PRIVATE security companies in Nairobi employ over 100,000 people. Tranquillity is hard to come by in Kenya’s capital but the Gymkhana Club, a ten-minute drive north of the city centre – notorious traffic permitting – provides it. It is a private members’ club opened by a former British Governor of Kenya that has all the features of exclusive establishments the world over: swanky restaurants, tennis courts, a swimming pool, a snooker room and much more.
Encircled by jacaranda trees, the Gymkhana Club Ground is a magnificent setting for cricket and has staged games for over a century. Yet it has not hosted an international match since 2010. For one glorious day, on 24 February 2003, the Gymkhana Club Ground was the fulcrum of the cricketing world. Kenya were hosting their first game in the Cricket World Cup, against Sri Lanka. ‘Just the fact that Sri Lanka were playing us at home was a big, big thing for us and the cricket fraternity,’ captain Steve Tikolo reflected. ‘Imagine a World Cup match being played in your own backyard.’
Although the game was played on a Monday, it was a sell-out: supporters were turned away even before the match began. It was quite a sight for the press corps to enjoy in the plush media centre. Along with new stands, the media centre was built in time for the new century: a symbol of Kenya’s advance into the cricketing elite. It had everything a journalist could wish for: even an open bar, thanks to East Africa Breweries’ sponsorship.
Dry and sweltering, it was a typical Nairobi day in February. But it did not seem as if it would be marked by a Kenyan victory. Although Kennedy Obuya batted with gusto, going down on one knee and smiting Sri Lanka’s opening bowler Chaminda Vaas for six over midwicket en route to 60, Kenya stumbled against Muttiah Muralitharan. He took 4-28 and Kenya reached 210/9. It did not seem like a score likely to test Sri Lanka’s powerful batting line-up, but Kenya retained a quiet confidence. ‘Knowing the ground so well, when we set 210 we knew we could defend it,’ remembered Collins Obuya, Kennedy’s brother and team-mate. ‘The pressure was on the bowlers to step up – as a team we knew what the nation expected from us. We could not settle for anything less than a win.’
As they reached 71/2, Sri Lanka appeared to be cruising towards victory. While Kenya did not have Muralitharan, they did have a 21-year-old leg-spinner. After Shane Warne was sent home from the World Cup for failing a drugs test, Collins Obuya became the tournament’s leg-spinning star. His bowling would later disintegrate, but for a day he bewitched Sri Lanka. Unusually tall for a spinner, Obuya made up for a lack of prodigious turn by getting the ball to grip and bounce off the surface. He also varied his pace: it was a quicker ball that snared Aravinda de Silva, the only Sri Lankan to look in command. By the time de Silva was dismissed, Sri Lanka had slid to 112/6. They subsided meekly thereafter.
In ten unchanged overs, Obuya took 5-24. ‘That was magical bowling, to beat the masters at their own game. Everybody knows that Sri Lanka facing spin was bread and butter for them,’ Obuya’s team-mate Maurice Odumbe told me. ‘It was nice to see a young African lad bowling leg spin just like Shane Warne. I don’t think I’ve seen any leg-spinner outside the Test-playing countries bowling like that.’
Obuya bowled so well that the victory lacked a dramatic denouement. Sri Lanka lost by 53 runs. In front of an official capacity attendance of over 8,000 – though plenty more seemed to be crammed in, including future captain Rakep Patel, who had skipped school – Kenya’s players did a lap of honour at a pace that would not have shamed the nation’s marathon runners. World Cup fever was spreading. ‘During that month and the two months afterwards everybody was talking cricket. If you walked down the street everyone would salute you,’ Tikolo remembered.
In the aftermath of the victory, Tikolo was asked who his Kenya side would overturn next. The answer came in their very next match. Kenya beat Bangladesh by 32 runs to secure their qualification for the Super Six stage.
The first recorded match in Kenya took place in Mombasa in 1896, between a local team and the crew of HMS Sparrow. Cricket was strongest in Nairobi, the capital and the heart of the British colonial administration. It thrived in elite private members’ clubs whose members did not even try to maintain the pretense that they wanted to play locals.
The two highlights of the summer – the Asian XI v European XI fixture which was played from 1933; and the Officials v Settlers fixture, which began in 1910 – reflected this underlying truth. It was only in the 1950s that the running of the game became non-racial although, in practice, this merely meant that those of Asian and European background ran it together rather than in two parallel organisations. ‘Cricket was a non-sport in the black community,’ said Tikolo, who was born in Nairobi in 1971. ‘When we were growing up cricket was a sport for the elites – it was mainly played by the whites and Asians.’
After Kenya gained independence in 1963, the sport slowly became Africanised. In 1976, Kenneth Odhiambo Odumbe became the first black African to play for Kenya. Four of his brothers would later represent the national team too.
For black Africans, cricket was not just a sport but an escape route. The Odumbe family was raised on an estate for government employees in Nairobi and lived next to the Sir Ali Muslim Club. Out of curiosity, they started to go and watch matches there, and to play themselves. The Odumbes used a plank of wood as a bat and maize coir as a ball. They used dustbins as wicket and played in between the streets of the estates. They practised on the boundary edge during games, and worked as ball boys.
