Cricket really can take you places

While walking around the Kinrara Oval on Saturday, a journalist friend pointed someone out to me who said that he was a fast bowler who had bowled Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid at the nets when India were in Kuala Lumpur for the DLF Cup in 2006. So I went up to him and asked him who he was and felt quite sheepish when he replied that he had been playing for the Malaysian national side for 15 years and captained them for eight. Suresh Navaratnam is 33-years-old now. He began playing for Malaysia in 1993, at the age of 18 and led the country from December 1998 to 2006.

A common gripe, and a realistic one, in smaller cricketing countries is that you can’t make a living out of playing cricket. Suresh, though he understands the larger problems, has had an extremely different experience with the sport. “People say, in this country, that cricket won’t take you anywhere,” Suresh said. ”But for me, cricket has taken me everywhere. You’ve got to grab your opportunities.”

Suresh’s family is originally from Sri Lanka – his grandfather was from there – but his parents were born in Malaysia and so was he. He took up the game at the age of 12, under the influence of his father and uncles who used to play actively. Why choose cricket when other sports were so much bigger in Malaysia? “I just followed my father,” he says.

Suresh was born in 1975, and during his formative years cricket was a rarity on local television. Yet he says his early heroes were Javed Miandad and then Steve Waugh. He used to read about the sport in papers and when people went to England and returned, he would soak up information from publications like Wisden and The Cricketer. A local channel used to telecast an hour cricket highlights once a week. They were mostly old matches involving England and West Indies but he used to watch and it was around then that he began to admire Curtly Ambrose.

His family had a significant impact on his early cricket days but his father died a year after Suresh was 14, a year after he began playing cricket. In some ways, he says, that became an encouragement for him to do well. He rose through the ranks of school cricket, played for his state, Selangor, then went on to play at the junior levels for Malaysia before breaking into the national side at the age of 18.

In 1996, Suresh got a major break. Graham Halbish, who was with the Australian cricket board at the time, brought two Australian teams - the seniors and an A side – to Malaysia to play a Super 8s tournament. It was an experimental format – eight players in a team and 14-overs-a-side contest. Suresh was part of an international team captained by Allan Border which included players like Sanath Jayasuriya, Aravinda de Silva and Chaminda Vaas, fresh from their World Cup victory. Suresh was the only Malaysian in the squad.

Even though he went on to represent Malaysia in the Commonwealth Games in 1998, that Super 8 tournament, though it failed to take off as a concept, is Suresh’s favourite cricketing experience. He played against the best Australian players of the time – Mark Taylor, Ricky Ponting, Mark Waugh, Michael Slater – and future stars such as Adam Gilchrist and Matthew Hayden who were part of the A team.

Suresh’s performances must have caught Halbish’s eye for Halbish invited Suresh to Australia to play for his club Mulgrave. So in August 1996, he was playing the Super 8s and in October he was in Australia, where he went on to play for four seasons.

Suresh says cricket’s given him a lot. He went to university in Malaysia to study sports science and he got picked for the course primarily because he was a national player. He admits that he’s had a lot of luck along the way but says that you’ve just got to keep at it.