, a lot of them are still amateurs, men who have to take time off from their nine-to-five lives to play in this World Cup. Watching these guys play is half the fun of the thing.
Take Seren Waters, who, as I type this, is walking out to open the batting for Kenya against Shoaib Akhtar. Waters is a decent player, on the books at Surrey, but he is also just a 20-year-old university student, trying to keep up with a degree course in human geography at Durham in between his innings. He missed so many lectures while he has been training with Kenya this winter that he got in all sorts of trouble with his tutors, who insisted that he took a week off to return to his studies.
Or Ashish Bagai, the captain of Canada. Until his national board gave him a full-time contract in 2009, Bagai was working 14-hour days as an investment banker for UBS in the city of London. Mudassar Bukhari, who opened the bowling for the Netherlands against England, manages a branch of Burger King in The Hague. Bernard Loots, who finished that innings off, is an accountant for a mining firm.
Fans can empathise with people like these. They are ordinary people doing extraordinary things, not well-paid professionals going through the motions of another day's work, a throw-back to the amateur age. That was the difference between the emotions shown by Borren and Bopara.
The Associates provide all the cult heroes. I don't know about you, but the only time the earth really moved for me in the 2007 tournament was when Dwayne 'Sluggo' Leverock took that slip catch to dismiss Robin Uthappa. Partly that was because the reverberations from his fall rumbled right across the Atlantic to my front room in London, but it was also because he was a 20-stone club cricketer who lived above a curry house doing something truly spectacular on a world stage. His catch gave hope to the very worst of us. And for all the crowing about the longevity of the likes of Muttiah Muralitharan, Ricky Ponting and Sachin Tendulkar, what about the indestructible Steve Tikolo? He was persuaded to come out of retirement at the age of 40 to play in this, his fifth World Cup. Tikolo looked "too old for this shit" way back in 2007. His is the most creaky-kneed comeback since Danny Glover did Lethal Weapon 4.
And unlike a lot of the cricketers who have actually brought out autobiographies, a lot of the Associate players actually have life stories worth reading about. Look at Rizwan Cheema, who thumped 93 from 70 balls in Canada's warm-up against England. He played a bit of cricket as a teenager in Pakistan, but then gave the game up when he moved to the USA because his family, who were Shia Muslims, were being persecuted. For six years he did not pick up a bat at all, but was busy earning a living as a taxi driver in Toronto. Then he went to watch a club practice in a public park and asked if he could have a go. He duly started slogging the ball all over. Six years and a string of blistering innings later, he found himself on the shortlist for the 2011 IPL auction. He didn't get picked up, but if he plays many more knocks like that one against England in the next few weeks then he surely will do next year.
My favourite character in this competition may just be the leg-spinner Balaji Rao, Cheema's Canadian team-mate. He unleashed such a vicious torrent of invective on England's close fielders when they appealed against him for an LBW during that same warm-up match that umpire Asad Rauf had to step in and tell him to cool off. That despite the fact he was batting at No11. One of the England team told Lawrence Booth that Rao "had a strange look in his eye". If the England players were wondering why he wasn't showing them more respect, they should have looked up his history. He made his first class debut back when Stuart Broad was still watching Blue Peter in 1994, turning out for Tamil Nadu when he was just 16.
Rao had an outstanding record for India U-19s, playing for them for three full seasons. In his time he has dismissed a miniature who's who of international cricketers: Michael Vaughan, Marcus Trescothick, Mark Ramprakash, Mark Boucher, Ashwell Prince, Kumar Sangakkara, Steve Waugh, VVS Laxman, Virender Sehwag. He has dismissed better batsmen than many he will face in the next few weeks. Somehow, his career never quite worked out at the top level, largely because he was so, well, large. He had what you could politely call 'commitment issues', put on a lot of weight and drifted out of first class cricket, playing his last match in 2001. He moved to Canada in the middle of the last decade. And if he is still a bit tubby, he also has a mean googly.
If you're a cricket fan, how can you not love a story like that? The World Cup will be a duller competition if it can't find room for men like Cheema, Rao, Waters and Tikolo.
When the winning runs had been hit Peter Borren fell to his knees, disconsolate. He looked like a man who had lost something much more precious than a game of cricket. Ravi Bopara allowed himself a quick grin, then simply tucked his bat under his arm and trotted briskly from the pitch, pausing only to exchange a perfunctory fist-thump with Paul Collingwood. As embarrassed as they would have been had they lost, England's players felt that win far less than the Dutch did their defeat. It was only a group match after all, the first of many. For England it was just another game. For the Netherlands it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as the respective reactions of Borren and Bopara showed.