The Odumbe brothers got the chance to train and play for the club. Soon, the Sir Ali Muslim Club agreed to pay for their school fees. The story of the Tikolo family, who contributed three players to Kenya, including two captains (Tom and Steve), is almost identical. They also grew up near the Sir Ali Muslim Club, where they watched matches with the Odumbes. The only significant difference was that a benefactor from the Swamibapa Cricket Club spotted the Tikolos, and signed them to play there.
Asian benefactors helped cricket gain a foothold in Kenya in other ways. During the 1980s, Indian Test players including Sanjay Manjrekar, Kiran More and Sandeep Patil all played for clubs in Nairobi. The significant Kenyan-Asian community attended in considerable numbers; crowds of several thousand were typical. For young Kenyan players, it ensured a high calibre of cricket, the opportunity to learn from Test players, and a decent grounding for international matches.
‘The really good Kenyan players suddenly raised their games and were able to compete,’ David Waters, who has been involved in Kenyan cricket for over 30 years including as chairman of selectors, told me. ‘Instead of being overawed by these international stars, we were playing with them week in and week out – and it was that that gave us the springboard to do well in those World Cups. They transformed our game.’
Collins Obuya is just one case in point. ‘Every time there was a match I would go to the ground and help players carry their kits and I would learn a few things.’ He attributes learning to bowl to working with the former Indian Test bowler Balwinder Singh Sandhu.
Yet Kenya did not appear in the first five Cricket World Cups and did not even join the ICC until 1981. Before that, Kenya had been absorbed, along with Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia, under the umbrella side East Africa. Kenyan players dominated the side that qualified for the 1975 World Cup, but they had been unceremoniously thrashed in all three games.
In 1994, Kenya hosted the ICC Trophy, which would decide which three associates would qualify for the newly expanded 12-team World Cup. It was an opportunity the players were too good to miss. A squad dominated by the Tikolo and Odumbe families, who each provided three brothers, won eight consecutive games to qualify, although they then lost to the UAE in the final. It meant that, in 1996, Kenya headed to their first World Cup.
There, they provided a hint of the mayhem they were to inflict upon the 2003 World Cup. For all except Steve Tikolo, who played for the South African first-class side Border in the winter of 1995/96 – having resigned his courier job to take up the chance – training before the tournament was limited to weekends and evenings after work. When the players requested white balls to train with before the tournament, the board could only afford to give them red balls painted white. During the World Cup, they were paid only a $10 a day allowance.
This made Kenya’s game against the West Indies all the more remarkable. ‘We were playing against our heroes,’ Steve Tikolo remembered. ‘A month earlier we were just idolising them on TV. You couldn’t believe it that you were actually facing Courtney Walsh, Ian Bishop and Curtly Ambrose.’
And Tikolo was not to be overawed: he flicked Walsh for six over midwicket, a shot brimming with wristy chutzpah. His 29 was Kenya’s top score. Their 166 did not seem like much of a competitive target. But both Caribbean openers fell to the new ball and Brian Lara nicked his 11th ball behind.
Still, no one really expected wicketkeeper Tariq Iqbal to claim it: he had already dropped a catch and conceded four byes through his legs. He was a ridiculous sight with his spectacles, blue headband and permanently furrowed brow after rudimentary blunders. Yet somehow he clung on to the ball between his legs. After Lara was dismissed, the West Indies subsided: all out for 93. It was the last of Iqbal’s three ODIs.
The day was especially memorable for the captain Maurice Odumbe, who took 3-15 with his off spin. Two years earlier he had asked Lara for his autograph after a Warwickshire game in Swansea, where Odumbe was playing for a club. Lara had declined. Odumbe now went up to him in the changing room after the game and handed him his autograph. ‘I asked for your autograph and you wouldn’t give it. Now I am saying you can have mine.’ Most of Odumbe’s team-mates were more respectful, preferring to have their photographs taken with Lara and the rest of the West Indies side.
Other international stars would soon become familiar with Kenya too. Although they lacked Test status, leading nations were not reluctant to tour Kenya; a few months after the 1996 World Cup, Pakistan, South Africa and Sri Lanka played against Kenya in a quadrangular ODI tournament in Nairobi. In 1998, the national squad became professional and developed a fixture list that would be the envy of leading associates like Afghanistan and Ireland today. Kenya defeated India in two ODIs.
For Canada, Namibia and the Netherlands, the other three associate nations at the 2003 World Cup, a chasm existed between the Test sides and their own amateur set-ups. This was not the case for Kenya: while cricket was a minority sport in the country, the top international sides were familiar opponents. This regular exposure underpinned Kenya’s success in 2003. ‘Those matches really helped our games,’ explained Tikolo. ‘The effect showed in how we performed in the World Cup. By 2003 we had become a very good team.’
At the start of every Cricket World Cup there is a familiar ritual. Journalists who have never seen, or even followed, the game outside Test nations are forced to take an interest. Rather than discuss the teams on their own merit, there is only one issue deemed worthy of debate: whether the associates should be allowed to compete on the world stage at all. It is indicative of the insularity that still afflicts world cricket.
