THIS book would not have been complete without a detailed analysis of Papua New Guinea. Gideon Haigh published the definitive take on the topic in June 2013 in The Nightwatchman, and he very kindly allowed us to reproduce the piece in full here.
The PNG story remains largely as it was when Gideon penned this piece, although there is perhaps now even more grounds for optimism. In January 2014 PNG came fourth in the World Cup qualifiers, giving them access to extra funding from the ICC and making them one of 16 teams in the world with ODI status. On 8 November PNG played Hong Kong in Townsville, Australia (no ground in PNG is ICC-approved to host ODIs). In the process, they became the 23rd international side in history to play an official ODI. The story of PNG cricket may still have a long way to run.
Greg Campbell’s office at Cricket Haus in sweltering Boroko, Port Moresby is kept habitable by three whirling ceiling fans – turning on the air conditioning unit behind him shorts the electricity. The landlines have not worked for 12 months, to the apathetic bemusement of a PNG Telikom technician who has just arrived after the payment of a bribe, and left without changing anything.
Petitioners are coming and going. The utes need filling up. The ground staff need lunch. For each, Campbell fishes colourful kina from a sturdy petty cash tin. He is careful, he explains, because things have a tendency to go missing round here. Over the last two years, he estimates having bought about 120 coffee cups. He reckons he is now down to about eight.
But if it’s difficult to credit, we’re actually in the headquarters of one of global cricket’s most remarkable success stories. At the turn of the century, despite a heritage of more than 100 years, cricket in Papua New Guinea was in disarray, short of money, of facilities, of purpose – the same might have been said of the country, which had turned over five prime ministers in five years and was routinely numbered among the world’s most unliveable places.
Today PNG is ranked 19th in the cricket world, having joined World Cricket League Division Two just over two years ago. It will play off in October’s World Twenty20 qualifier in the UAE and next year’s World Cup qualifier in New Zealand; later this year it will also participate in South Australia’s new Premier League, alongside four teams from Adelaide and a fifth from the Northern Territory.
In the last five years alone, PNG has gone from a cricket backwater into a poster country of the International Cricket Council’s development programme. ‘With an ever-expanding junior base, a crop of very talented national team players and a strong off-field administration, PNG is what development is all about,’ says ICC’s global development manager, Tim Anderson. ‘Turning cricket from a game played by a traditional few countries into a genuinely global, mass-participation sport.’
To savour some of the passion for the game you need to hit the road, which in Moresby is a memorable experience in itself, there being no speed limits, no obvious road rules, and no apparent fear among pedestrians. For a few months after arriving, Campbell took the red stains on roadsides for blood stains. They were actually expectorated splashes of the ubiquitous betel nut, but you can understand the misapprehension as you weave through the chaotic traffic. Pavements are crowded with street stalls, corners with people waiting patiently for buses that aren’t exactly regular.
In free use, applied to everything from mowing grass to shaving, are long-bladed machetes – ‘the PNG pocket knife’, as they are colloquially known. Fences are tall, sturdy, and topped with generous coils of barbed wire to discourage marauding raskol gangs – after a while, in fact, the coils comes to seem like a form of vegetation, growing as universally and inconspicuously as lantana in Australia. The housing types are deliriously varied, from fibro shacks that it looks like it would take one shove to demolish to the husks of modernist houses previously occupied by the colonial administrators who began moving out after PNG’s independence in September 1975.
About 20 minutes north-west of Port Moresby, a turn off the main road reveals a village’s picturesque panorama. Historically, Hanuabada is where Captain James Erskine of the HMS Nelson hoisted the union flag in November 1884 to declare Papua, the south-eastern portion of the island of New Guinea, a protectorate of the Queen of England. Nowadays it is a fishing community with a population of 20,000, and a cricket community with a history of having provided over the years almost three-quarters of those who have represented Papua New Guinea – a kind of junior Barbados or south seas Pudsey.
While larger, older dwellings line the narrow foreshore, most residents occupy simple but sturdy homes on piers out over the water. A closer look reveals a sorrier scape – a shoreline thickly carpeted with plastic debris. But walk the long jetties and, strange as it may sound, you’re in cricket country. My guide was PNG Under-19s coach John Ovia, a native son man and boy, who lives with his wife, mother and three young children about three quarters of the way along a jetty called Border, because it separates Hanuabada from nearby Eleva. They all play cricket and, after a while, it seems that everyone does.
We stop to pay our respects to a cricket personage at every second house, from a Moresby quick of the 1970s, Morea Gau, to the mother of PNG’s promising young opening bowler, Ray Haorda. ‘And this man,’ says Ovia proudly as he introduces a slight, white-haired, shyly-smiling figure, ‘he was the master of the single. By the time you looked up, he was at the other end.’ I ask Pala Ura, PNG’s wicketkeeper in the 1982 ICC Trophy, the secret to good running. ‘You must always run the first one hard,’ Ura replies solemnly. I tell him a few Australians would benefit from the advice.
One thing, Ura adds: PNG finished that tournament in third place, with only the winner, Zimbabwe, going through to an eight-team World Cup, sans exiled South Africa, the following year. I do a quick mental calculation: this means, in effect, that 30 years ago, PNG was the tenth-strongest team competing in international cricket. And most of the players were from this village. Smiles all round. Quite something, eh?
That it is, agrees Bill Leane, Campbell’s predecessor at Cricket PNG, when I meet him in his home town of Melbourne – and that’s good and bad. ‘No coaches, no sports science, no fitness programmes, just raw passion, and they were tenth on the world,’ he says. ‘It’s amazing, but where did that go in between times?’ So this is not so much a development story, as a redevelopment story, and also a speculation – for where does PNG go from here?
Captain Erskine’s proclamation 129 years ago completed a three-way carving of the island of New Guinea, the west forming a province of the Dutch East Indies, the east dividing British Papua to the south from German New Guinea in the north. Cricket reached Papua as part of the cultural baggage of missionaries, and among several fathers of the game one stands out: Rev Charles Abel of the London Missionary Society, and also of the Hertfordshire County Cricket Club, who arrived in Moresby in October 1890, aged 28. He soon found the game useful when shortly after arriving he was temporarily marooned in the village of Orokolo, 270km north-west of Moresby, surrounded by restless natives.
