Paul Radley
DUBAI // This was not exactly Million Dollar Arm. The prize on offer is someway short of a lucrative contract to play ball. There is unlikely to be a contract of any sort, to be honest. Yet still they came in droves.
The humble talent hunt may be an age-old concept, but it still packs them in. Especially, it turns out, if the specified talent is cricket and the country is the UAE.
Around 700 aspiring players made it to the ICC Academy in Dubai for the latest instalment of the Emirates Cricket Board’s continuing nationwide search for new players.
That is on top of more than 200 who attended the first one in Ajman, and the 400 who turned out in Abu Dhabi. Sunday’s Sharjah session is expected to be the busiest of all.
All lured by the prospect of a chance to play for the UAE. Or maybe just the chance to get a selfie with Aaqib Javed, the UAE coach.
VIDEO: Highlights from the UAE cricket talent hunt
“Aaqib Javed is my idol,” Noman Atif, one of the wannabe international cricketers in Dubai, said. “Because of the World Cup in 1992. I wasn’t born yet, but I’ve seen the highlights.”
Not that the idea of meeting the Pakistani World Cup winner was Atif’s sole driver for attending, along with his two friends, Safeer Shah and Faisal Tariq.
Cricket is their obsession. So much so, they walked the final 10 kms of a journey that started at the Palm Deira metro station, near where they live, at more or less the furthest point of Dubai from the ICC Academy.
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On arrival, they had to queue for an hour and a half for their small window of opportunity. And there was no cutting corners. Security guards were stationed at the entry to the net area to maintain order.
“We’re civil engineers, but cricket is our life,” said Atif, who had to be at the trial after his brother tipped him off about it via Facebook. “It’s all we want to do.”
The talent hunt had been advertised as open to everyone, male or female. The lone woman who made it along might have felt in a very small minority, but she was still keen to prove herself.
Justyne Smagacz, 26, had not played for over 10 years, but wanted to get back involved. And as a resident in Dubai for just over two years, the Englishwoman would qualify for the women’s national team immediately, if she proves herself worthy.
“I played cricket back in the day, then other main sports got in the way, like hockey, netball, athletics,” Smagacz said.
“One of my best friends works for a sports channel and sent me the link saying, ‘They’ve got some trials for the UAE, you’ve always said you want to get back into cricket.’
“I thought this was a good chance to give it a crack. I had to ask around when I arrived, as I thought it was supposed to be girls and boys. I just had to get in amongst it, even though I am the only girl here.”
The idea is to expand the player pool available to both the male and female national teams.
“If 400 people come along, we will easily get at least five or six players of a good enough standard,” Mohammed Tauqir, the former UAE captain turned selector, said.
“We want to raise our pool of available players to around 70 for us selectors to look at.”
It is not easy to stand out among 700 rivals, with just 15 or so minutes to impress, and with eight nets in operation all at the same time.
One player most definitely did, though. Suleman Afridi is a 26 year old from the northwest of Pakistan who works as an operations analyst in a bank in Dubai.
He bowls left-arm seriously fast, and hit the stumps four times in successive deliveries just in the time that Aaqib was watching him.
So good was he, the beleaguered batsman sought him out to shake his hand afterwards, even though he had lanced his own prospects of getting picked.
“I didn’t know they’d conduct a talent hunt here, but back in Pakistan I experienced that,” Afridi said.
“I was amazed to hear about this and there was a happiness in my heart that this was happening. I thought, ‘Oh God, that is my opportunity — let’s go and try our luck’.”
The pity for both him and his prospective new teammates is he has only been in Dubai for a year and a half, meaning he is over two years off being eligible for the national team.
Players who qualify for selection for the national team immediately were given bibs to wear, so the selectors knew who to look out for.
Even though he did not get a bib, Afridi’s contact details were saved. They are unlikely to let him slip away, given his talent.
“Since childhood, there was one wish in my heart, and that was to be a cricketer,” he said. “If I got that chance, and my dream comes true, that would be like ‘wow’ for me.”
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