Tour Diary
Dedicated fan unbeaten on 150 Tests
Brydon Coverdale
25-Feb-2013
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While Michael Clarke was on the way to his highest Test score, another milestone was being celebrated on the grassy hill at the Basin Reserve. Australia’s most dedicated fan was watching his 150th Test match. Not a bad effort for a man who hasn’t even hit his 40th birthday.
In his colourful shirts, replica baggy green and with his Australian flag in hand, Luke Gillian has become a fixture of Australian tours all over the world. So much so that when he celebrated his 100th Test, in Auckland five years ago, he became the first non-team member to sing "Under the Southern Cross" with the players in the rooms after a win, when Justin Langer invited him to join them.
“My first time in the dressing room was in Karachi ’98,” Gillian told Cricinfo at the Basin Reserve. “I was there when the boys were lining up to sing the team song and I thought ‘You beauty, fantastic.’ But then Ian Healy came around and said ‘Out! Team only!’ So I listened to the team song through the window and 69 Test matches later I was in there.”
Full postMatch of the Day ... in Dhaka
On Sunday, Manchester United take on Liverpool in one of the Premier League highlights of the season, but for Bangladesh football fans (of whom there are several million), their very own Clash of the Titans took place on Friday evening
Andrew Miller
25-Feb-2013
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| It was a clash of two major teams, but with the match on TV the crowd was small at the Bangabandhu © Getty Images |
On Sunday, Manchester United take on Liverpool in one of the Premier League highlights of the season, but for Bangladesh football fans (of whom there are several million), their very own Clash of the Titans took place on Friday evening. When Abahani, the league leaders, took on Mohammadan Sporting Club, in third place, it was a contest that could have decided the destiny of the 2009-10 title. And it was all played out at the country’s former home of cricket, the Bangabandhu Stadium in Dhaka.
Football in Bangladesh has a long and proud heritage, and for many years it was, by some distance, the most popular sport in the country. Whereas cricket was seen as an expensive and time-consuming pastime, and one that harked back to a bygone era, football was cheap, simple, and appealed to the masses, not least during the Independence struggle in 1971, when the national team, exiled to India, became one of the first bodies to popularise the country’s green-and-red flag.
Subsequently that passion was channelled into the Bangladesh League, and the rivalry between Mohammadan and Abahani, the two biggest clubs in Dhaka, became as intense as any local derby you’d care to mention. However, the atmosphere in Friday’s latest encounter lacked a certain sizzle. Where once a sell-out would have been guaranteed, now there were fewer than 6000 people turning out for a fixture that was being broadcast live on national TV. As one local journalist put it: “Cricket eats everything”.
Full postExploring neighbourly possibilities
Flying from Melbourne to Wellington feels more like a domestic trip than an international voyage
Brydon Coverdale
25-Feb-2013
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Flying from Melbourne to Wellington feels more like a domestic trip than an international voyage. Passports are not stamped, accents change only slightly and it’s a shorter flight than from Melbourne to Perth. Even when an Australian settles down in New Zealand, their TV screens show Aussie sights like Eddie McGuire asking million-dollar questions and Kevin Rudd answering queries of his own on parliament question time.
The two countries have their own distinct characteristics but share much more than not. The former New Zealand prime minister Mike Moore once said that Australians and New Zealanders had more in common than New Yorkers and Californians. Some of that goes back to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs) of World War I but even earlier, in the 1890s, New Zealand considered joining the soon-to-be Federation of Australia. Even Fiji was in the mix to become a state, while Western Australia was a somewhat reluctant participant.
Obviously New Zealand chose to go its own way and WA joined, although the state did hold a referendum in the 1930s over the possibility of seceding. And that brings me to my point. What if the Federation of Australia featured six states – Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand – while Western Australia remained independent? What would that mean for the sporting landscape?
Full postChittagong's grassless grass-roots
Andrew Miller
25-Feb-2013
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There’s a lot of time for looking out of the window while waiting for the lift at the Asian SR Hotel in Chittagong, but on Sunday night the standard view of random headlights, flickering tea-lights and silhouetted passers-by had been transformed beyond recognition. Across the road, in a field that had previously been occupied by a herd of non-descript sheep, was a sight that England’s Johnny Cash-obsessed cricketers might well have described as “a burning ring of fire”.