‘There was no time to lose [wrote his son]. With his usual resourcefulness he gathered the village children together and at once began to teach them cricket…The play relieved the tension considerably and soon the older people began to gather round, intrigued by the strange new game. Finally whatever the sentiments of their elders might have been, the children made friends with the white stranger. Hostility gave way to curiosity, the truculent attitude disappeared, and the danger passed.’
In August 1891, Abel was posted to the LMS’s easternmost head station on Kwato Island in the China Strait, a waterway growingly busy with traffic from Australia to goldfields ports to the north. This 28-hectare speck was another dicey posting. Abel’s predecessor had succumbed to malaria; nearby natives had recently murdered a sea captain and only been subdued by some exemplary hangings. Encouraged by his Orokolo experience, Abel threw himself into bringing cricket to Kwato. No sooner had the church, mission station and student dormitories been erected than he enlisted his Papuan acolytes in transforming a malarial swamp into a cricket ground.
Abel’s only published work, a book for Christian youth called Savage Life in New Guinea (1902), contains something to offend every modern sensibility. The Papuan, in his experience, occupied ‘a very low position in the scale of savage peoples’, being slow, lazy, dirty and base, ‘guided in his conduct by nothing but his instinct and propensities, and governed by unchecked passions’; there were times, wrote Abel tremulously, when ‘unbridled passion seizes and masters him, the man becomes a fiend; and then there are no limits to his barbarity’.
Yet Abel wrote as much out of fear for Papuans as contempt for them. Purportedly the only LMS member to read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Abel foresaw disaster where Papuans were exposed to the full onslaught of occidental ways. Only ‘hard work and healthful sport’, he thought, as he looked down at last on the cricket ground it took four years to complete, could fortify them.
‘Their own amusements are often vicious. You cannot take away the pastimes of a race and give them nothing in their place…The spirit of prophecy was fulfilled when we transformed our spears into wickets and our shields into cricket bats…Most people will be able to appreciate our satisfaction as we sit in the shade of the citron trees sometimes after the day’s work is done and watch the boys at cricket, with their wickets pitched on the very spot where a short time ago the stagnant water and oozing mud exuded vapours which poisoned the air.’
Besides elementary subjects and Bible study, carpentry for boys and sewing for girls, the Kwato curriculum was heavily oriented to cricket, for its moral efficacy in instilling good technique, good sportsmanship, and good deportment. Abel insisted that his young Papuans play in crisply laundered flannels, setting the standard with a natty bow tie, and with Victorian orthodoxy, seldom evaluating youths in his diaries without an assessment of their cricket prowess (‘a clever youth and a fine medium bowler’; ‘nice serious lad, very clever behind the sticks’).
He was no less demanding of his white colleagues, once dismissing a young teacher sent out by LMS for sporting ignorance (‘Mr Hallows plays no cricket,’ reads the diary entry. ‘He is leaving by the next boat’) and scorning a well-meaning government anthropologist (whom Abel dismissed as ‘out of his depth’ after a mild suggestion that the mission curriculum involve ‘less cricket and more Christ’).
The only time this incurably active man paused was when his edition of Cricket: A Weekly Record of the Game arrived, wrapped for appearance’s sake in editions of The Christian World; eyes glistening, he would pore in silent rapture over its scorecards and match reports. After a while, too, Kwato Mission began playing against outsiders. Regular games commenced with Europeans in nearby Samarai, who had built their own cricket ground, and against passengers on passing ships, including in 1910 a team from the steamer Matunga including Australian Test all-rounder Frank Laver and Tasmanian keeper George Gatehouse. Only rain prevented the visitors’ defeat after Kwato’s star googly bowler, Aleadi, bowled Laver for nought and had Gatehouse caught for seven.
By then, too, cricket was no longer confined to Papua’s eastern extremity. Interest was sufficient among Port Moresby’s European community by Christmas 1906 to invite Samarai to send their team, while former Tasmanian leg-spinner John Watt wrote in The Referee soon after reporting that the game had a strong vogue in villages surrounding the city, ‘If you visit any native village about Port Moresby, small boys can always be seen playing cricket right on the water’s edge, with material of their own make. Every other hit the ball goes into the water, while the two batsmen “run them out”. The Papuan is never stuck for a cricket ball, for as soon as he loses one he taps the nearest rubber tree, and makes another.’
LMS evangelists here were as often Samoan as English, but preached cricket with little less enthusiasm, an Australian expeditioner recruiting bearers for a sojourn into the interior in 1910 finding the game a serious inconvenience:
‘We had some trouble in getting the carriers, as all the villagers, including the Samoan missionary, were engaged in playing cricket. The craze for cricket seems to have spread from village to village all over civilized Papua. Wherever we entered a village we invariably found a cricket match in progress. The singular feature about the play was that young natives who could not speak English had most of the English terms used in the game by heart. Thus one would hear “Play!” “Run!” “Stop!” “How’s dat, umpire?” “Out!”
‘I must say that many of them handled a bat well and gracefully. The bowling was good and very swift, and as for the fielding it was quite up to the average. The worst of this cricket mania, my guide told me, was that if carriers were wanted and they were playing a match no inducement would make them move until the game was over. It was becoming, be said, the curse of New Guinea.’
Nowhere was the vogue more ardent than Hanuabada, thanks to a Samoan emissary of LMS, Fa’vae. The game was well established by the time he was succeeded by an Englishman, Rev. Robert Lister Turner. A rather more orthodox missionary than Abel, Turner would complete the first Motu dictionary and grammar, plus a translation of the New Testament. But he was also the brother of a Leicestershire county cricketer, and made Hanuabadan cricket famous enough by the 1920s to feature in a series of cards for Namo and Papuan Beauties cigarettes sponsored by the British Papuan Development Company, the prowess of its early champions Reautau Mea, Toka Gaudi, Gavera Arua and Kohu Dogoda making it a serious rival for Kwato and Samarai.