Despite their steady performances before the 2003 World Cup, which included two victories against India, some still considered Kenya a tedious distraction from the real spectacle of watching the top teams playing against each other. ‘When we got to South Africa, there were questions from journalists about whether we had come to make up the numbers,’ Tikolo remembered. ‘I bluntly told them we were here to compete. That is how confident I was with my players.’
For all the ebullience of Kenya’s victory over Sri Lanka at Nairobi, the ground hosted an equally significant game three days earlier. It was significant because it did not happen. Owing to security fears, New Zealand refused to play. Kenya were awarded a walkover win and t-shirts were printed mocking New Zealand’s fear before the game against Sri Lanka. Points from the New Zealand ‘victory’ would prove very handy in the Super Six stage as both Test teams Kenya secured points against – New Zealand and Sri Lanka – progressed to the next stage, meaning Kenya carried forward the points gained from these wins.
Kenya needed to win only one of their three games in the Super Six stage to reach the semi-finals. They gave India a fright in Cape Town but 12 March was the day that Kenya had been waiting for. They faced Zimbabwe, who had not defeated any Test side and only owed their place in the second stage to a walkover against England and a rained-off game against Pakistan. It represented an extraordinary opportunity for Kenya to reach the semi-finals, though Zimbabwe were still justifiable favourites: they had beaten Kenya in all 12 completed ODIs between the sides.
In Bloemfontein, Kenya ended the sequence in the World Cup – and how. Theirs was a ruthless victory: after an immaculate spell of new-ball bowling from Martin Suji, Zimbabwe were bundled out for 133. Kenya reached their target for the loss of only three wickets – and with 24 overs in hand. They had beaten three Test sides in the World Cup; Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe were all beaten comprehensively. ‘Today is the biggest day in every Kenyan’s life,’ Tikolo asserted after the victory over Zimbabwe.
Intoxicating as these wins were, the indelible memory of Kenya’s World Cup was their defeat to Australia – and the spellbinding bowling of Aasif Karim.
Before the 1990 football World Cup, Roger Milla was playing out his career at Réunion when he received a phonecall from Cameroon’s president urging him to come out of international retirement. He went on to score four goals in Cameroon’s run to the World Cup quarter-finals. Karim is perhaps the closest that cricket has ever come to an equivalent.
After captaining Kenya in their disappointing 1999 World Cup campaign, Karim announced his retirement from cricket. For the previous 19 years he had played for Kenya alongside his business career. He even played for the Kenyan tennis side in the Davis Cup. Into his 40th year, Karim’s time as an international cricketer was four years behind him. Then a few months before the 2003 World Cup the board asked him to return. ‘There was a lot of acrimony and problems to be sorted.’ It proved a harbinger of the strife to come for Kenyan cricket.
His comeback did not begin well. After a wait of 1,354 days, Karim was selected for Kenya’s World Cup opener against South Africa. His two overs were thrashed for 17. He was unceremoniously dumped.
Kenya’s progress to the Super Six stage gave Karim the chance to end his career on a more triumphant note. Recalled after a month, his nine overs against Zimbabwe went for only 20 runs. Three days later, he faced Australia in Durban. There is a good case to be made for the Australian side in the 2003 World Cup being the finest in ODI history. They would win all 11 of their games in the tournament. But for 48 glorious deliveries, Karim reduced Australia to a quivering wreck.
After restricting Kenya to 174/8, Australia were hurtling towards their target. They had reached 109/2 from 15 overs when Karim was handed the ball. Ricky Ponting was on strike. It did not seem like a fair contest, but Karim thought rather differently. ‘With my second ball I saw that there was turn on the wicket and that he was a little bit shaky.’
A classic left-arm spinner’s delivery gripped and bounced, and kissed the edge of Ponting’s bat. A sharp chance was put down by slip, diving to his left. Karim was not to be deterred. ‘I kept putting the pressure on him and every ball he was struggling.’ With his fifth delivery, Karim bowled a faster arm ball that went straight on. It thudded into Ponting’s back leg before he had time to get his bat down: plumb lbw.
So began one of the most enchanting spells in the history of the game. After Karim had fizzed a ball sharply into the left-hander Darren Lehmann in his second over, commentator Barry Richards sensed what was about to happen. ‘He’s got a slip in place for the one that goes on with the arm,’ Richards said on air. ‘You bowl one that really turns a lot and surprises the batsman. The next one goes on with the arm, he looks for the turn and nicks it to slip.’
Richards was wrong. Lehmann didn’t nick Karim’s next ball to slip. He edged it to the wicketkeeper instead, deceived by a delivery straight across him from over the wicket. Three balls later a slower delivery swindled Brad Hogg, who was too early on the ball and got a leading edge back to Karim, who dived to snare the chance with an agility the envy of 39-year-olds the world over. His figures read 2-2-0-3. No more wickets followed but he continued to vary his flight, pace and turn with mastery: after eight overs he had only conceded two runs.
