“Xià yí zhàn: Shìjì Dàdào,” a robotic Chinese voice blares over the metro carriage speakers. “Qiánfāng kěyǐ huànchéng èr hào xiàn, liù hào xiàn, hé jiǔ hào xiàn. Chēmén jiàng zài yòu cè kāimén, qǐng zhàn wěn fú hǎo.”
A few seconds later an English voice follows: “Next station: Century Avenue. You can transfer to Line 2, Line 6, and Line 9. Doors will open on the right. Please stand clear and hold on to the handrails.” I get up from my seat and attempt to manoeuvre myself and my large Kookaburra duffle bag towards the carriage doors. “Bù hǎo yì si, bù hǎo yì si” (“Excuse me, excuse me”) I say as I squeeze past an old lady and her shopping caddy and then a mother with a pram.
“Shìjì Dàdào, dàole,” says the announcer’s voice as the train stops and the doors open. “We are now at Century Avenue.”
I merge with the crowd and take the escalator up to the concourse, following the signs for Line 6 before heading up a small flight of stairs to another platform. I have a few minutes to wait for the train towards Gangcheng Road.
While Century Avenue sounds like the ideal location for a cricket ground, my destination is Wuzhou Avenue and the nearby Shanghai Community Sports Club where I’ll be turning out for DPR Hot Dogs CC first XI in the Shanghai Cricket Club League.
This is a commute I would make every couple of weeks or so during the summers of 2017 and 2018 while I was working as a staff writer and editor at Time Out Shanghai magazine, a job opportunity I had stumbled upon while looking to escape my parents’ house and the UK job market in an attempt to find some direction post-university.
The train arrives and I get on, grateful to find a seat as I’m still 11 stations away from my stop. We head east, deep into Pudong, a part of Shanghai that is a mix of industrial and residential. With each stop we get further away from the city’s more glamorous Puxi area, famous for the picturesque tree-lined streets and art deco and neoclassical buildings of the former French Concession, a neighbourhood frequented by members of Shanghai’s foreign community.
For the first few stops, I’m the only non-Chinese person in the carriage. A young boy across from me alerts his mother to my presence by nudging her and pointing in my direction. She bats his hand down, telling him to behave. “Wàiguórén,” (“Foreigner”) I hear him say – not meant as an insult, but merely as a statement of fact. It’s not uncommon in China for people, particularly children, to be intrigued by the presence of someone from overseas, especially a guy as pasty and northern as me.
We reach an interchange station and a South Asian man gets on further down the carriage. He’s carrying an SG bag and wearing full whites. It doesn’t take a genius to work out where he’s heading.
During my time in China, the Shanghai Cricket Club League was a three-division competition made up of teams from eight participating clubs playing 40-, 30- and 20-over matches. Nowadays the competition, which was formed in 2004, is much smaller due to the significant decline in Shanghai’s foreign population post-pandemic.
The eight clubs included founding members Bashers CC and Pudong CC, as well as associate teams such as China Zalmi CC – who had an affiliation with the Pakistan Super League side Peshawar Zalmi – and K2 CC, a team that had some players making a 350-mile round trip from Hangzhou in neighbouring Zhejiang Province for each game – the equivalent of living in London but playing your club cricket in Wales.
Unsurprisingly, due to cricket not being a popular sport in China, the vast majority of the players during my time in Shanghai were expats, many of them hailing from India, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, England and New Zealand. But there was also a smattering of local representation across the league, notably including the former China women’s captain Mei Chun Hua and the men’s international Zhang Yu Fei.
Due to a lack of playing facilities, it wasn’t possible for every team to play every week, so over the course of the season most players would get a game once a fortnight, which resulted in each match feeling like more of an event and something to look forward to.