One final eastern champion, nonetheless, would outstrip all in fame. Born in Milne Bay in 1914, John Guise taught himself cricket by clipping pictures from Australian newspapers, including one treasured image of Learie Constantine hitting a six at the SCG, and imitating them in solitary drills with a tennis ball and a self-made bat on the docks at Samarai where he worked as a basket carrier. He cultivated a habit of massive scores, including 253 in Milne Bay and 346 in Samarai, after which he was approached by representatives of a Melbourne grade club – only, to his bitter disappointment, to be forbidden from accepting the offer by Papua’s lieutenant-governor Sir Hubert Murray.
His cricket thwarted, his life took different directions. Thirty-five years after Murray’s death, Sir John Guise would become the inaugural governor-general of an independent Papua New Guinea under a constitution whose preamble was drafted by Rev. Charles Abel’s son Sir Cecil Abel.
There actually emerged many crickets on the island of New Guinea. There were expatriate competitions, the original being a triangular in Port Moresby played for the Freezing Company Shield; expatriates also began playing among themselves on the north coast in Lae and Madang in what the First World War had left as Australian territory. There were also Papuan competitions, maturing in Moresby into a league in 1937, with four of the seven teams coming from Hanuabada.
Most numerous were spontaneous local variants, one described by a correspondent in the 1928 spring annual of The Cricketer as involving players wearing ‘little more than is demanded by the laws of decency’ using ersatz equipment in irregular numbers with elastic rules(1).
‘There may be as many as 20 natives fielding, such is the enthusiasm for the Papuan game…Wearying of fielding, point, cover-point, long-stop and other betake themselves to cool groves, there to pluck the scarlet hibiscus…All laugh at hits and misses, for in merry Papua all is jest….Scoring is a strange affair, the losing side increasing its score by adding sufficient runs to the scoring book to render defeat honourable.’
Yet what often looked riotous to outsiders contained strong ceremonial aspects, integral to inter- and intra-village relations. Anthropologist Cyril Belshaw documented both 60 years ago in his encyclopedic ethnography of Hanuabada, The Great Village (1954). As an example of the former he recorded the arrival of a men’s team from the village of Kido to thank Hanuabada’s Taoro Club for laying a pitch and performing some coaching, bringing with them a festive board of pigs, bananas and yams minutely apportioned.
‘At five o’clock in the evening….the bananas and yams were brought out and unwrapped, the principal cricketers foregathered on the verandah of the club captain and ate the entrails and other pig tit-bits. At six o’clock the cricketers distributed the yams, bananas and pig cuts…they carried out the whole procedure with much argument and confusion and disagreement before everyone agreed that the allocation was satisfactory.’
To illustrate the latter, he observed the female Laurabada Club incorporating elaborate cricket matches into their community-building activities, laced with socially approved sledging.
‘Though there was much horseplay and good fun, there was a great deal of determination. Women on the sideline kept proper score, and over the ground flew a large green flag embroidered with “L. B. C.”. Regular teams developed for both cricket and evening games: women without children played women with children, married women played single women, or old women played young. As one side carried the day they would break off to dance triumphantly to a Polynesian song, or to sing a couplet of abuse, or to make humorous or obscene gestures.’
These complex antecedents did not begin blending until about half a century ago, and then only little by little, after the expatriate Papua New Guinean team was invited to play its first games abroad, in north Queensland against a Cairns XI and a Tablelands XI in January 1954 – what became an annual visit.
Moresby’s colour bar was a fragmentary one: some companies, like Burns Philp, distinguished between expatriates and indigenes; other, like Steamships Trading, did not. In 1958, the PNG team visiting Cairns included two Papuans: Babani Momo from Kilakila, and John Ovia’s father Uduru. Nobody seems to have been overly fussed. And over the next five years, the expatriate and Papuan competitions merged as a prelude to deeper integration.
The 1960s and 1970s leading up to independence were actually a prosperous period for Papua New Guinean sport. Australian rules football produced champions such as Herea Amini and David Haro. Rugby league’s Friday night competition, reinforced by quality players from Australia, was the highlight of the Moresby sporting week.
Cricket kept pace. Around a thriving sports club in Moresby’s premier expatriate suburb of Boroko were clustered three fine grounds with concrete pitches including picturesque Colts, home to a successful club team of the same name. Former Australian umpire Col Hoy, an executive with Ansett Airlines, organized the first visit from an Australian XI of first-class players led by Queensland’s Sam Trimble in March 1972. When a Papua New Guinea Cricket Board of Control was formed the following year with representatives from Moresby, Lae, Mt Hagen, Rabaul and Bougainville, the International Cricket Conference admitted the country as its eighth associate member.
Inspired by PNG hosting its first rugby league international against a Lions team en route to fulfilling World Cup away fixtures in Australia and New Zealand, the PNGCBC invited Clive Lloyd’s West Indians to play two one-day games on their way to the 1975-6 Worrell Trophy series. So it was that just five weeks after the last lowering of the Australian flag, the World Cup’s inaugural winners played, confusingly, two different ‘Papua & New Guinea’ teams selected locally in Moresby and Lae.
After the first ball from Andy Roberts soared from the concrete wicket at Moresby’s Murray Stadium over the keeper’s head, the visitors settled mainly for bowling part-timers. But a new cricket nation had arrived. Well, part of it had anyway.
For the teams pitted against the West Indies represented the last efflorescence of expat cricket. In the first game, Richard Unsworth, a Wollongong accountant, gained a lifetime’s bragging rights by dismissing Viv Richards. In the second game, Charlie Harrison, an Indian-born Australian previously resident in Pakistan, made 34, and dismissed Roy Fredericks, Alvin Kallicharran and Lawrence Rowe.
But cricketers henceforward would be home-grown, if initially still led by a post-colonial elite. Brian Amini, the first Papuan to captain the national team when PNG beat Fiji by eight wickets in 1977, became chairman of the Papuan Community Development Group. His successor Nigel Agonia, a public servant from Moresby, went on to serve as Secretary for Minerals and Energy; Agonia’s deputy Ilinome Tarua, a lawyer raised in Kwato, would later be PNG’s permanent representative at the United Nations.
