Chinese cricket on sticky wicket

Locals are finding it difficult to embrace one of the world's most popular sports, AFP reports.

White-clad Chinese cricketers roared as a homegrown bowler sent the bails flying in Beijing - to the unfamiliar clatter of leather on plastic.

The national universities' tournament, the country's top competition, was held on an astroturf baseball field in the capital, where the pitcher's mound had been removed, the stumps were made of plastic and the boundary marked out by orange discs.

It was a sign of the lack of government support for the non-Olympic sport in China, where only about two dozen homegrown teams play regular competitive matches and a few foreigners are trying to drive it forward.

Across Qomolangma, cricket-obsessed India tops the world rankings in one-day internationals. But, despite an even larger population, China is listed last but two in Asia, ahead of only Myanmar and tiny Brunei.

"When I got here, everyone was holding the bat like it was baseball," said Rashid Khan, the former Pakistan international who now coaches China's national team, one of the few spectators at the university event.

"Now they can play good cricket," he said, as players hooked balls towards the baseball netting. "The bowlers at least are bowling with a decent action."

The first recorded cricket match in China was played in 1858 between a team of officers from the British navy's HMS Highflyer and a side from Shanghai.

But while the British Empire spread the game to Australia, South Asia and the Caribbean, among others (former colony Hong Kong recently qualified for next year's World Twenty20 in Bangladesh), the Chinese mainland resisted complete colonization and the sport never caught on.

Now a wave of sports governing bodies ranging from American football to Australioan Rules and rugby are pushing their wares in China, hoping to secure a slice of its vast market after basketball and soccer won tens of millions of fans in recent decades.

The Malaysian-based Asian Cricket Council funds the national team, and Briton Matt Smith, who coaches at a university in the northeastern rustbelt city of Shenyang, said: "We have begun to build a cricket culture."

There are expatriate sides in China's major cities, but according to the state-backed Chinese Cricket Association, the vast country has only 68 homegrown teams, in schools and universities.

Smith has brought balls and bats - not easily found in China - back from Britain but one of his toughest tasks has been translating cricket's unique lexicon into Chinese.

He rendered "googly" - a type of delivery bowled by a legspinner - as a "cross-eyed ball", and bowlers send down "bright spin" rather than "offspin".

Another spin delivery, known as a "Chinaman", has been bowled in the country but remains untranslated, although the cricketers' cry of "Howzat!" is apparently universal.

Smith brokered a deal to send Shenyang-based batsman Jiang Shuyao to the English North Sea resort of Clee-thorpes for local matches last year - the first time a Chinese -born cricketer had played in a foreign league.

"If we want to get better we need to study abroad, there are not enough high-level matches here in China," said Jiang, a floppy white hat framing his face.

"If cricket is to be successful here, it needs to become an Olympic sport," he said.

Crushing defeats

Chinese sport remains government-dominated, with vast sums ploughed into training athletes for events which can bring Olympic glory and other disciplines are placed on the backburner, experts say.

The country's only cricket stadium was built for the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou, where there is no adult Chinese team to use it.

The China men's side has suffered mostly crushing defeats in international matches, but the nation's women cricketers have fared a little better, notching victories against Malaysia and Thailand in the 2010 tournament, before being on the wrong end of a 128-run thrashing from Pakistan. Still, they are still ranked joint-bottom in Asia.

Terry Zhang, of the CCA, admitted there were "no funds from the central government".

But that has not prevented China from investing in the game abroad - it reportedly funded $132 million worth of cricket facilities in the West Indies in recent years, including a $30 million loan to Jamaica for a 25,000-seat stadium.

The loans were dubbed "cricket diplomacy" by Caribbean media, as Beijing seeks to win friends in the region.

Back on the Chinese mainland, one of its own top players, Zhang Yufei, regarded as the first Chinese cricketer to score a century in a competitive match - against an expatriate side - is on the verge of retirement at just 21.

Zhang says his career may be over before it has even begun, and he is preparing to start work at an engineering firm run by his father.

"There is no chance to make a living from cricket," he said.