The Unlikey Rise of Chinese Cricket

If there’s one thing that Chinese do badly, it’s sports.  It’s not the Olympics, were children are put through tortuous Soviet style training in order to ensure China is at the top of the medal leader board, we’re talking about that most revered and lucrative of games, football.

Basketball does really well in China, it’s cool, it’s American, and it’s pretty easy to set up a basketball court almost anywhere, especially in the overcrowded cities were urban space is at a premium.  Football, however, is another story.  You need a pitch, you need grass, and mostly it’s played outside, and given China’s appalling air quality, you don’t want to be spending a huge amount of time outside, and then there’s all that running about and the risk of getting injured.  All of which go some way to explaining why there’s little love lost between the national football team, and the Chinese fans.  And when we use the word “fans”, we of course mean Chinese people who are fans of football, not Chinese people who are fans of the Chinese team - kind of like the way that pop music fans hate Justin Beiber.

When the men’s football team played Thailand in June, there were no fans waiting at the hotel for autographs, and when they lost, enraged fans blocked the team coach from leaving and started a riot that injured 100 people.  The team’s official Weibo account is replete with apologies and excuses for their poor performances, but they find little sympathy online.  The English language coverage of the match didn’t do them any favours either, saying that “Poor possession, poor team work and most of all no fighting spirit resulted in the most humiliating defeat for years for China’s national soccer team.”  They managed to make it to the World Cup once, have been knocked out by Iraq for the 2014 competition.

Desperate to prove themselves better than the Koreans and the Japanese - football is one sport among many that the Chinese must prove themselves to be the best at so everyone will love them...or something - China has spent a lot of money on upping their game, but nothing seems to work.

Expensive foreign coaches have been lured to Beijing, corrupt elements in the sport have been tracked down and punished and players have been imported from overseas - still the Chinese seethe with anger when their team inevitably suffers another humiliating defeat.  The problem is that the people who actually play in the national side have little in the way of actual sporting talent, and, as always, are more interested in making as much money as possible while their knees are in proper working order.

With the problems plaguing the football squad, it might not be the best time for the Chinese government to think about launching a national cricket squad.  Which they have.  In Shenyang, which is, apparently, the new home of cricket in China, and, in contrast to the talentless poster boys in the football team, they’re pretty good.  Well, the women are at least.

Interest might be growing the game domestically, but they still have only one grass wicket, which was proudly used in the 2010 Asian Games.  With little in the way of cricketing tradition, and the apparent disinterest in partaking in team games, lack of equipment is the least of their worries.  China isn’t exactly known for it’s vast expanses of greenery, that the game demands - concrete cricket pitches just aren’t the done thing.  If the Chinese urban sprawl can push the the panda, China’s national animal, to the brink of extinction, there’s little hope for the enthusiastic, but cash strapped amateur cricket teams.

The problem for competitive sports in China is that while children have PE lessons in primary school, as soon as students hit the age at which they should start studying for the dreaded gaokao, the cramming sessions leave little room for sports.  But we shouldn’t count the Chinese out of making waves on the international cricket scene just yet.

After years of being banned in the People’s Republic, insanely young Chinese golfing prodigies dazzled in last years US Open.  Parents desperate to turn their children into the next Tiger Woods, spare no expense in providing the best trainers, equipment and opportunities to transform them into sporting superstars, and their parents into multi-millionaires.  If the likes of Sachin Tendulkar could inspire Chinese parents that there’s money in them thar cricket cricket whites, then there’d be no stopping them.  In the same way the Indian super-rich aspire to London properties, the Chinese super-super-rich could learn to aspire to appreciating the intricacies of a medium paced leg spinner.

The Chinese have set their sights on the 2014 World T20 to be played in Bangladesh, but government officials have confided that their real goal would be the 2019 Cricket World Cup.  Money has poured into help support China’s most promising players, with a select few being sent overseas to play in English and Australian clubs, where their enthusiasm for the sport has impressed many professional players.

Famously, failure is not an option for those representing China on the international sporting stage.  In search of the next Olympic gold medal machines, children as young as five years old are put through training courses that would make western social workers weep - all of the glory of being the best.  If cricket became an Olympic sport, there would be no shortage of Chinese cricketers willing to represent their country - given China’s population, if only 1 in 10,000 made the grade, that would mean that there would be 100,000 potential players.  Let’s just hope that they don’t get the same kind of attention from their domestic fans as the football team does.