At first, this new model prospered. Having won the gold medal for cricket at the first South Pacific Games, PNG went on to that remarkable 1982 ICC Trophy, held in Britain’s Midlands. Led by Api Leka, they lost only to Zimbabwe, a class above everyone else, Kenya and Bermuda. They comfortably beat Canada, a participant in the previous World Cup, as well as Hong Kong, Israel and Gibraltar, then finally Bangladesh in a play-off for third place. They played, moreover, flamboyant cricket with a flavour of the West Indies, who whenever televisions were turned on in PNG in the 1980s to pick up the Channel 9 signal wafting across the Coral Sea seemed to be knocking lumps off Australians.
Whether PNG regressed, or the rest of the world advanced, that promise remained unfulfilled. The national team did not play another international game for four years and when they did, in the next ICC Trophy, experienced a rude awakening: Netherlands cruised to 271/6 and bundled PNG out for 52. Fifth in their group, they went home early. For countries containing professionals and semi-professionals, such as Zimbabwe, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Kenya, UAE, USA and Canada, all-amateur PNG was no match.
Taking on the chairmanship of the PNG board that year, Veari Maha, a leading light in local Australia rules football, did little to change that. A word you hear much of in PNG is ‘wantok’ – pidgin for ‘one talk’, it conveys the idea of reciprocal obligation based on shared blood, shared clan or shared language. Maha was the patriarch of a large sporting family: in due course, his cousin William would become coach, his son Navu become captain, his other son James and nephew Rod key players. It was not a family one offended lightly.
There were still glory days. The South Pacific Games came to Moresby in September 1991, and PNG again secured cricket gold. Victoria led by Matthew Elliott came to Moresby in April 1995 and lost to PNG by six wickets. The PNGCBC rolled out an adaptation of Kwik Cricket, called Liklik Cricket, promoted by Dean Jones.
But the peculiar difficulties of PNG now made themselves felt: the distance between cricket centres, the distance from the rest of the cricket world, the growing heft of rugby league exemplified by the Australian achievements of Adrian Lam, Arnold Krewanty and Elias Paiyo, and such infrastructural shortcomings as the continued absence of turf wickets. ‘Wherever the English went round the world, they left behind beautiful turf wickets,’ PNGCBC’s long-time secretary Wayne Satchell would lament. ‘The Australians in Papua New Guinea left behind only concrete.’
Satchell was one continuous thread throughout this time. His father Bruce had arrived in PNG in 1956 to set up local operations for Trans Australia Airways; his mother Daphne was an ebullient cricket lover; Wayne himself married a girl from Hanuabada.
A patient opening batsman for Lae’s successful Morobe Cricket Club, he was the epitome of the dedicated amateur administrator: his office was the boot of his car, and his office hours when he was not required as a general manager of Gibson Chemicals. For a time, Satchell and the board were so indivisible that he slipped into the habit of covering expenses of the national team at the ICC Trophy himself: some of them in 1990 and 1994; nearly all of them, which involved mortgaging his home, when the tournament came to Kuala Lumpur in 1997. ‘We’d always sent a team to ICC events,’ he says. ‘I wanted us to maintain that record.’
Ask about this period in PNG’s cricket history, however, and the answers grow somewhat vague, perhaps not surprisingly given what was happening elsewhere, with the collapse of the resources economy, the deterioration of security in Moresby, Lae and worst of all on Bougainville, and a succession of chaotic and violent elections. For some, it was not an entirely bad time to be away, including for PNG’s two best players at the 1997 ICC Trophy.
John Ovia accepted the opportunity to train at the AIS Cricket academy in Adelaide, where among other things he enjoyed the thrill of batting to Brett Lee in the nets and became a lifelong Australian cricket supporter. ‘My father, he always supported West Indies,’ says Ovia. ‘But I couldn’t support anyone but Australia. It would be stealing.’
Charles Amini, whose family rivals the Mahas as Papuan cricket’s most fecund, spent the late 1990s in Melbourne on a posting with Shell, becoming indispensable to St Barnabas CC. Charles and son Chris played in the seconds, wife Kune in the fifths, sons C.J. and Colin in the Under-12s and Under-14s; all had or would represent PNG. For Chris, now national captain, it was an invaluable first exposure to two-day cricket. ‘I learned how to bat in Australia,’ he says.
Local efforts, however, to raise standards were fitful. Veari Maha and Wayne Satchell promoted a plan to upgrade Amini Park, welcoming Allan Border to Boroko in September 1999 to turn the first sod. It was a prestigious, high-visibility event: Border was presented to the prime minister, governor-general and local dignitaries, providing the focus for days of media coverage. Yet disappointingly little happened afterwards; indeed, the ground started slipping into disrepair. Any shelter in Moresby will over time attract squatters.
Cricket’s precinct offered a number of instant accommodation opportunities including the old Boroko Sports Club and a curator’s house. Squabbles broke out among local administrators chafing at the long Maha ascendancy, a lack of information around finances and a want of resources for teams. PNG players arrived for the Under-19 World Cup in New Zealand in January 2002, for instance, with neither equipment nor footwear nor uniforms. Cricket PNG, as the board was now known, even lost its patron, which since Sir John Guise’s time had been the governor-general, when the country went for six months without a vice-regal representative because of two politicians wrangling over the job.
Yet it was out of this chaos that came the first important step to reviving cricket in PNG: the appointment as patron of Sir Brian Bell.
Bell, born in the Darling Downs township of Chinchilla in 1928, would in earlier times have been a south seas merchant adventurer. Reading a magazine story about the infamous ‘Telefolmin incident’ in November 1953, when four Australian patrol officers were bloodthirstily killed by tribesmen in the northern province of Sanduan, Bell decided PNG must be ‘an exciting place’ and moved there. Over the next half a century he built a vast family retail conglomerate, sealing everything with a handshake. He brought a similar goodwill to the role of patron, available to endow senior tournaments, Under-19 tournaments, women’s cricket challenges alike.
Things would get worse before they got better. Bell’s deputy on the board of Moresby’s general hospital was Mick Nades, a savvy Sri Lankan-born accountant who had come from Sydney with Steamships Trading in 1976. When Nades was drafted to provide Cricket PNG with an overdue and thorough audit, troubles emerged. Satchell was claiming to be owed tens of thousands of dollars for personal contributions to Cricket PNG; Bank of PNG was expressing concerns about K250,000 borrowed to redevelop Amini Park, whose title itself was unclear, being vested in a trust on which Veari Maha sat.