Kenya were still defeated, by five wickets, but Karim’s performance was established as one of the most remarkable in the history of the World Cup. ‘After the game I must have done at least 50 interviews from CNN to Sky to all the Indian channels. I think any cricketer would dream of my performance against Australia. It came from nowhere. That is something that I treasure every day including today. Whenever it comes up there is a smile.’ So keen is Karim to remember it that he personally uploaded his entire spell on to YouTube. Few better examples of the guile and skill of orthodox spin can exist.
The World Cup semi-final was billed as Karim v India. After Kenya’s defeat Karim retired, this time for good. He and his team-mates were greeted by President Kibaki when they returned to Kenya, believing that their opportunity to play Test cricket was imminent. After their semi-final defeat to India, Michael Holding told Tikolo that the ICC had earmarked Kenya as the next Test-playing country.
The notion was not a new one. In the 1990s, the International Cricket Council belatedly recognised the need for cricket to become a more inclusive sport. South Africa were readmitted to Test cricket while Zimbabwe were granted Test status in 1992. More controversially, Bangladesh were awarded Test status in 2000.
This justifiably irked Kenya. On playing performance, Kenya would have been more deserving. ‘It was very frustrating,’ Tikolo reflected. ‘Kenya were playing better cricket than Bangladesh.’
Indeed, after beating Bangladesh in the 2003 World Cup, Kenya had won six of the seven ODIs between the sides. The explanation that one member of the Kenyan board got when they made the case to an ICC official was, ‘You do not have 100 million people.’ It says much about cricket’s attitude to expansionism. Yet the feeling was not that Bangladesh were granted Test status instead of Kenya but that, in time, both sides would have it. After all, when Bangladesh were formally awarded full member status, it was after a unanimous decision from the ICC Annual General Meeting at Lord’s.
On 17 October 2000, Kenya applied for Test status. Their case was proposed by the West Indies and seconded by Zimbabwe: in theory, Kenya just had to meet ICC criteria and pass inspections before being admitted as a full member.
Two days earlier, Nairobi hosted the final of the ICC Knockout Trophy. The tournament featured all ten full members as well as the hosts: an indication that Kenya were on the verge of being admitted into cricket’s most exclusive club. ‘The tournament has come and gone, leaving Kenyans with fond memories of a world-class event at their doorstep,’ wrote an editorial in the East African Standard. ‘This was the start of a positing journey, that could see Kenya given much bigger events to host before finally taking her place among Test nations.’
But the success of the era was built on unstable foundations. For the Kenyan Cricket Association, the 2000 ICC Knockout Trophy and 2003 World Cup were chances to show off the national side to the world – as was needed if Kenya were going to earn Test status. ‘They were showcases,’ reflected the future chairperson of Cricket Kenya, Jackie Janmohamed. ‘It was very, very important for the world to notice us. And therefore everything had been invested in the players.’ Future generations were forgotten. ‘From 1994 to the 2003 World Cup it was the same core of players,’ Karim explained. Fundamentals of the sport, the development of players and the quality of domestic competition ‘became weaker as we became stronger internationally. The repercussions were seen after the 2003 World Cup.’
David Waters, at the time involved in the board of the Kenyan Cricket Association (KCA), urged that 25 per cent of all revenue be explicitly ring-fenced for developing the game. It was the sort of thing that countries planning for the long term would do. And it was completely ignored. ‘We missed out, we missed the boat,’ Odumbe told me. ‘Cricket remained a closed shop, just for a few elitists. If you don’t belong to a club, forget playing cricket.’
‘Unless you have a good structure it’s very difficult to produce quality cricketers on a regular basis,’ Karim reflected. ‘You don’t find them on the street.’ After the World Cup, the KCA were furious with him when he publicly doubted Kenya’s Test aspirations on the basis of their lack of a multi-day domestic structure (though Bangladesh did not have one before being awarded Test status). The problem was not the strength of Kenya’s squad at the start of the century, but the lack of attention placed on developing further generations. ‘We had other cricketers who could have done well but what happens after those cricketers? What would have happened in Test cricket? We’d have been a laughing stock.’
Karim was part of a generation of players accustomed to hard cricket. They had learned the game in Nairobi clubs in the 1980s and 1990s, and had a reliable stream of fixtures, against not only A teams but also full members. This golden age for Kenyan domestic cricket proved fleeting. The growth of satellite television meant that expat cricket fans had no reason to attend matches when they could watch India and Pakistan play on TV.
The increase in the volume of international cricket, along with domestic competitions like the Indian Premier League, has meant players have less time to play in outposts like Kenya: even journeymen Indian and Pakistani first-class players, who were staples of every top club in Nairobi into the new century, are no longer found. And the exponential increase in the earning power of cricketers meant that Kenyan clubs could no longer afford to sign them. The Gymkhana Club Ground and others in Nairobi regularly attracted thousands of paying spectators in the 1980s. They seldom attract more than a few dozen today.
