Warning: include() [function.include]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in E:\inetpub\vhosts\magtheweekly.com\httpdocs\14\sports_feature.php on line 90

Warning: include(http://www.magtheweekly.com/skymidpage.php) [function.include]: failed to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found in E:\inetpub\vhosts\magtheweekly.com\httpdocs\14\sports_feature.php on line 90

Warning: include() [function.include]: Failed opening 'http://www.magtheweekly.com/skymidpage.php' for inclusion (include_path='.;./includes;./pear') in E:\inetpub\vhosts\magtheweekly.com\httpdocs\14\sports_feature.php on line 90
The WCL is unlikely to rock the foundations of a sport with other acronyms on its mind but internationally cricket is a handy new paragraph or two for the tourist brochures. On an island which at high tide measures a postage stamp nine miles by five, this motley gathering of 12 sides—if in doubt, compile your own list of cricket’s least likely outposts—may just represent the largest number of international teams per square mile in the game’s history.

It is a curiosity all right but these teams are not here to be patronized. Division 5, held over nine days stretching into June, is part of the ICC’s attempt to derive meaning from the alphabet soup of its 91 Associates and Affiliate members - everyone, in other words, below Test level. Not only is the game’s governing body keen to create a credible World Cup qualifying structure (think of the FA Cup before the big boys join the fun on third-round day), it wants to give emerging cricket nations the chance to test themselves against teams of a similar standard and establish a global pecking order.
Thanks to the $1.Ibn deal between the ICC and a leading sports network in December 2006. Associates and Affiliates will from next January claim 6% of the ICC’s overall broadcasting and sponsorship revenue, along with the 25% percent share already ring-fenced for the Associates. Consequently, Jersey feels like the start of a new era.
“The next eight years or so will be the litmus test, because we will find out if increases in investment really have helped,” says Matthew Kennedy, the ICC’s global development manager. Not everyone is convinced that cricket is exportable (so complicated, so long, so English) and it is a bit too easy to spot the four semi-finalists in advance. It is true that Singapore do not come in too far behind Afghanistan, Jersey. Nepal and the USA-Division 5’s answer to Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool. But then we have the also-rans.
Vanuatu, an 83 island archipelago in the South Pacific, concede 360 for 3 against Norway, who are coached by the British journalist and broadcaster Ralph Dellor, while Mozambique are skittled for 19 by the Nepalese with the left-arm seamer Mahaboob Alam taking 10 for 12. Mozambique’s Imtiyaz Shafikbhai Lili, one of nine batsmen out for a duck, is a delightful man but his protestations that it was “just one of those days” and “we were for those trying to make sense of it all, Mozambique recover to beat the Norwegians two days later. It is great to see these sides having a go but, wherever their path is leading, it is likely to be a long one.
Clayton Lambert, the former West Indies opener who is a voluble figure on match days as coach of the USA, is a touch concerned. “I’m a bit worried that some of the scores have been so low,’ he says. “I know these are early season wickets but some of the teams don’t know how to change their approach.” He has a point. In 37 completed matches there are 15 double-figure totals and a further 17 under 150. On an average the team batting first in games unaffected by the weather scores 157. Only one batsman-Shahid Ahmed of Norway registers a hundred. Innings-building proves elusive and the bowlers prosper: Mahaboob Alam finishes the tournament with the prep-school average of 4.89, and he is not the only one.
“The levels here have been fairly disparate,” admits Kennedy. “But this is a first: we haven’t had the chance to cross-regionally test teams before, so it was expected that the top four or five teams would be visibly stronger.” Sensibly, qualification for the 2015 World Cup will consist of eight smaller divisions rather than five. And, citing the rapid rise of Vanuatu from cricketing nonentities to Division 5 in just a few years. Kennedy says: “What’s clear is that all the teams are getting better.”
Few have improved as quickly as the two finalists, Jersey and Afghanistan, who will now travel to Tanzania to take part in Division 4 in October. Ryan Driver, a former Worcestershire and Lancashire all-rounder who qualified to represent Jersey through residency, believes the top teams here are on a par with the Minor Counties, and there are moments of genuine class during his side’s semi-final win over the USA, not least in stand of 122 between the Jersey openers Peter Gough and Steve Carlyon.