Unfathomable liabilities; uncertain assets: Cricket PNG was on a financial brink. It pulled back thanks to Bell, who quietly retired the bank debt, and Nades, who succeeded to the chairmanship and watched every cheque for the next few years until the finances stabilised.
The macro prospects were also suddenly improved. In July 2006, the ICC’s development programme finally obtained significant secure funding, the full members agreeing to allocate associate members six per cent off the top of revenues, in addition to their quarter share of dividend distributions. A new multi-divisional global tournament cycle, the World Cricket League, provided an avenue to more money and improved opposition.
‘All of a sudden there was something to play for,’ recalls Rarua Dikana, then PNG’s captain, who was appointed its first high performance manager. To operate under this new dispensation, Nades decided, it would be necessary to succeed Satchell with an outsider – someone free of the history, personal and familial ties in which Cricket PNG was trussed. His choice was a bright and personable Australian youth ambassador, Andrew Knott, who had been working as a volunteer in Samoa at the South Pacific Games in September 2007. With money from the Brian Bell Company and in-kind support from Hebou Constructions, a new headquarters, Cricket Haus, was erected at Amini Park for Knott and a small staff.
Yet nothing could have prepared Knott for the challenges of PNG. The Amini Park and Colts grounds were in poor shape, strewn with garbage, from broken glass to used condoms; neighbouring Ken Lifu Reserve was worse, having been churned into a bog by locals using it for driving practice. The precincts by now were also seething with squatters: Knott retained one named Luke at K50 a month to act as an intermediary with the rest, and found him very helpful, even inviting him to the staff Christmas Party at a Chinese restaurant.
‘You have never seen a man pile his plate so high with food,’ Knott recalls. ‘Then he tells us very proudly that he’s a Seventh Day Adventist and doesn’t eat pork. We didn’t have the heart to tell him that he had about half a pig on his plate.’
But a day at Cricket Haus could be scary, especially the three hours without electricity because of the local utility’s practice of ‘load shedding’, and also throw up startling problems. On one occasion, Luke visited Knott about a personal matter. In the course of an altercation, his mother had killed a man by hitting him with a watering can; this man’s wantoks were now threatening to raise hell at Amini Park unless they received compensatory ‘payback’. Unsure if the ICC had intended its annual grant be spent this way, Knott made the restitution.
Knott drew on the laconicism and resilience of his staff: then Dikana and his two development officers, Lakani Oaha and John Ovia. Nothing much fazed them. One afternoon, Knott and Dikana were talking at Cricket Haus when gunshots rang out, and a group of felons began sprinting across Amini Park with police in hot pursuit. They watched in fascinated silence as the police caught their quarry up and began absolutely leathering them with their batons. Knott paled at the brutality, but found his colleague unmoved. ‘They’ll cop it worse at the station,’ said Dikana simply, and resumed reviewing the high-performance programme.
This, Knott realised, was what you had to do – just get on with things. He introduced policies for training, selection and touring. He implemented a rebranding with a competition to devise new names for the national teams, and persuaded South Pacific Breweries to sponsor a new domestic competition, the SP Supa Series (2). The Brian Bell Company paid for two young players, Assad Vala and Willie Gavera, to play in Townsville in 2007/08 with Wanderers, the club best known for discovering Mitchell Johnson.
There was a limit, however, and Knott encountered one in December 2008 when PNG was rocked by a shocking crime. Sir George Constantinou, principal of Hebou Constructions, was carjacked in the Moresby suburb of Gerehu and stoned to death. As the PNG government exacted bloody reprisals and the Australian government issued travel warnings recommending ‘a high degree of caution’ in view of ‘high levels of serious crime’, Knott felt the ever-present ‘mood of paranoia’ in the expatriate community intensify. ‘It [Constantinou’s death] was one of the reasons why I felt it was time to move on,’ Knott recalls. ‘You can’t help but feel as though you’re playing a game of chance and your number will come up at some stage.’
The replacement he helped recruit, Australian Bill Leane, remembers his introductory visit for its atmosphere of lockdown, ‘Knotty had done a great job, and a ton of groundwork that gave the ICC confidence in dealing with us. But he was shit-scared. I could see it. He was surrounded by squatters, and it had gotten to the point where he couldn’t even walk the facility.’ Leane wasn’t going to put up with that, and he didn’t.
Few conversations with anyone involved in cricket in Papua New Guinea last five minutes without mention of Bill Leane. He is a divisive figure, although rather than causing some to love him and some to hate him, he usually leaves people doing both. That was probably bound to happen. For all its sanguinary eruptions of violence, PNG is bound by social structures of suffocating tightness: there is always a reason not to do something, because it has always been done some other way, or because of who might be offended by a change. Leane had no patience with these customs.
The standard exchange about Leane will begin with a complaint, that Bill didn’t understand this, or didn’t listen to that, or that he was rude, or impetuous, or cavalier. Equally you never leave a conversation without the admission he accomplished what had hitherto appeared impossible.
Leane came to Cricket PNG from the Australian Cricketers’ Association where he’d been commercial manager for two years, after a long career in retail, and an even longer one as a fierce competitor in grassroots cricket and football. His most conspicuous work at the ACA had been building its Masters cricket tour for past players: as a result, he had a Filofax full of cricket contacts all over the world. First priority was a proper coach, as near to full-time as possible.
‘I could see that the players weren’t lazy; they worked hard,’ he recalls. ‘But they only worked hard so far as they could see. They were visual learners. They followed examples. It was pretty clear written programmes and processes were a bit pointless for them; they needed leadership and mentoring.’
One candidate stood out. ‘Andy Bichel was perfect. He’s just a great bloke. He engages people. He shows you how. He also had a story: he’d been Australia’s 12th man more often than anyone else. He was all about the team. Plus he had a profile, which was something you could sell.’ Already bowling coach at the Chennai Super Kings and only available 65 days a year, Bichel was an expensive investment; Leane paid him more than he paid himself. But he proved worth every Kina, making friends everywhere. He stayed while in Moresby in Hebou’s Airways Hotel, PNG’s finest, where the restaurant maitre’d still wears the national shirt that Bichel gave him.