A weak domestic structure was not the only problem for Kenya. After the 2003 World Cup, the ICC brought forward the date when there would be a vote on Kenya’s bid for full membership by a year, to 2005. To help prepare Kenya, the ICC announced that it would give the country’s association an extra $500,000 a year for two years. Sharad Ghai, the former chairman of the KCA, told me that the ICC actually only gave $400,000 a year. ‘I don’t want to say it’s an insult. We were grateful that it did come, but that was nothing. We went on tour to West Indies, and our team went because they said to get Test status we need the exposure. That cost us an arm and a leg. $400,000 might look big in Kenyan standards, but in the real world, $400,000 is nothing.’
According to an ICC source, Kenya ‘did well too fast, and the system wasn’t able to cope, and they hadn’t got the fundamentals to have a sustainable programme moving forward’. Of course, in theory the ICC’s role was to provide Kenya with those fundamentals, but it did not grasp the extent of the challenges involved in establishing cricket in the country. ‘The ICC visited us twice a year, promised the world, handed out a few t-shirts saying “Bringing Cricket to Africa”, made lots of promises about more equipment at schools, and that’s the last you would hear of them,’ Waters reflected. ‘What we needed more than anything was personnel – a person to run development structures in this country. The ICC just paid lip service to supporting Kenyan development.’
After the World Cup, Kenya needed two things: sound administration and regular matches. The KCA ensured they did not receive the first; and the myopia of the Test nations ensured that they did not receive the second. In the 18 months before the 2003 World Cup, Kenya played 18 ODIs, including a tri-series with India and South Africa and another with Australia and Pakistan. It amounted to a solid base, but Kenya needed more to build on the achievements of the World Cup. Instead, they got almost no fixtures.
It seemed as if sides were afraid of losing to them. An intrusive example came in 2005 when a tour was scheduled for Zimbabwe. Kenya hoped that this would feature official ODIs; instead they played against a Zimbabwe A team that was the full side in all but name. Kenya won, but they did not gain the ranking points or prestige of defeating a full member. In 35 months after the World Cup, Kenya played a meagre five ODIs. No wonder that they were thumped twice in the 2004 Champions Trophy.
Through a combination of inertia and impotence, the ICC did nothing to swell Kenya’s fixture list. Request after request was sent for ODIs. Request after request was turned down. ‘Three months down the road everything went quiet,’ Tikolo lamented. All Kenya received was an invitation to play in the Caribbean first-class competition, the Busta Cup, in early 2004.
In any other sport, their rewards for reaching the World Cup semi-finals would have been far greater. After Argentina reached the semi-finals of the 2007 Rugby World Cup, a feat almost as unexpected as Kenya’s 2003 success, the International Rugby Board agreed a series of measures to make sure it would not prove a one-off: Argentina were given more rugby Test matches, given help developing a professional domestic structure, and subsequently included in the prestigious annual Rugby Championship alongside Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Kenya’s cricketers can only have looked on enviously.
Even if it could have done more, the ICC’s cash handout after the 2003 World Cup still amounted to sums unimaginable in the previous 50 years of the KCA’s existence. Therein lay the problem. ‘When we left Nairobi for South Africa we were told whatever prize money you win, it is for the players,’ Tikolo remembered. ‘In their minds they never believed we would get to the semi-finals! Getting to the semi-finals, the pot of money got bigger. We ended up collecting half a million dollars. There was no way they were going to leave half a million dollars for the team to share.’
Even before 2003, there had been murmurings of corruption in Kenyan cricket. In 2001 Kenya suffered from player strikes, as the side complained about not being paid enough or on time. ‘The administration would probably give 95 per cent to cricket and keep five per cent for themselves, which in itself is not right, but they did well for themselves and the team,’ the journalist Clay Muganda told me. The governance of Kenyan cricket was to deteriorate rapidly after the 2003 World Cup.
Corruption has long been endemic in Kenya: it was ranked 136th out of 177 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index in 2013. ‘It’s our turn to eat,’ was the author Michela Wrong’s summation of the mentality that different groups manipulate resources for their allies whenever they get the chance.
After 2003 the newfound riches inspired some unsavoury characters to take an interest in running the sport. Corruption became so widespread that Tikolo called it ‘an open secret’. He had several discussions with the sports minister to alert him to what he knew. The disarray of Kenya’s cricketing administration undermined all the team’s sterling performances. ‘Our cricket management let us down big time,’ Tikolo lamented.
‘All of the hard work from 2003 went down the drain. People just wanted to benefit themselves in terms of taking the money that was supposed to be for cricket, developing the game and all that. People turned it into a business where they made money rather than promoted the game.’
By 2005 the turmoil afflicting all facets of the running of Kenyan cricket had created a system utterly unconducive to elite international sport. The chairman Ghai, who had earlier displayed vision to attract Test teams to Kenya for ODI series and the ICC Knockout in 2000, now became the embodiment of their problems. The KCA became a pariah. He suspended elections, fiddled the constitution and oversaw a regime in which there was no accountability for how money was spent. He allegedly diverted vast chunks of the KCA’s revenue into his own companies and was accused of stealing $3.3m from the KCA, including putting gate receipts into bags to take home.
‘There was nothing of the sort,’ he told me. ‘What corruption? There’s no money in it; even with the new lot, there’s no corruption in cricket.’ He attributed the case against him to ‘a camp that basically wanted to get rid of our administration’ who had resorted to ‘playing politics’.
