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.
The secretary-general of the Chinese Cricket Association (CCA) was previously in charge of the equivalent snooker organization.
“I have been involved in sports for a very long time, being a sports official,” Liu Rongyao said 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,” he said.
Snooker might not be 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.
More 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 a commitment to the sport.
“I think that cricket in China is already moving ahead,” he said. “They have 140 Level One coaches and umpires now. They’ve achieved that in the period since 2005. That is indeed very noteworthy.”
“The ICC has believed for quite some time that there is a real opportunity for cricket in China and one of our projects is to explore the possibility of cricket becoming very large in this country,” he said.
Liu explained how the game had established itself in China.
“The ICC came to us and said they had a very charming game which could be introduced to China and at that time the then vice president and secretary general of the CCA paid a visit to Hong Kong to observe the Hong Kong International Sixes.
“We found that cricket is very good for Chinese people because it emphasises hand-eye co-ordination,” he said.
He said the 2010 Asian Games, which feature cricket and will be staged in Guangzhou, would play a key role in helping expand the sport’s popularity beyond the several thousand already playing banqiu (Mandarin for cricket) in China.
“Our long term emphasis is on youth,” Liu said. “Now what we need to do urgently is improve our high performance.”
“With high performance in the big events such as the Asian Games we can grab the attention of a mass of the people so it will then be easier to promote cricket. They will know it and they will love it,” he said.
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