Over the years, the experiences of John Ovia and Chris Amini notwithstanding, PNG had benefited relatively little from its proximity to Australia. Leane was resolved that that should change. In December 2009, Bichel welcomed Michael Kasprowicz, Damien Martyn, Greg Matthews, Greg Blewett, Andrew Symonds and Jimmy Maher for the inaugural Legends Bash, sponsored in the name of the ‘Don’t Drink and Drive’ campaign by Pacific MMI Insurance.
Cricket PNG had not had known such publicity for ten years, since Allan Border’s flying visit. The games were covered by EMTV locally, by Foxtel in Australia, and won an ICC award for best marketing and media event outside the full members.
Leane was also adamant that the traffic should be two ways. He expanded the Brian Bell-sponsored scholarship programme, placing a score of young hopefuls with Melbourne clubs where he had contacts: they were billeted with families, paid in modest allowances and public transport vouchers enabling them to practise twice a week among themselves at the Maddocks Indoor Cricket Centre in Blackburn. He then tapped the same clubs to donate gear, which Maddocks staff loaded into one and a half containers for shipment by freight forwarder from Brisbane.
Leane’s greatest coup was to introduce a turf wicket table to Amini Park – a task in which he enlisted an invaluable ally. From Wellington in NSW, Mitch Lutschini opened the bowling in the early 1980s for Sydney in NSW grade cricket; his sister Marie also played eight Tests for Australia. Thirty years ago he accepted a diesel engineering apprenticeship in PNG and joined Hebou, where he grew ever more senior and ever more adept at getting things done. Asked to describe himself, he says simply, ‘I fix things.’
As Leane had cricket contacts in Australia, Lutschini had professional and political contacts in PNG, in abundance. Lutschini is too full of bonhomie to muse aloud on his motives, but his passion for cricket in PNG, to provide an opportunity for cricketers to make something of themselves, seems to come from a deeply personal place. Sir George Constantinou’s murder hit him doubly hard. Not only had Lutschini regarded the Hebou patriarch as a surrogate father, but his own life had been scarred many years earlier by the carjacking death of his first wife, pregnant with their third child.
In the last five years, Hebou has turned into Cricket PNG’s first K1m sponsor, including backing for the national championships, the Hebou Shield, held from May to July. But Lutschini’s support has been deeper and broader. He has been the solicitous voice on the phone in times of trouble; he has been the shrewd interpreter of local customs; one senses he has been a secret source of authority too. Joining Lutschini in the airway’s private Havanaba one evening, I found him deep in conversation with a nuggety figure in an open-neck shirt who looked vaguely familiar. ‘Meet the prime minister of PNG,’ said Lutschini casually.
The challenge of finally introducing turf cricket to PNG more than a decade after it had been promised required that Amini Park at last be secured. First, the title had to be sorted out, by a byzantine legal process that finally brought a halt to opportunist petitioners at Cricket Haus claiming to be traditional owners of the land. Second, the area needed to be purged of its unruly inhabitants, whose drinking sessions and pitched battles with improvised weapons on the oval had now reached epic proportions: one, reported in the 2012 edition of Wisden, involved as many as 400 combatants.
Again, Leane explored legal remedies, this time to no avail. At last, Lutschini suggested the old-fashioned remedy of ‘smoking them out’. In short, this involved Hebou setting fire to the derelict Boroko Sports Club where most of the squatters were congregated, having them arrested as they emerged, then bulldozing the charred remains into the ground. As soon as this process was complete, Lutschini deployed earthmoving equipment to ring the ground with two-metre moats and two-metre fences topped with barbed wire. The ubiquitous Luke was offered the run of the old curator’s house in return for becoming the resident security chief, a duty he performs to this day with utmost vigilance and a gleaming PNG pocket knife.
Early in 2010, Leane and Lutschini then flew to Brisbane to learn about turf wickets. They met former Gabba curator Kevin Mitchell Snr for tuition. They visited Jimboomba Turf to discuss grasses, choosing a couch known to flourish in tropical Darwin. Cultivated in Beaudesert, the turf was moistened, palletised and flown to Moresby by Air Niugini, where a former golf course designer, Josh Hanrahan, supervised its installation.
Hebou provided a road roller to flatten the surface, and dammed the nearby creek so that water could be drawn by a bore pump. The donation of a ride-on mower allowed them to retire the old Victas on which they had previously relied to keep the out field in check; within twelve weeks, Papua New Guinea was playing an Australian indigenous team on a surface that visiting umpire Bruce Oxenford deemed ‘world-class’. ‘We never dreamed of having turf,’ says Chris Amini. ‘Bill just bulldozed through. He was a bulldozer. A big one.’
A year after Leane’s arriving, Cricket Haus was a busy place, utes constantly coming and going, disgorging cricketers for regular practices, dispersing cricketers to run a fast-growing programme of junior cricket instruction, Schools Kriket, sponsored by BSP Bank. Many of these cricketers were now employees of Cricket PNG itself, and thus lifted a little above the ruck in a country where paid employment is exceptional.
Nobody would be busier than Leane, one minute descending from the ride-on mower to oversee fielding drills, next minute putting on a tie to meet a sponsor or conferring with the five regional managers he appointed to begin covering the country beyond Moresby and the south-east coast. He could be a hard man to work with; stories are legion of his sometimes explosive temper. He had limited patience with administrative chores like reports, budgets, paperwork and board relations, and ever-diminishing time – which is why he hired Greg Campbell.
A bustling and bouncy right-arm quick, Greg Campbell would have played more than four Tests for Australia in 1989/90 but for incurable damage to his left knee. He narrates the end of his career wryly. He and his Tasmanian team-mate David Boon were admitted for operations by the same surgeon and were lying in adjacent beds when they received their post-operative prognoses. ‘You’re fine,’ the surgeon said to Boon, then turned to Campbell. ‘You, I couldn’t do anything for.’