The Kenyan government took a different view and, although Ghai was never found guilty, the KCA was suspended in 2005. The ICC, who had been convinced that the KCA was corrupt since at least late 2003, followed later in the year, effectively forcing the board of Kenya to be reformed for the national side to continue playing.
Yet greed was not the preserve of the Kenyan administrators alone. In August 2004, Odumbe, who had averaged 42 in the 2003 World Cup, was banned from all cricket for five years for associating with a known bookmaker. He returned to Kenyan club cricket at the age of 40, when his ban expired, and enjoyed tremendous success, but did not play for Kenya again. When I eventually obtained his number I assumed that he would refuse to speak with me.
To my surprise, he was not reticent at all. I found Odumbe courteous, charming and incredibly generous with his time when I called him out of the blue. He also continued to deny any wrongdoing. All he was prepared to admit was that he had a friendship with a man pretending to work in the movie industry who was actually a bookmaker, though the explanation is less convincing given that Odumbe admitted to knowing him for eight years. ‘We were not bosom buddies, it was just once in a while, that “Hi”, “Hi, how are you?”, you know, that sort of thing.
‘I never stole anybody’s money, yet I was given five years,’ he complained. ‘I was banned for inappropriate contact, it was never match-fixing, but they don’t seem to want to get it right. I think match-fixing sounds much sweeter.
‘The only way probably I would have known is if he had approached me, and said, “Look, can you do A for me?” In fact there was a time even when the investigators came talking to me, they asked me the same question, how could you not know that he was a bookmaker? I said “Ah, well it’s not written on his forehead.”’
Odumbe finds enemies everywhere in the case against him. He feels wronged by the ICC; other corruption hearings were chaired by local judges, whereas he had to contend with a judge flown in from overseas. He also feels wronged by his board. ‘If you look around, all over the world, the local boards have always stood by their players. But, in my case, my local board, they left my head on the chopping board. Sometimes, people even wonder, is it a question of colour, or what is it?’
And he feels wronged by past girlfriends. ‘If you look at the witnesses that they brought in my case, 99 per cent of them were former girlfriends, so obviously they had a bone to pick with me.’
Not unreasonably, Odumbe also feels his punishment was harsh in comparison with that received by some more high-profile cricketers. ‘If you look at Shane Warne and Mark Waugh, they accepted giving information to a bookmaker, and what happened to them? It was just a slap on the wrist. In my case it was inappropriate contact – just being friends with somebody who is a bookmaker.’
He is still desperate to clear his name, hoping that he may yet be involved in the running of the game in Kenya. ‘The only wrong I did is befriending the gentleman. When it comes to the integrity of the sport I think I gave it my best, I gave it my all, and the good thing is, I sleep easy knowing that whatever happened to me, I was wrongly accused, I was wrongly sentenced, without any mercy, without any chance of an appeal. And it would be prudent for me to still pursue this matter to its logical conclusion.’
No other Kenyan was ever found guilty of corruption, but Odumbe asserted that this is no proof of innocence. ‘I’ve heard rumours and I know for a fact that the investigators were down here to talk to a few players.’ Other players I talked to hold a similar view. Karim believed, ‘There was greed among the players. I always used to explain to them that don’t run after success because when you are successful money follows you.’ He blamed greed on the side’s ‘lack of education’.
At the start of 2006, the KCA was disbanded for good. By this point it was an organisation with no assets and a considerable overdraft, and was not even running a national competition. The legacy of this turmoil is still felt today. ‘Cricket has become a tainted game because of the corruption of the previous regime,’ Tikolo reflected.
In 2006, Cricket Kenya took over the running of the game. The logic behind this was irrefutable: so tarred was the KCA with corruption and chronic mismanagement that the game could not advance otherwise. But this rebirth did not lead to an upturn in fortunes. Off the pitch, allegations of financial impropriety remained: Tom Tikolo, the older brother of Steve, resigned as chief executive in 2009 after claiming an allowance of $10,000 in cash which was left unaccounted for.
On the field, the national team continued to get worse. Kenya performed poorly in the 2007 World Cup and, in 2011, lost all six matches – including a comprehensive defeat to Canada. A new nadir arrived in 2013/14. First, the side finished tenth in the World Twenty20 qualifiers. And in January 2014, Kenya missed out on the World Cup – and lost their coveted ODI status. To skipper Rakep Patel, it was ‘heartbreaking’. He lamented, ‘It’s the only big stage we get every four years as we rarely play against the big teams.’
The tournament brought home just how far the side had fallen since 2003. ‘Kenyan cricket has gone backwards,’ Tikolo admitted. ‘When you look at the quality of players we have used in the last four or five years a number of them are not up to the standards of international level, simply because we never had development programmes nurturing youngsters coming through. The blame should not be on the players – they did not get the proper coaching.’
The upshot of the lack of development is that the side continued to be over-dependent on the class of 2003, even as they aged and declined: seven members of the 2003 World Cup semi-final team were already in their 30s. Waters, chairman of selectors from 2005 to 2007, reflected, ‘When I was chairman I barely needed to call a meeting. No one was pushing for a place in the team – the players picked themselves.’
