Nairobi ready for ICC KnockOut 2000

Nairobi - The Almighty's ability to shower His blessings wherever and whenever cricket is played will be tested at the Nairobi Gymkhana Club over the next two weeks as the ICC KnockOut 2000 tournament takes its course.

Kenya has had neither decent nor reliable rains for the past three years and the country is in the grip of a severe drought. At the National Stadium in Nairobi on Sunday, a government backed prayer rally asked for an end to the country's several woes, and high on the list was a request for a bit more rain, please.

Locals, however, aren't holding their breath and the provision of rest days for KnockOut 2000's semifinals and finals seems an excessive caution.

Notwithstanding the drought, the Gymkhana Club, which has its own borehole, looked just about ready on Monday for Tuesday's opening match between the hosts and India. The outfield had a lush covering of grass, but it remains to be seen how the pitch will play over two weeks.

At a four-nation tournament at the same venue last year, according to South African captain Shaun Pollock, "it started off slowly and turned a bit, but it quickened up as the tournament went on".

It would be stretching a point to argue that all Nairobi will grind to a halt for the cricket, but there does seem genuine interest in the game in a country that hopes, in a few years' time, to become the 11th Test playing nation.

ICC officials have managed to get posters, advertising the tournament, up on all the lamp-posts into the centre of town from the airport. Taxi drivers, bellhops and shopkeepers are all aware of the cricket as are the local newspapers. The East African Standard carried four KnockOut 2000 related stories in its Monday morning edition, and in the Daily Nation there were match reports of Sunday's warm-up games between Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and India and the West Indies, including a scorecard for the latter match.

In fact, reported the Nation correspondent, the India-West Indies fixture was "watched by a mammoth crowd". He did not, however, think to elaborate on exactly how big this crowd actually was.

This enthusiasm, however, did not extend to visa officials at the airport. If you come in as a tourist just to watch the cricket, no visa is required. CricInfo's Colin Croft, whose passport declares his profession as "pilot", got in this way. This correspondent, on the other hand, confessed his professional interest in the cricket and it cost him US$50 for a "business visa".

In the middle of a heated argument, the senior visa official at the airport announced that if the players were professionals and were doing their jobs by playing cricket, they, too, would have to have "business visas".

The prize money for the tournament is a generous US$1-million with the winners getting US$250 000 and the first-round losers US$60 000. Even so, some of cricket's poorer relations, Zimbabwe for instance, might have to go without dinner for a day or two if they have to cough up for a visa.