And that, in those days, was that. Campbell relocated to the Gold Coast, drifted in and out of coaching, then into a series of mid-level managerial jobs to which he struggled to warm, finally running one of a chain of café cum carwashes owned by Ian Healy. He missed cricket, still felt he had something to offer, and his wife urged him to offer it, but he faced a common dilemma. ‘When I applied for jobs, I’d be rejected for lacking experience,’ he recalls. ‘But how was I to get experience if I couldn’t get a job?’ Leane’s invitation to become Cricket PNG’s operations manager seemed to offer that experience; it almost lasted one day.
On the morning Campbell arrived, he found Leane typically consumed by his daily tasks. There was nothing for him to do, nowhere even for him to sit. Leane looked up long enough to foreshadow dinner at the Port Moresby Yacht Club, then disappeared again; Campbell stood there in Cricket Haus, sweating, self-conscious. Dinner was late, terse, tense, and ended with Leane throwing him the keys to a unit, with the blithe advice that, oh, by the way, it had neither electricity nor bed linen.
Campbell lay on the couch in the darkness brooding on how he might convey his dissatisfaction, but no sooner had he opened his mouth the next morning than Leane jumped down his throat. ‘What are you worried about?’ he barked. ‘I can’t be running around making your bed for you. You’re a big boy. You can sort it out.’ Only the fact that he had so coveted a job in cricket kept Campbell from leaving by the next flight.
Over the next year, however, Campbell developed great admiration for his boss, who worked around the clock for little reward or recognition. PNG, there were regular reminders, was a dangerous place: in August 2011 another senior sports administrator, PNG football team manager Peter Meli, was stabbed to death. It wore one down, thought Campbell: it could make you cautious, but also impetuous, determined to plough on round, over and sometimes through obstacles. Things, including a big fenced court of artificial practice pitches, were inclined to cost too much – a problem exacerbated by escalating rates of inflation, fed by a new mining boom. But otherwise they took too long, and cricket in PNG had already done too much waiting.
‘Bill’s got a big heart, he’s passionate, and he gets the job done,’ says Campbell now. ‘He just wanted to succeed so badly….It’s true that he overspent, but the money was always coming. It just got spent before it arrived.’
For the last few months of Leane’s time in PNG, leading up to his departure not quite two years ago, his relations with chairman Nades were tense – entrepreneur Leane feeling restricted, accountant Nades feeling excluded. But by PNG standards, tensions in cricket have been mild indeed. Still by far the country’s biggest sport, rugby league has been rocked in recent years by crisis after crisis: feuds, scandals, governance splits, legal battles, corruption allegations. In less than three years, cricket had come further than any other sport in PNG – further, in fact, than most institutions.
Its reputation is now for professional management and positive thinking. ‘There are bigger sports in this country,’ says John Mogih, a teacher at Jubilee Secondary, a school in the BSP Cricket for Schools programme, which has now reached 125,000 students. ‘But apart from cricket, no other sport has been interested in us. And cricket is a sport I admire, because it is very well run. It is putting our country on the map.’
How great a place it eventually occupies on the map is now interestingly poised. Sound administration, generous sponsors, growing participation numbers: these are necessary conditions of success but not sufficient.
Strategic dilemmas loom for cricket in PNG. Two are simply geographic. Cricket is still concentrated to New Guinea’s south and east, in the province encompassing Hanuabada known as Central. The day I visited John Mogih at Jubilee Secondary, he was still chuffed about a recent classroom discussion during a BSP Cricket For Schools session when a boy answered correctly a question about the name of England’s captain: the boy who answered Alastair Cook and who turned out to like watching cricket on television was from PNG’s remote Highlands, not traditionally a cricket stronghold.
Cricket’s identification with the coast, says Mogih, remains a handicap. ‘Children will still say to you, “I’m not from Central so I don’t play cricket.” They see it as a different culture.’ PNG Cricket now has ten regional managers, but they have huge territories to cover and there is a way to go before the game can truly be regarded as national.
PNG also suffers from where it sits in the world, grouped in with associate members of ICC’s East-Asia Pacific region, of which it is comfortably the strongest.
Trivia question: which country has compiled the highest international one-day score? Answer: PNG in making 572/7 in 50 overs against New Caledonia in the 2007 South Pacific Games, breaking their own record of 502/9 in the corresponding fixture four years earlier.
An established solution to the dearth of quality competition has been to place players with Australian clubs: another ten spent last summer spread among four clubs on Queensland’s Gold Coast, so as to be near new national coach Peter Anderson.
Another possibility has just emerged almost by accident, because of a conversation between two former Tasmanian team-mates of Campbell’s, Jamie Cox and Michael Dighton.
Cox, now the South Australian Cricket Association’s director of cricket, was airing an idea he had for an Adelaide premier league pooling the talents of local grade cricket into four zonal teams, also competing with an XI from the Northern Territory; he was negotiating with the Australian Capital Territory to be the sixth team. Dighton, a well-travelled international coach with stints behind him in Canada and the Netherlands, had just been in PNG for the fourth Legends Bash, and mentioned the talent on display.
When the ACT decided against joining the premier league, Cox revisited the conversation. ‘We wanted a team of players who weren’t in our talent pool; weren’t in any Australian talent pool,’ says Cox. ‘And PNG certainly weren’t.’ The league opens the possibility of a PNG player being picked up in the Big Bash League by the Adelaide Strikers, and in doing so becoming to cricket as the Melbourne Storm’s Marcus Bai has been to PNG rugby league: likeliest candidate is Vala, a 26-year-old left-hander, who trained last summer with the Brisbane Heat.
That still leaves international competition, just adequate for present purposes, but really of insufficient frequency and intensity to advance players to the next level. PNG last played anything other than Twenty20 against another country more than a year ago. With Amini Park their country’s only turf wicket table, PNG’s cricketers still grow up with hard-wicket habits; fearless horizontal bat hitters flourish; aspiring spinners do not. Fielding is a strong suit: uneven, unkempt outfields conduce to quicksilver reflexes.
