They keep giving incredible amounts of love to a game that doesn’t love them back
Sidharth Monga14-Mar-20168:39
What it takes to play the sport you love
Vivian Kingma is a 21-year-old fast bowler, the youngest in Netherlands’ squad. As a nine-year-old, he knew he needed to wear glasses, but he wouldn’t because he thought it wasn’t cool. He once accidentally-deliberately broke them and told his mother he didn’t really need glasses.Kingma’s older brothers are cricketers, his father was a cricketer, they live on a cricket field, and he turned out to be a good quick bowler. He was too embarrassed to wear glasses, though. At school he would sit in the back row and find excuses to cover his right eye so that he could see out of his good left eye. “I was not dumb, but wasn’t a good student, so school didn’t matter that much,” he says. He used to go to the movies, sit in the dark with a hand covering his right eye. At cricket his coaches would wonder why he wasn’t a great fielder or why he couldn’t bat to save his life.Eventually they forced him to get glasses and contact lenses when he was 19. He now bowls wearing contacts and bats with glasses on. Kingma today is a mature young man who looks back slightly embarrassed by his silliness. Already, though, he’s doing something else that may be seen as silly, except it’s more serious than avoiding wearing glasses.Kingma lives with his parents, doesn’t work, because he wants to play for Netherlands (he has played one ODI and one T20I for them), but has no contract, and gets paid only when he actually plays or is part of the squad, which is for about ten days this year. He has given up other job opportunities because he wants to be the fittest he can be. His only other earning is through basic cricket coaching for kids. He trains four days a week and works out at the gym on the other three days. He doesn’t drive. He takes a train, which is quite expensive. Sometimes he runs out of money.Only five players have contracts with Netherlands, and the situation is similar to Kingma’s for the rest. Coach Anton Roux sometimes gets calls from these youngsters before training sessions to tell him that they are stranded without money. They have to find ways to keep doing what they love.The problem, though, is that opportunities to do what they love are scarce. Paul van Meekeren, two years older than Kingma, is a tall and strapping fast bowler who extracts extra bounce from the pitch. Kingma does everything that’s asked of him but still doesn’t make it to the XI for the World T20, and it breaks Roux’s heart to tell him that. But van Meekeren makes it and takes six wickets in two matches: 2 for 17 in a promising spell against Bangladesh, and four in the six-overs-a side match against Ireland, which captain Peter Borren calls a bit of a lottery.The unwanted: Netherlands have three matches to look forward to for the rest of the year•ICC/Getty ImagesVan Meekeren’s next chance at a global event will now come in four years because the World T20 has become a quadrennial event. There will also be fewer World Cricket League matches to play now that the tournament will be held over a three-year cycle.Van Meekeren will go and play club cricket in Durham and in New Zealand, which, by way of earning, is not much, though the travel and accommodation is taken care of.The players insist they train as hard and as well as, say, the Indians or Australians, which means they can’t really take up other full-time jobs. However, if you ask them whether they will still be playing cricket four years from now, they don’t think twice before saying yes. Van Meekeren says he wants to lead the attack with Kingma in 2020.Roux and Borren find it encouraging, but they fear it’s going to be hard to keep this strong unit together and motivated with so little reward. Kingma and his family were at Lord’s when Netherlands beat England in 2009, but the team knows they have become a much better side since – the way they train, the way they look after themselves, the way they field, the way they back their skills. They don’t want to be seen dining off the win in 2009 or their great show in 2014. They want to go a step further. They want to leave their own legacy. But they need opportunities to do that.The first round of this World T20, no matter how you look at it, was not the right opportunity. Netherlands and the rest of the Associate teams played qualifiers last year under extreme pressure in Ireland and Scotland. It is just unimaginable when your funding, your one appearance in four years, perhaps your existence, depends on just one tournament. Yet after that they had to go through another qualifier against practically the same opposition. And how? Three matches in five days, with only one out of four teams in each group going through, playing in Dharamsala in March, when it usually rains there, with no reserve days or arrangements to make sure the last two matches were played simultaneously to avoid run-rate manipulations.The Associates are not playing in front of tens of thousands of people, with millions of dollars of revenue depending on their performance. They are not going through the same scrutiny that India players go through, they are not callously labelled match-fixers for every defeat, as the Pakistanis are, but this is a different kind of pressure.Van Meekeren got to showcase his talents for six overs in a tournament that is played over 27 days•ICC/Getty ImagesSo as it rained on Saturday, raising doubts of yet another washed-out day, the teams sat in their hotels, reliving every small mistake they made on day one, which basically knocked them out.Netherlands mulled over that last over they bowled to Bangladesh. Imagine what Max Sorensen went through: his full tosses with a wet ball in the last over against Oman knocked them out.Oman, just behind Bangladesh on net run rate, kept replaying in their minds the great Gary Wilson effort at the boundary that kept a six to one.They have been set up to fail, and for every mistake they make on the field they can sense there are decision-makers congratulating themselves for keeping them out of the system.Which brings us to the decision-makers. They are making business decisions. They don’t see any revenue coming from Netherlands, and very little from Ireland. The broadcasters don’t want them. More so, they don’t want the risk of these teams knocking out the big revenue generators – let’s say, India – early in a tournament for which they paid loads and loads of money. R Ashwin tweeted the other day that it would be great news for cricket if Oman were to go through to the main round, but such news doesn’t bring in revenue.The only fallacy with this school of thought is that it stops the game from creating new revenue generators in the long run. But with franchise cricket now an option, not many seem to have the patience and the foresight to wait for these Associate teams to grow to a stage where they can sustain themselves. It comes in the way of maximising profits. Cue Gideon Haigh’s seminal question: does cricket exist to make money or does it make money in order to exist?
