I am writing this blog today because the Nepal v UAE three-day match ended in two days. Nepal lost by 10 wickets and I got free time today to write about Nepali cricket. Is it downfalling?
Nepal’s cricket team’s performance since six months hasn’t been good. The cricket team always used to perform well under any condition and most of the people were in the belief that if there is any sport that could put Nepal in world stage, it was cricket.
But the latest humiliating 10-wicket loss to UAE and two draws against Malaysia and Singpore in the ACC Fast Track Countries Tournament, and also the quarterfinal loss to Qatar in the ACC Trophy 2005 in Malaysia, has been more than enough to for those hopes fading. And with these results, people have started debating about captain, coach and Cricket Association of Nepal.
Is Nepali cricket downfalling? Slightly yes. Because:
a. Domestic cricket tournaments that used to be a pride of Tundikhel has all been stopped because the army donot any more let the groud be used for cricket tournaments. And there is no other good ground to hold tournaments.
b. The TU International Cricket Ground is almost busy throughtout the year due to closed-camp and its own tournaments. If its available Rs. 5000 a day is simply not cheap for the organizers.
c. Nepal’s domestic cricket structure as run by CAN is not strong. To say, we have Under-15, Under-17, Under-19 and national league for five (now six) cricket development regions, but all of them are one-day tournaments and runs no more than 12-15 days.
But these alone has not caused the bad results. Other reasons:
a. Most of the gulf teams and Malaysia, Singapore use Indian, Sri Lankan or Pakistani emmigrants in their teams. For eg, the UAE team that defeated Nepal had 9 Pakistani nationals, a Indian national and only one UAE national. Singapore drew with Nepal largely because of Buddhika Silva’s century who is a Sri Lankan and Malaysia because of Sarath Jayawardene who is also Sri Lankan.
What we can do?
We have no choice other than to restructure our domestic cricket. But when will CAN do that? Nobody knows.