It may be even worse today. ‘You’re picking players on the basis of their performances in the league – but the league is not even competitive. The structure is not strong,’ asserted Tanmay Mishra, who played in the 2007 and 2011 World Cups. Attempts were made to address this through the creation of the East Africa Premier League in 2011, featuring four Kenyan teams and two from Uganda. After three years the idea stalled, with a feeling that too many substandard players were playing, diluting the competition’s quality.
Perhaps even more damning than the loss of ODI status in New Zealand in January 2014 was the presence of Steve Tikolo. At the age of 42 he made a comeback, a more rotund and slovenly figure than when he top-scored with 65 in Kenya’s first ODI, against India at the 1996 World Cup. For almost a decade he was considered the finest cricketer outside the Test world: a batsman fusing grit with a little of the flair of Tikolo’s batting hero Viv Richards, and a very serviceable off-spinner to boot. He is the leading run-scorer in the Intercontinental Cup, the multi-day format created in 2004 as part of Bob Woolmer’s vision to prepare associates for Test cricket, with 1,918 runs at 64.
But Tikolo was more than just an associate titan: he hit 90s at better than a-run-a-ball against Sri Lanka and the West Indies, as well as ODI centuries against Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. ‘Had he been born in Jamaica, with good coaching and fitness discipline he really could have been something special,’ the journalist Martin Williamson said.
‘It was humbling that I could perform the way I did against the bigger teams,’ Tikolo reflected. ‘I used to work a lot at the gym and those were the fruits of working hard.’ Too few younger players shared Tikolo’s voracious appetite for self-improvement. ‘I remember as a kid watching Ravindu Shah [the former opening batsman] or Steve Tikolo,’ one recent player told me. ‘After national team training they used to spend another hour and a half just to come and groom the young kids. The intensity at that time was worthy of admiring – but now it’s fallen off massively.’
When Tikolo returned, he was still among Kenya’s best players. It was testament not only to his talent and desire but also Kenya’s complete failure to replace the 2003 team. ‘There was a sensationally good isolated pocket of players produced at the same time that managed to get them where they got to,’ an ICC source reflected. ‘The underlying system wasn’t there, and to a large extent still isn’t there.’
Signs of hope are hard to find. Kenya have not merely endured a ‘lost decade’ but 12 years in which all facets of the country’s cricket have collapsed. ‘The cricket fraternity missed an opportunity to take cricket to the next level,’ Tikolo lamented. ‘I wish they had used 2003 to take cricket to the next level and all over the country.’ Still, at least the desolate state of the national side means that there is no room for disputing that long-term development must be prioritised, regardless of the immediate pain that will follow.
In 2012, Janmohamed was elected as chairperson of Cricket Kenya, becoming the first woman to head a country’s cricket board. A lawyer by trade, she was inculcated with a love of the game by her father and has, in the past, donated money to Kenyan cricket. Her position is honorary and unpaid, reflecting the paucity of funding in Kenya, but her ambitions have not been tentative. ‘It’s time that we all recognised the fact that to build cricket in Kenya it’s not about a particular association. It’s every Kenyan’s duty and responsibility, because when the team goes out there it plays as Kenya. Blame games don’t help,’ she said.
Janmohamed’s aim is nothing less than to inculcate a culture of cricket in state school. As of 2014, some public schools in England – like Cranleigh, which the Kenyan players Duncan Allan and Seren Waters attended – had more cricket nets than all the state schools in Kenya combined. Cricket Kenya has made tentative steps in developing grassroots cricket. The new Kenyan state constitution, which came into being in 2010, could help. By decentralising power in the country, it provides hope that Cricket Kenya may be able to work with newly empowered counties to spread the game.
The country is now divided into 47 counties and there are pilot projects to spread the game in five. This may not sound like a lot, but it amounts to a significant improvement. ‘Kids will play any game you give them – you give them a ball and a bat and they’ll play,’ Janmohamed told me. ‘You should see the happiness and the war dances after taking a wicket. It’s not a lost cause – it’s just if people expect results overnight, that is an impossibility.’
‘Cricket is not ingrained here,’ Waters noted. ‘It has never really been introduced into the schools.’ Cricket has fundamentally failed to take hold among the black Kenyan population; the black cricket journalist Clay Muganda told me there is a running joke that only Indians and him like cricket. Kenyan-Asian-run private members’ clubs in Nairobi do not formally exclude black Kenyans, as they historically did, but there are economic and cultural reasons why black Kenyans seldom play. Waters remains optimistic. ‘What is amazing is the natural hand-eye coordination of so many Kenyans. Given the right schools and youth development programmes, there is no reason that Kenya won’t be able to compete again at the highest level.’
It had long been a source of complaint that, even after the Africanisation of the Kenyan side, the game continued to be run by Kenyan-Asians. It is a criticism that no longer holds. Tikolo is now Kenya’s coach and leading black players including Martin Suji and Thomas Odoyo are involved in coaching. Tikolo is as defiant as one would expect a man who has given his life to Kenyan cricket to be. ‘There is a lot of goodwill from the government and the public. It is just a matter of giving them some time and seeing how they go. Cricket has become a tainted game because of the corruption of the previous regime.’
