China getting ready to be bowled over
Posted on Aug 27, 2008 at 16:05 | Updated Aug 27, 2008 at 17:11
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Tags: cricket, india, china
Beijing: As China laps up the plaudits for its staging of the Beijing Olympics, some within the world's most populous nation are turning their attention to cricket.
Administrators in various sports have long regarded China as one of the great untapped markets and cricket is no exception.
Traditionalists, more comfortable with the concepts of a 'Chinaman' (a ball from a left-arm spinner which turns the opposite way from his normal delivery), or a 'Chinese cut (a false shot off the inside edge) than playing against a team of Chinese may be sceptical, but ignoring a population of 1.3 billion is not an option for cricket's rulers.
And having topped the overall medal table at an Olympic Games for the first time, the rest of the world ought to be aware of what China is capable of when it sets itself a sporting goal.
Anyone still doubting the seriousness of China's intent should be aware that the current secretary-general of the Chinese Cricket Association (CCA) was previously in charge of the equivalent snooker organisation.
"I have been involved in sports for a very long time, being a sports official," Liu Rongyao told AFP here in an interview.
"I used to be in charge of snooker. Later, after the Cricket Association was established, I got to know more and more about cricket and began to like it more and more, so I changed from snooker to cricket."
Snooker too is not a native Chinese sport but that didn't stop the then 18-year-old Ding Junhui from winning the 2005 UK Championship, the sport's second most important title.
Further proof of China's snooker progress came this year when Ding was joined at the world championships by compatriots Liu Chuang and Liang Wenbo.
China may still be some way off from making a similar impact upon cricket but David Morgan, the president of the International Cricket Council (ICC) says what the country has already achieved in the game is evidence of their commitment to the sport.
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