In 2015 the ICC will sling the Associate nations out of the World Cup, or at least, that is their plan. The competition will be pared down to 10 teams. While the horrendously one-sided turkey shoots like the shocker between New Zealand and Kenya last Sunday will not be missed, the World Cup will still lose more than it gains from that cut-back. It is the length of this competition that needs to be trimmed, not the breadth.
While the best of the Associate players are able to earn a living through the playing the game, a lot of them are still amateurs, men who have to take time off from their nine-to-five lives to play in this World Cup. Watching these guys play is half the fun of the thing.
Take Seren Waters, who, as I type this, is walking out to open the batting for Kenya against Shoaib Akhtar. Waters is a decent player, on the books at Surrey, but he is also just a 20-year-old university student, trying to keep up with a degree course in human geography at Durham in between his innings. He missed so many lectures while he has been training with Kenya this winter that he got in all sorts of trouble with his tutors, who insisted that he took a week off to return to his studies.
Or Ashish Bagai, the captain of Canada. Until his national board gave him a full-time contract in 2009, Bagai was working 14-hour days as an investment banker for UBS in the city of London. Mudassar Bukhari, who opened the bowling for the Netherlands against England, manages a branch of Burger King in The Hague. Bernard Loots, who finished that innings off, is an accountant for a mining firm.
Fans can empathise with people like these. They are ordinary people doing extraordinary things, not well-paid professionals going through the motions of another day's work, a throw-back to the amateur age. That was the difference between the emotions shown by Borren and Bopara.
The Associates provide all the cult heroes. I don't know about you, but the only time the earth really moved for me in the 2007 tournament was when Dwayne 'Sluggo' Leverock took that slip catch to dismiss Robin Uthappa. Partly that was because the reverberations from his fall rumbled right across the Atlantic to my front room in London, but it was also because he was a 20-stone club cricketer who lived above a curry house doing something truly spectacular on a world stage. His catch gave hope to the very worst of us. And for all the crowing about the longevity of the likes of Muttiah Muralitharan, Ricky Ponting and Sachin Tendulkar, what about the indestructible Steve Tikolo? He was persuaded to come out of retirement at the age of 40 to play in this, his fifth World Cup. Tikolo looked "too old for this shit" way back in 2007. His is the most creaky-kneed comeback since Danny Glover did Lethal Weapon 4.
And unlike a lot of the cricketers who have actually brought out autobiographies, a lot of the Associate players actually have life stories worth reading about. Look at Rizwan Cheema, who thumped 93 from 70 balls in Canada's warm-up against England. He played a bit of cricket as a teenager in Pakistan, but then gave the game up when he moved to the USA because his family, who were Shia Muslims, were being persecuted. For six years he did not pick up a bat at all, but was busy earning a living as a taxi driver in Toronto. Then he went to watch a club practice in a public park and asked if he could have a go. He duly started slogging the ball all over. Six years and a string of blistering innings later, he found himself on the shortlist for the 2011 IPL auction. He didn't get picked up, but if he plays many more knocks like that one against England in the next few weeks then he surely will do next year.
My favourite character in this competition may just be the leg-spinner Balaji Rao, Cheema's Canadian team-mate. He unleashed such a vicious torrent of invective on England's close fielders when they appealed against him for an LBW during that same warm-up match that umpire Asad Rauf had to step in and tell him to cool off. That despite the fact he was batting at No11. One of the England team told Lawrence Booth that Rao "had a strange look in his eye". If the England players were wondering why he wasn't showing them more respect, they should have looked up his history. He made his first class debut back when Stuart Broad was still watching Blue Peter in 1994, turning out for Tamil Nadu when he was just 16.
Rao had an outstanding record for India U-19s, playing for them for three full seasons. In his time he has dismissed a miniature who's who of international cricketers: Michael Vaughan, Marcus Trescothick, Mark Ramprakash, Mark Boucher, Ashwell Prince, Kumar Sangakkara, Steve Waugh, VVS Laxman, Virender Sehwag. He has dismissed better batsmen than many he will face in the next few weeks. Somehow, his career never quite worked out at the top level, largely because he was so, well, large. He had what you could politely call 'commitment issues', put on a lot of weight and drifted out of first class cricket, playing his last match in 2001. He moved to Canada in the middle of the last decade. And if he is still a bit tubby, he also has a mean googly.
If you're a cricket fan, how can you not love a story like that? The World Cup will be a duller competition if it can't find room for men like Cheema, Rao, Waters and Tikolo.
Source: guardian.co.uk
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