‘India not lowering themselves by playing Japan’: Head coach Dhugal Bedingfield - The Indian Express
The cricket fan of a certain vintage might remember Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket, and the controversy that enveloped it in the late 1970s. Dhugal Bedingfield remembers something else — the tournament that made him fall in love with cricket. He would memorise the names of every cricketer, obsess over the Australians, and try to emulate his heroes. The obsession led him to club cricket, but not beyond that. 25 years later, he arrived in Japan, not as a cricketer, but as a teacher.
On Tuesday, a childhood dream will come full circle. Bedingfield will sit in the Japan dugout, as head coach, for their historic one-off T20I against India in Sano. Ahead of the fixture, Bedingfield spoke to The Indian Express.
Bedingfield: I’m from Melbourne, where I played a lot of club cricket. I joined the Japan Cricket Association in 2014, but I was already familiar with Japanese culture, a bit of the language and the Japan cricket scene before that.
Japan Cricket is a very small operation compared to some other countries, such as India, so you end up filling a lot of different roles. I’ve done a lot over that journey: not just coaching but community cricket, trying to grow the game, and managing domestic leagues and tournaments. I’ve floated through a few coaching roles, including women’s coach and under-19 coach. I took a team to the 2020 Under-19 World Cup, where we played India and got soundly beaten.
Bedingfield: I spent four years here, 2004 to 2008. I was working in Australia at the time and decided to do something completely different. There was a high demand for teaching roles in Japan back then, so I did a bit of that. There was a lot of exchange between Australia and Japan at that time, with many Australians visiting, and I was one of them. I got some insight into the culture and a bit of the language. Around then I also got involved in club cricket in Japan, which was at a very basic level. One of the first things I did in 2004 was join a cricket club, the Chiba Sharks.
Bedingfield: It has improved exponentially. We now have four divisions of 40-over cricket and about 85 senior men’s T20 teams playing in the Japan Cup T20 and a few other tournaments and leagues. The club scene is pretty well established now. There are some big clubs in Tokyo that you’d probably call Indian clubs, because most of the players are Indian men who moved to Japan for work but also love their club cricket. Some of those clubs have six or seven senior men’s teams, plus under-19 and under-15 teams and even women’s teams.
Bedingfield: So, our cricketers fall into three categories. Firstly, players who have two Japanese parents, who grew up in Japan and came through the Japanese junior system. But more commonly, players who have one Japanese parent and one from another country, that is a cricketing country, like a New Zealand, an Australia or a Pakistan. The third category is the expats.
Players qualify under the ICC eligibility criteria: passport, birth, or residency. With residency, you spend at least three years in a country and you’re eligible. We don’t go out of our way to include expat players in our national squads.
Bedingfield: It’s still hard to compete against established sports in Japan. You’d think of baseball and now soccer as the two biggest, and a few other sports are more developed than cricket. We have to offer something pretty good. Cricket and baseball are both bat-and-ball sports, but baseball at junior level in Japan can be quite rigid. We try to provide a cricketing experience that’s more fun, which I think we can do. But kids have so many options these days, and cricket is just one of them. It’s a struggle and something we’ve worked very hard at for a long time. To be really successful, we’d want thousands and thousands of kids playing cricket all day, every day, and we don’t quite have that yet.
Bedingfield: Honestly, when we were told that we might get to play against India, I wasn’t sure it was going to eventuate, but it is happening now. Credit to the Indian team for agreeing to play. Not every team would. I get a sense from India that they’re not lowering themselves by playing Japan, but trying to lift everyone else up to make cricket a global sport. I’ve sensed a lot of positivity from the Indian coaches and team managers I’ve spoken to, and I’m really looking forward to it.
Bedingfield: A lot of our players work full-time or part-time, or are students, and cricket is separate to that. If you have a full-time job, you work your training and playing commitments around it, and hopefully you have an understanding employer. At best, players receive an allowance when they travel on tour, and a couple of meals. We try to cover all the costs at tournaments so players aren’t out of pocket.
Another problem is distance. A lot of our players travel long distances to reach national team grounds. I’m in Sano right now, which is a bit more than an hour north of Tokyo. It’s a smallish town, and where we have access to land, we can develop cricket grounds. Not just national players but club cricketers may travel at least an hour and a half to a game or even a training session.
Shuvaditya Bose is a Deputy Copy Editor at the sports desk of The Indian Express. ... Read More
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