BOWRAL: Australia it may be a long time before cricket catches on with China’s sports fans

But that doesn’t bother Wang Xiaodong a pill grim from Beijing to this hallowed shrine of Australia’s most popular sport and boyhood home of cricket here Sir Donald Bradman

I like cricket said the 23-yr-old athlete as he honed his batting skills in the practice nets in this quiet country town south west of Sydney.

Wang one of a handful of Chinese who play the game is hoping to make a small contribution to cricket’s future back home In Beijing.

 It is played largely by foreigners and Chinese cricketers could probably squeeze into two moderate-sized taxi cabs.

Wang a former member of China’s national field hockey team and a recent graduate of the sports institute in Beijing where top athletes train and study plays for the Australian Embassy XI.

Invited to Australia by Sydney’s Waverly Cricket Club he has joined about 10 Australian cricket enthusiasts al a training camp at Bowral’s Chevalier College.

This is a good place to start said Richard Mulvaney curator of Bowral’s Bradman Museum a hall of cricket history

Cricket is so important to our national culture and when you talk cricket it’s Bradman he said.

Bowral is temples to cricket more than 40,000 people have crossed the Museum’s threshold in the first year since its doors were opened to the public.

Outside is the grassy oval where the young Bradman played before cementing his fame in a Test career that began in 1928 and spanned two decades. As any Australian school kid would know his rest average of 99.94 has never been equaled. Wangi’s already learning the Bradman lore

He recently had a chance to bowl to Australian captain Allan Border whizzing a ball past his head prompting a gentle admonition to follow through on his delivery.

But one of his more daunting tasks is to translate the rules and often arcane ter minology of the sport into Chinese.

Fielding positions with names like silly mid-on short leg and long off will probably just become numbers. It’s not easy to translate says Wang.

Article extracted from this publication >> January 25, 1991