What it actually turned out to be was the opening round of the Baniatila Premier League, a brand-new floodlit tournament that was the very definition of grass-roots cricket, even down to the surface on which it was being played – a patch of arid, dusty soil in desperate need of watering to enable anything substantial to grow. And yet, the bare facts of the event were nonetheless astonishing – not least the size of the crowd, which had to number at least 200 people, set three bodies deep all around the boundary’s edge.
That boundary itself was marked out by a series of bamboo poles – each topped with a home-security-style floodlight and strung together with a single white flex of electrical cabling that was being fed from the mains of a nearby house – but the playing area it encircled was tiny. A regulation 22-yard strip had been rolled as flat and hard as possible along the middle, with proper stumps and bails at either end, but the distance to the boundary could not have been more than five metres in some places.
Full postEddie Barlow's misplaced legacy
Andrew Miller
25-Feb-2013
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Midway through the first day of the Chittagong Test, a commotion broke out in the press box as an elegant, well-dressed English lady breezed into the room and set about chatting to the local journalists, with a TV camera tracking her every move, and dictaphones at the ready to jot down her utterances. The lady in question was Cally Barlow, the widow of the late, great Eddie, and her return to Bangladesh was the hot news of the day.
Eddie Barlow’s brief spell as the coach of Bangladesh seems almost incidental in the grand scheme of his life story – a tale which included 30 Tests at the height of South Africa’s pre-isolation powers in the 1960s, and a significant role in the liberalising of the board thereafter. He came to Bangladesh in 1999 with a remit to guide them through the turbulent early years of their full Test status, but his tenure came to a sad end one year later, after he suffered the first of a series of strokes that would lead ultimately to his death in 2005, at the age of 65.
And yet, as Cally’s return to Bangladesh shows only too well, there was something about the Barlow era that made a lasting and devoted impression on the country. “He was more than a coach, he was a father to our team,” said Aminul Islam, Barlow’s first captain, and the man who, in November 2000, marked his country’s inaugural Test with a life-changing 145. “To lose him when we did was the biggest setback in the history of Bangladesh cricket.”
Full postThe Bangladeshi boozer
The Railwayman's Inn on Station Road sounds like a thoroughly conventional boozer
Andrew Miller
25-Feb-2013
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The Railwayman's Inn on Station Road sounds like a thoroughly conventional boozer. The sort of place with a jukebox and soiled brown carpets, and a dozy clientele of commuters waiting for the 17.32 to Paddington. The Railwayman's Inn on Station Road in Chittagong, on the other hand, is something else entirely.
Mind you, Station Road in Chittagong is a sufficiently different sort of place as it is. It's a long wide boulevard of the distinctly functional variety, with cheap and cheerful hotels lined up along one side, and even cheaper, rather less cheerful stalls and boutiques on the other.
It's grimy and noisy, and tailored towards a transient market, with the average trip across the road bringing to mind that old-school computer game, Frogger. As you dither through the traffic, a constant stream of buses, lorries, carts, rickshaws and auto-rickshaws bear down on you at every speed imaginable, first from one direction, then from another, with only a thin brick kerb in the middle providing any sanctuary.
Full postDancing into the night
No matter what criticism comes Bangladesh’s way after each new whitewashed series, it rarely takes long for the singing and dancing to resume
Andrew Miller
25-Feb-2013
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| Even when the cricket team loses, the festivities and celebrations do not stop in Bangladesh © Cricinfo Ltd. |
As the ever-enthusiastic crowds drained into the fields behind the stands, and the press corps trooped off to conduct the post-match briefing, the sounds of nascent revelry began to float out from the village that backs onto the ground. And as dusk kicked in, the atmosphere kicked off, with all manner of excitement wafting up from an otherwise sleepy community.
The village of Malpara lies a half-hour drive from the centre of town, across two railway lines and past a rickshaw graveyard, and near an expanse of scrap-metal merchants where the spoils of Chittagong’s famous ship-breaking yards are hammered back into shape. It was a quiet fishing settlement long before the Bangladesh Cricket Board parked the Chittagong Divisional Stadium on its doorstep, but happily for the villagers, the impact of the intrusion seems, for the most part, to have been beneficial.
