Club cricket in Shanghai: a familiar comfort in an unforgiving city | Cricket

Xiy zhn: Shj Ddo, a Chinese robot voice blares over the subway speakers. Qinfng ky hunchng r ho xin, li ho xin, h ji ho xin. Chmn Jing Zi Yu C Kimn, Qng Zhn Won F Ho.

A few seconds later an English voice follows: Next station: Century Avenue. You can change to line 2, line 6 and line 9. The doors open on the right. Stand at a distance and hold onto the handrails. I get up from my seat and try to maneuver myself and my large Kookaburra duffel bag to the carriage doors. B ho y si, b ho y si (Excuse me, excuse me) I say as I squeeze past an old lady and her shopping cart and then a mother with a stroller.

Shj Ddo, dole, says the announcer's voice as the train stops and the doors open. We are now on Century Avenue.

I blend into the crowd and take the escalator to the hall, following the signs for line 6 before going up a small flight of stairs to another platform. I have to wait a few minutes for the train to Gangcheng Road.

Although Century Avenue sounds like the ideal location for a cricket ground, my destination is Wuzhou Avenue and the nearby Shanghai Community Sports Club, where I will be featuring for DPR Hot Dogs CC first XI in the Shanghai Cricket Club League.

This is a trip I would take every few weeks during the summers of 2017 and 2018 while working as a staff writer and editor at Time Out Shanghai magazine, a job I stumbled upon while trying to escape my parents' house and the British labor market in an attempt to find a post-graduate career.

The train arrives and I board, grateful to have found a seat as I am still eleven stations away from my stop. We drive east, deep into Pudong, a part of Shanghai that is a mix of industry and residential. With each stop we get further away from the more glamorous Puxi district, famous for the picturesque tree-lined streets and art deco and neoclassical buildings of the former French Concession, a district frequented by members of Shanghai's foreign community.

During the first few stops I am the only non-Chinese in the carriage. A young boy opposite me alerts his mother to my presence by nudging her and pointing in my direction. She slaps his hand down and tells him to behave. Wigurn, (foreigner) I hear him say that this is not intended as an insult, but merely as a statement of fact. It is not uncommon in China for people, especially children, to be intrigued by the presence of someone from abroad, especially someone as pasty and northern as I am.

We reach a transfer station and further down the carriage a South Asian man gets in. He carries an SG bag and wears all-white clothes. It doesn't take a genius to figure out where he's going.

During my time in China, the Shanghai Cricket Club League was a three-division competition consisting of teams from eight participating clubs playing 40, 30 and 20 over matches. Today, the competition, which was formed in 2004, is much smaller due to the significant decline in Shanghai's foreign population after the pandemic.

The eight clubs included founding members Bashers CC and Pudong CC, as well as associated teams such as China Zalmi CC, which had links with Pakistani Super League side Peshawar Zalmi, and K2 CC, a team that saw some players complete a 350-mile lap. Travel from Hangzhou in neighboring Zhejiang province for every match – the equivalent of living in London but playing your club cricket in Wales.

Unsurprisingly, because cricket is not a popular sport in China, the vast majority of players during my time in Shanghai were expats, many from India, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, England and New Zealand. But there was also some local representation across the competition, notably including former Chinese women's captain Mei Chun Hua and men's international Zhang Yu Fei.

Due to a lack of playing facilities, it was not possible for every team to play weekly, so during the course of the season most players got a match once every two weeks, making each match feel more like an event and something to experience. looking forward to it.

Life in Shanghai was hectic and fast-paced. The city's population would hover between 25 and 30 million over the course of a working day, with more than 10 million of them piling onto the trains of the massive Shanghai Metro system (with 14 lines covering a distance of more than cover 640 kilometers). of their daily commute. This was a world away from my home town of Pudsey, which has a population of around 25,000 and a large Asda. To put this into perspective, Putuo, the district of Shanghai where I lived, has a population of over 1.2 million. However, Putuo does not have a large Asda.

The city was incredibly stimulating, home to people from all over the world and boasting a bevy of bars, restaurants and nightclubs. But with this stimulation came fatigue.

Due to a combination of the language barrier, difficult bureaucratic processes and the sheer amount of options when it came to food, entertainment and dating, along with the occasional loneliness and feelings of insignificance that living in a megacity brings, I found myself feeling burned out. feeling and a little homesick. This is where the cricket came in.

Every fortnight, me and 21 other like-minded guys from all over the world would meet up for a few hours, play a competitive game of cricket, have a few beers and for a while we'd forget we lived in Shanghai. There was something familiar and comforting about it. Finding something you know in a place you don't know.

You don't have time to think about rush hour on line 2 when you're busy cutting off singles at extra cover; Obtaining all the documents to renew your visa is not a problem if the opposition rushes in and collapses halfway through.

For those of us who wanted to play a bit more seriously, there was also the chance to play for Shanghai Cricket Club's representative XI, the Shanghai Dragons. We hosted touring sides from Hong Kong CC and MCC and were also due to take on Beijing CC in the annual China Cup match. MCC has toured China only twice: in 2006 and again in 2017.

The most recent squad, overseen by Mike Gatting, included ex-Pakistan international Yasir Arafat, upcoming Scotland international Chris Greaves and former Yorkshire wicketkeeper Simon Guy.

Club cricket in Shanghai gave everyone involved exactly what they wanted: a sense of community far away from home, the chance to play cricket in a place where many wouldn't expect it, and a much-needed escape from the chaos of city life. .

Wzhu Ddo, benefit. The train comes to a stop and the doors open. We are now on Wuzhou Avenue.

The only competition in the world

The sense of escapism through club cricket is something I would experience again a few years after my time in Shanghai. In 2020, I played in Taipei, Taiwan, where Id had moved to a new job the previous year, lining up for Taiwan Dragons CC in the Taipei T10 League. This time, however, it wasn't just escapism for me, but for those watching.

Because Taiwan had responded so quickly and efficiently to the Covid outbreak, the country was able to host competitive club cricket with only minimal precautions in late April. As a result, Taiwan was, albeit briefly, the only cricket-playing country in the world. Games were streamed live on the Sports Tiger mobile app and on YouTube, attracting thousands of viewers per match, mainly in India, with viewers able to choose teams on the Dream 11 fantasy platform to further invest in the action.

With the future of the world so uncertain, the Taipei T10 League was a welcome distraction. People wanted to take a break, not think about the pandemic and enjoy live cricket, regardless of location or quality.

The entire world is out of sports, and people in countries around the world under lockdown are bored because they can't even go to exercise, league host Priya Lalwani Purswaney told Taiwan's Central News Agency. The league's 160 players are long-term residents of Taiwan from cricketing nations around the world, including engineers, students, English teachers, restaurant owners and local community members who have been playing cricket for fun in Taiwan for decades.

It was a strange time to be in Taiwan. The island nation went eight months without a known case of Covid-19 being transmitted domestically, with the streak finally broken in December 2020. It felt like we were living in a bubble while the world around us was on fire; non-residents/nationals were not allowed to enter the country and no one who was there was in a hurry to leave.

It was emotionally conflicting: I felt scared for the well-being of my family and friends back home, and guilty because I was so lucky to be in Taiwan. But during those four weekends in April and May, as soon as I stepped onto the playing field, all I could think about was cricket.