The result is reward for the most professional set-up in the competition. While the USA are only here because the ICC relegated them two divisions over a pythonesque power struggle between two rival boards, Jersey have quietly gone about building an impressive infrastructure which Keith Dennis, the cricket board’s chairman, claims is the best in the non Test-playing world.
The island’s six turf wickets helped edge out Singapore, who have only four, as tournament hosts, and one of them—Farmers Field- was growing Jersey Royal potatoes in 2004. Signatures in the pavilion guest book include Sir Bill Morris and the late Tom Cartwright, while the two honorary members on the clubhouse boards are Mike Gatting and Geoff Boycott, a Jersey resident. In cricketing terms the island is now far more than a beer-and skittles summer tour.
Farmers Field typifies the mix of resourcefulness and dedication that persuaded the former South African batsman Peter Kirsten to coach the national side, and there is delight all round after the 84 run victory over the States only a year after Jersey achieved associate membership. “We‘re a nation of 90, 000,” enthuses Chris Minty, the dedicated director of cricket. “They’re a country of 300 million. I know they’re not all cricketers but then nor are we.”
If the hosts’ passage to east Africa is enough to keep cricket on the front and back pages of the Jersey Evening Press, then the Afghanistan story is not far behind. Students of cricket stereotypes will be relieved to learn that the Afghanis are nothing if not mercurial. Somehow a team which has provided players for MCC Pakistan Customs and Sebastianites Cricket and Athletics Club in Sri Lanka contrives to be dismissed by Singapore for 76 before going on to win the division. But not even that setback shakes their belief that World Cup qualification is a given.
“Why not?” shrugs Rais Ahmadzai, who resigned the captaincy a la Shaun Pollock when Afghanistan’s ignorance of the Duckworth/Lewis system led to defeat by Hong Kong in the semi-finals of the Asian Cricket Council Trophy in 2006. “It was a total surprise to lose to Singapore. We lost our temperament. We have to wait for the balls more. In Peshawar (the team learned its cricket in Pakistan) the ball comes on to the middle of the bat but here everyone was out driving against the moving ball. Now we’ve been told no one should go for the drive.”
That sounds reassuringly self-aware but the tendency of the Afghans to thump their chests has not endeared them to everyone, so much so that one coach pleads for this article not to mention them. There is, though, something irresistible about a side built on refugees from a war-torn nation: their progress is followed by a three-man film crew, who are hoping to tell their story in a documentary called “Rising from the Ashes”, and their coach, Taj Malik, has become one of the unwitting stars of the tournament. His promise to “throw myself into the Atlantic if we lose” apparently went down poorly with the Afghanistan government, but it is easy to see why his players respond to him.
“No one will stop us in divisions 4, 3 or 2,” he says, incongruously wearing a flat cap and a black bomber jacket and puffing on a cigarette as he watches his side bat first in damp greyness in the semi-final against

Nepal. “Our confidence will build and there will be new conditions in Tanzania and only six teams, so it will be easier. We are opening all doors for the next generation in Afghanistan. They will be proud of us.” Malik may be getting ahead of himself but Afghanistan duly see off Nepal, then celebrate promotion by skittling Jersey for 80 en route to a nervy two-wicket win in the final.
Say what you like about the Afghans but at least their team has an unmistakably local flavour to it. The match between Germany and Norway is noticeable not just for the strange mixture of tongues (‘good stop, sehr schon”) but for the names on the scoreboard: 20 are Asian, one is Anglo-Saxon and only one—Graham Sommer—has the ring of continental Europe: more “shahbash” than Schmidt.
It should be said that the ICC does have stricter qualification rules than most sports. For those born outside the country or without citizenship there is a seven-year residency period (although two players per team can qualify after four years). On top of that players must have taken part in a prescribed amount of domestic cricket in their country or helped the sport’s development there. And although the role of knowledge expats in spreading cricket’s arcane should not be sniffed at, Richard Holdworth, the regional development manager for the European Cricket Council, says the ICC is keen to “encourage indigenous cricketers”, pointing to a successful scheme in Finnish primary schools and a more recent drive to educate young Spaniards as two examples.
Even so, it is hard not to feel for a side like Japan, who have a self-imposed limit of four non-indigenous players. “We get booms all the time,” explains the Japan Cricket Association’s chief executive Alex Miyaji. “The softball boom, the basket ball boom and so on. We don’t want cricket to be a one-generation sport. So it’s step by step.”
Step by step may be the perfect slogan for the concept of the World Cricket League. It is not perfect slogan by any means but cricket rarely is. And in any case one would be hard-pushed to find the game being played with more passion than by Afghanistan, more commitment than by Jersey and more pleasure than by Mozambique. The skeptics maintain it will always struggle to take root beyond the Commonwealth. But one cannot blame the ICC for trying to find put.
In the next issue of MAG Twenty20 cricket and its acceptance level in the USA will be discussed. Watch this space next time for Twenty20 cricket and American megafunding ala IPL.