During the ground’s construction back in 2003, many of the local women earned extra income by chiselling bricks while sat beneath flimsy umbrellas, and if that sounds like a hardship then it at least helped establish a firm link with the community. Besides, you’d be hard-pressed to find any children in the neighbourhood whose lives haven’t been enriched by the thrill of big-match cricket on their doorstep.
Full postThe slow train to Chittagong
Andrew Miller
25-Feb-2013
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England’s cricketers must have a carbon footprint the size of the Jolly Green Giant. When they aren’t playing, practising or resting in a hotel, they can invariably be tracked down to an airport of some description – either jetting off long-haul to some far-flung destination, or hopping domestically from one island, state or city to the next. But of all the internal routes that they’ve encountered, Dhaka to Chittagong must be one of their most ill-starred.
On the 2003 tour, that short but intense route claimed a notable casualty in Steve Harmison, whose high-kicking hostility had been too much for Bangladesh in the first Test at Dhaka, but whose back folded like a deckchair during the 50 minutes he spent squeezed into a seat that had been designed without six-foot-several Geordies in mind. (At least that was the official line – unofficially, the management had simply lost the will to deal with his homesickness, but that’s another story.)
Six years on, and the curse has struck again, and that’s before anyone dares ask for an update on Stuart Broad’s stiff back – suffice to say, he was walking like an old woman on his eventual arrival at the team hotel in Chittagong. The England squad had been expected in town at roughly 4pm this afternoon, but after several delays that turned into outright cancellations, they were still slogging through the traffic as the clock ticked round towards 9.
Full postUshering in a new era
Andrew Miller
25-Feb-2013
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I have fond memories of Dhaka’s venerable Bangabandhu Stadium, the venue for England’s inaugural Test against Bangladesh back in October 2003. Like the Recreation Ground in Antigua, its ramshackle nature was an integral part of its character, and the fact that both venues were situated right in the heart of their capitals was an added advantage when it came to ushering casual spectators through the gates.
In its 50-year history, the Bangabandhu hosted 17 Tests and 58 ODIs, but in 2005, it was decommissioned and handed back to the national Football Federation, to resume hosting the sport which had long been held at the ground during the monsoon season. Instead an alternative stadium was earmarked in Mirpur, a somewhat less frantic suburb 5km to the north. During England’s last visit it was still in the throes of reconstruction, but now it is ready, and it has to be said, it does look rather impressive.
In keeping with the Bangladeshi experience, the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium has its unconventional aspects. The exterior, for instance, is entirely dominated by furniture stores, which have burrowed deep into the triangular cavities beneath the stands, and where you can purchase a lavishly carved dining-room table for a pre-haggle price of 10,000 taka (roughly £100), with a cup of tea thrown into the bargain.
Full postBangladesh's warm embrace
Andrew Miller
25-Feb-2013
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It’s been six long years since I set foot in Bangladesh, but after 48 hours, it feels as though I’ve never been away. In my experience, which includes journeys to all parts of the cricket-playing world, as well as seven months’ hitchhiking through Africa, I have never known a land with an embrace that’s so unrelenting. For better or for worse – for reasons of hospitality on the one hand, and raw survival instinct on the other – the Bangladeshi welcome is the most genuine and vivid imaginable.
It’s a welcome that pervades the senses to an extent that no other country can match. First there’s the heat, an oppressive and clammy blanket of humidity that sets you up for the smothering that’s to come. Then there’s the 24-hour cacophony that plays out like a looped techno track; the bass rumble of a million motors mixed with the spiky treble of as many car horns, and embellished by the intermittent wail of the Azan and the aggressive bark of the loudhailer, as another political rally springs up on a street corner, and then melts away into the crowd.
It’s a welcome that not even the most churlish of tourists could hope to avoid. The staggering stagnation of Dhaka’s choked arteries sees to that. No city on earth can be closer to gridlock, and a 5km journey can take upwards of an hour as air-conditioned coaches compete for road-space with grimy local buses, pea-green tuk-tuks, and the wonderfully ornate bicycle rickshaws that are the city’s signature mode of transport. Even if you wished to close your eyes to the destitution on display, the glacial progress means it’s not an option. There are too many faces at the windows, and too many piles of rags in the gutters, for anything other than the brutal truth to hit home.
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