Meet the poor sons of cricket

Paul Radley

• Last Updated: June 16. 2008 11:28PM UAE / June 16. 2008 7:28PM GMT

The UAE Cricket team take a break from training. The National

DUBAI // Doesn’t your heart bleed for Kevin Pietersen, sometimes? “I could earn a million dollars playing cricket for six weeks this summer,” he moaned recently, after missing out on the chance to play in the cash-rich Indian Premier League (IPL).

“But I can’t. The English cricket board won’t allow it. And that’s hard to take. People who abuse us for admitting we want to earn that kind of money are not going to pay for my children’s school fees in 15 years time, are they?”

Probably not. Perhaps he will be able to afford those costly fees if his England side win the Stanford Twenty20 for $20 million (Dh73.4m) in November. But the disproportionate gap between cricket’s haves and have-nots is even wider when you contrast Pietersen’s travails with that of cricketers in the UAE.

No one will be paying Khurram Khan’s children’s school fees in the near future either. But the long-serving UAE all-rounder, who will be one of their key players in the Asia Cup later this month, is not complaining.

Playing cricket actually costs him money. He often has to take unpaid leave from his job as a flight purser with Emirates airline to play for his adopted national team.

“These boys are professional in their own lives,” says Mazhar Khan, the Emirates Cricket Board administrator and tour manager for the Asia Cup. “For example, Khurram is a flight purser. He might play a match, then be flying out on the night of the game to Melbourne on a 20-hour flight. Just imagine how hard that is.

“If he plays a four-day match, he would almost certainly then have a four-day job with his work to Melbourne, or Tokyo, or Jakarta. And working as a purser is not easy. It is a serious job.” Cricket in the UAE could survive for a year quite adequately on what one player in the victorious Stanford Twenty20 team earns for three hours of work.

When they play at the Asia Cup in Pakistan, they will be playing against players from Test nations such as Sri Lanka’s, whose players reaped considerable financial benefits from the IPL.

The UAE will be one of two Associate – or non-Test playing – nations playing in the Asia Cup, the other being Hong Kong.

“All the associate nations face the same problems, on account of not being professionals,” adds Mazhar. “The I-Cup [Intercontinental Cup] takes away 40 days, including travel, per year alone.

“Then you have domestic cricket, the Asian Cricket Council tournaments, the European Council tournament, plus the World Cricket League matches.

“You are talking around three months of leave for any given cricketer. It is very difficult for a company to just go and say, ‘Fine, this is your paid leave’.

“And so it is also difficult for a board to support that salary. Just imagine: you can’t do that for 14 players. It is not easy.

“Some say, why doesn’t the board support it? But it is not a small amount. On average, a cricketer earns $2-3,000 per month, plus he has to go on leave to be with his family.

“It is a tough call for these boys, but because of their passion for the game, they sacrifice all these things. They take a few days here and a few days there, and that’s what keeps cricket going.”

pradley@thenational.ae