But PNG’s aspirations to play more in Asia, and perhaps even join the ICC’s Asia development region, will be restricted by their home conditions. Amini Park, moreover, is in constant demand, not only for cricket but for Australian rules, and where their seasons overlap the custom is simply to roll the pitch as soon as football ceases to rub out the stop marks for cricket the next day – a rather more relaxed attitude to curation than other countries are used to.
And attitude generally is what it will probably all come down to. Ultimately, PNG’s future will be shaped by its national players. And that in its way is the puzzle’s missing piece. To repeat, PNG is a country of many different crickets. What Cricket PNG and the ICC are seeking to foster is another form of the game – the cricket that aspires to being a truly global sport, with an expanding elite level and healthy commercial undergirding. They are like the missionaries of a century ago, evangelists for an imported sporting culture remote from previous experience which may or may not take root.
Leane and Campbell have found life amid the pre-existing culture both frustrating and fascinating. Leane recalls a comment made to him by another local sports administrator soon after he arrived – that in PNG, it was being picked and ‘getting on the plane’ that mattered, not any success that might follow. That had a host of entailments.
Selection had always been a vexed issue in PNG. ‘It was one thing I could never unpick,’ admits Andrew Knott. ‘I couldn’t speak motu or pidgin. There was never a lot of expertise around choosing teams: they had really been picking their wantoks forever and a day.’
Leane tried. When he learned that selectors usually made their choices from information they received from others, he sacked them, appointing a new panel led by former captain Api Leka which he bound to attend games. That had its own implications, for Leka’s daughter Lisa is a national player, and married to Chris Amini. But it did introduce a more robust sense of competition for places.
Leane wanted also to regularize behaviour on tours. Just before he arrived, PNG participated in the World Cricket League Division Three in Buenos Aires. Reviewing the visit, Leane learned that the majority of the players were in the habit of gorging themselves at breakfast and lunch, which were provided, and eating nothing in the evening so as to save their modest allowances for distribution among their wantoks.
What satisfied their familial obligations was detrimental to their cricket, and in this event tiny differences had counted: a single heavy defeat by Afghanistan cost PNG their chance to advance to the ICC World Cup qualifier. That was it, said Leane: allowances were out, and communal evening meals were in, the message being that good cricket required good preparation.
Another step followed a chance glimpse in the street of a woman wearing a PNG national team uniform, evidently borrowed from a player. That was it, said Leane again: uniforms were to be returned to Cricket PNG after use. Respect for and pride in the colours was not negotiable. To instill it further, he traversed the annals of the national team allocating numbers to all past and present players, who each received a specially-made ‘baggy black’.
Sometimes Leane’s determination to professionalise PNG was carried to a fault. When PNG visited Dubai to tackle World Cricket League Division Two, it brought Leane, Campbell, Bichel, batting coach Andrew Cavill, bowling coach Ray Bright and a strength and conditioning coach. It was more attention than the players ever had, and at first left them feeling overwhelmed. ‘There was information coming from everywhere,’ recalls Chris Amini. ‘It was too much for some players to absorb.’
The team redeemed a poor start by winning a third-place playoff, thereby qualifying for a $US700,000 two-year high-performance grant from the ICC, but gaining no additional fixtures – a good result just short of great. And in some respects, PNG remain in search of their breakthrough win.
Running Cricket PNG, Campbell reports, has pastoral as well as professional elements. Nineteen senior men, ten rookies and ten senior women are contracted on sums between K120 and K250 a month. But the choice between the calls of sport and of family is no contest.
A year ago, Campbell lost one of his squad’s most valuable batsmen, Kila Pala, who top-scored in that aforementioned record against New Caledonia, because his father had decided it was time for him to return to Hanuabada to work. Campbell visited the father to plead for the young man’s cricket career, but to no avail. Sport? What kind of ‘job’ was that? Wantok networks impose heavy and ineluctable obligations. Not so long ago, Campbell wanted to give one of his staff a raise. The man pleaded otherwise: if it was known he had more money, wantoks would materialise to importune their share.
The fluidity of property extends further, to a mainly harmless, scarcely malicious but seemingly irreducible problem with petty theft, from petrol being siphoned from cars to blades being detached from the ride-on mower. ‘One thing you have to understand about PNG, Campbo,’ Dikana warned Campbell when he arrived. ‘Daytime is for sleeping; nighttime is for stealing.’
Individuals tend not to think through the implications of taking something because in their daily lives there usually aren’t. PNG still has a law criminalising sorcery; somewhat different concepts of personal property should not perhaps surprise us. And, well, we have a few strange habits ourselves. Ovia and I were chatting in the ute one day when he turned to me with great earnestness. ‘You know, I read that the man in charge of the Australian cricket team, he is a rugby player,’ he said. ‘Why is that?’ Trying to explain Pat Howard to John Ovia: some of cricket’s cultural gaps are simply unbridgeable.
When we returned to Cricket Haus, I took in again its most striking feature, which is a doorway on the first floor, perhaps five metres in the air, that simply leads into space. ‘There was a fire escape there,’ Campbell explains. ‘But we decided it would simply be quicker to jump.’ Nobody had bothered to cordon it off or post a warning sign; instead it yawned, almost inviting you to walk through it. A metaphor for its cricketers’ steps into the unknown, perhaps? While the development programme has provided them with a beckoning portal, the leap still requires courage.
(1) Most renowned of all local variants became the elaborate and riotous games played between village teams numbering as many as 60 players on the Trobriand Islands, off New Guinea’s eastern tip, the game having been introduced there by a Methodist contemporary of Abel’s, William Gilmore, as an alternative to ritual warfare. Ceremony takes precedence over scoring: the home team always wins, and always hosts the post-match feast. The accent instead is on display, dancing and chanting – think of it as PNG’s version of the IPL. It reached a worldwide audience thanks to the power of media too. Cambridge anthropologist Jerry Leach’s Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response to Colonialism (1976) is among the most famous of all ethnographic films.
(2) PNG’s senior men’s team is now known as the Barramundis, a local sea bass, and the senior women’s team the Lewas, pidgin for heart. The other men’s teams are respectively the Under-19 Garamuts (a local percussion drum), the Under-17 Geckos (a local lizard) and the Under-15s Rokroks (frog in pidgin).