Still, no one is too optimistic about where cricket goes next. There is the unmistakable sense that the ICC has given up on Kenya for good, considering nurturing the game there more trouble than it is worth. ‘They need to get more cricketers and they need more support from the corporate world in Kenya and the government,’ an ICC source reflected. ‘With the current state of that country, it might be a bit difficult at this point.’
Sharing a border with Somalia makes Kenya acutely vulnerable to Islamic terrorism. The security situation adds another further complication. Home games have repeatedly had to be moved, postponed or cancelled, and no international team has played in Kenya since 2012. Cricket Kenya’s attempts to host events like the World Cricket League, the Under-19 World Cup qualifiers and even the ICC Conference have all been scuppered by security concerns.
This makes it impossible for cricket to get the exposure it needs to inspire the uptake of the sport. Understandably, the government cannot justify investment in a niche sport like cricket with almost half the population living on under a dollar a day. To both Karim and Odumbe, Kenyan cricket today is ‘dead and buried’. Karim even predicted that Kenya could lose their associate status. ‘It is beyond sad and painful. I am sure you can feel it in my voice, even now.’
Shorn of ODI status until 2018, at least, a sense of despair pervades Kenyan cricket. ‘When you lose your status teams look at you differently, because your value has gone down,’ said Suji, who played in three World Cups and is now a coach. Kenya are no longer allowed to play any ODIs, making matches harder to market and sponsors harder to attract. ‘The only time a sponsor wants to come in is when we’re going for a World Cup or something,’ Janmohamed reflected. ‘Who would want to play a game that doesn’t have ODI status because it no longer goes into the record books?’ She believed that having ODI status ‘would help us get sponsorship’, even if Kenya’s ranking was the same. It is an indictment of the ICC’s arbitrary decision to limit ODI status to 16 teams.
The reduction in the World Cup to ten teams from 2019 is the cause of further vexation. ‘The ICC are talking about reducing the teams on one hand and about globalising the game on the other,’ Tikolo reflected. ‘It inspires youngsters to play the game if they know that if they do well they would be playing in the World Cup.’
Children today are not only turning to football in cricket’s place. Since Kenya qualified for their first World Cup in 2001, rugby sevens has become increasingly popular. Cricket is going the other way. ‘Once they reduce the teams I am not sure whether the associate countries will be looked after,’ Tikolo feared. ‘At some point you will be forgotten.’
That means underdog stories like Obuya’s 5-24 against Sri Lanka will be impossible. ‘We are in 2014, we cannot be speaking of spreading the game and at the same time decide to reduce the number of teams playing the World Cup,’ Obuya said. ‘The more teams play, the more we get people talking and interested in learning more about our game.’
Cricket Kenya cannot even afford to keep its best players. While Nairobi clubs are dominated by middle-class players, especially those of Asian origin, the national side has a very different character because cricket has nothing to recommend itself as a career for middle-class Kenyans.
Seren Waters, the son of David, was once a beacon of hope in Kenyan cricket. At the age of 18 he made 74 in an ODI against South Africa. Yet before he turned 22 he effectively abandoned his international career; he now works as a teacher in London.
A contracted cricketer in Kenya today earns around 50,000 Kenyan shillings a month – around $560. It does not make cricket a remotely attractive option for the middle-class.
Tanmay Mishra, an attractive strokemaker who scored 72 against Australia in the 2011 World Cup, is another example. At the age of 26 he moved to India to build his cricketing career. ‘My main reason was that there were basically no fixtures and club cricket is not good,’ he reflected. ‘You want to be playing competitive cricket and you want to keep yourself busy. It just never worked out. After the 2011 World Cup it just became really difficult – the only thing you’re looking forward to is the Intercontinental Cup every five or six months.’
The tales of Mishra and Waters stand as a warning to Kenya and the rest of the associate world. Without a regular fixture list that can generate sustainable revenue for Cricket Kenya, the organisation will not be able to make cricket a viable career option and will be doomed to fielding under-strength sides. Kenya have tried to arrange more games but no side is compelled to play them. In December 2013, Zimbabwe cancelled a planned series at ten days’ notice. So Kenya remains locked in a vicious cycle that many low-ranking associates could relate to.
To grow the game, investment in development is fundamental. But this has to be paid for by reducing players’ wages. Without the prospect of decent salaries, the best cricketers will not commit to playing the game professionally – and the national side will not be able to achieve the results necessary to get the prize money and sponsorship necessary to drive cricket forward.
Perhaps the remarkable thing is not the collapse of Kenyan cricket but how players were once able to overcome the failings of the ICC and local administrators to reach the World Cup semi-finals. That will remain cricket’s apex in Kenya. Barring a radical transformation of the game both in Kenya and in the boardrooms of the ICC, Kenya will never qualify for a World Cup again. For all its splendour, the Gymkhana Club Ground is deserted today. The media centre is still stubbornly standing, a relic of unfulfilled promise.