Life in Shanghai was hectic and fast-paced. The city’s population would fluctuate between 25 and 30 million over the course of a working day, with more than 10 million of those piling on to trains on the enormous Shanghai Metro system (boasting 14 lines covering a distance of more than 400 miles) as part of their daily commute. This was a world away from my home town of Pudsey, which has a population of around 25,000 and a big Asda. To put this in perspective Putuo, the district of Shanghai I lived in, has a population of more than 1.2 million. Putuo, however, does not have a big Asda.
The city was unbelievably stimulating, home to people from across the globe and boasting an embarrassment of bars, restaurants and nightclubs. But with this stimulation came fatigue.
Due to a combination of the language barrier, difficult bureaucratic processes and the sheer amount of options when it came to food, entertainment and dating, along with the occasional hit of loneliness and feelings of insignificance that come with living in a megacity, I found myself feeling burnt out and a bit homesick. This is where the cricket came in.
For a few hours every fortnight, myself and 21 other like-minded guys from across the globe would meet up, play a competitive game of cricket, have a couple of beers and, for a little while, we’d forget that we lived in Shanghai. There was something so familiar and comforting about it. Finding a thing you know in a place that you don’t.
You don’t have time to think about rush hour on Line 2 when you’re preoccupied with cutting off singles at extra-cover; getting all the documents in order to renew your visa isn’t a concern when the opposition quick is steaming in and banging it in halfway down.
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For those of us wanting to play a little more seriously, there was also the chance to turn out for Shanghai Cricket Club’s representative XI, the Shanghai Dragons. We hosted touring sides from Hong Kong CC and MCC and would also take on Beijing CC in the annual China Cup fixture. MCC have only toured China twice: in 2006 and again in 2017.
The most recent squad, overseen by Mike Gatting, included the ex-Pakistan international Yasir Arafat, the soon-to-be Scotland international Chris Greaves and the former Yorkshire wicketkeeper Simon Guy.
Club cricket in Shanghai gave everyone involved exactly what they wanted: a sense of community far away from home, the chance to play cricket in a place where many wouldn’t expect there to be any, and a much-needed escape from the chaos of city life.
“Wǔzhōu Dàdào, dàole.” The train comes to a halt and the doors open. “We are now at Wuzhou Avenue.”
The only league in the world
The feeling of escapism through club cricket is something I’d experience again a couple of years after my time in Shanghai. In 2020 I found myself playing in Taipei, Taiwan, where I’d moved for a new job the previous year, lining up for Taiwan Dragons CC in the Taipei T10 League. This time, however, it wasn’t just escapism for me, but for those watching too.
With Taiwan having responded so quickly and efficiently to the Covid outbreak, by late April the country was in a position to host competitive club cricket with only minimal precautions in place. As a result Taiwan found itself, albeit briefly, to be the only cricket-playing nation on the planet. Games were livestreamed on the Sports Tiger mobile app, as well as on YouTube, attracting thousands of viewers a match, mostly in India, with those watching able to pick teams on the Dream 11 fantasy platform to get further invested in the action.
With the future of the world so uncertain, the Taipei T10 League was a welcome distraction. People wanted to switch off for a while, not think about the pandemic, and enjoy some live cricket, regardless of the location or quality.
“The entire world is starved of sports, and people in lockdowns in countries around the world are bored because they can’t even go out and play sports,” the league’s broadcast presenter Priya Lalwani Purswaney told Taiwan’s Central News Agency. “The league’s 160 players are long-term residents of Taiwan from cricketing countries around the world, including engineers, students, English teachers, restaurant owners and local members of the community who have played cricket in Taiwan for fun for decades.”
It was a strange time to be in Taiwan. The island nation enjoyed eight months without a known case of Covid being transmitted domestically, with the streak finally broken in December 2020. It felt like we existed in a bubble as the world burned around us; non-residents/nationals were not permitted to enter the country and nobody who was there was in a hurry to leave.
It was emotionally conflicting: I felt fearful for the wellbeing of my family and friends back home, and guilty for being so lucky to be in Taiwan. However, for those four weekends in April and May, as soon as I stepped on to the playing field all I could think about was cricket.
