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Former captain decries falling standards of game cricket in Kenya

Xinhua, November 22, 2016 Adjust font size:

Kenya' s former national cricket team captain Maurice Odumbe on Tuesday decried the falling standards of the game in the country, saying that the East African nation ought to go back to the drawing board to stop the decline.

Odumbe, 47, who played in two Cricket World Cups including captaining the Kenyan side during the 1999 global tournament, told Xinhua in Nairobi that attempts should be made to develop youth cricket in the country as the first step towards recovery.

"In the past, Kenya stood shoulder to shoulder with cricket-playing giants like India, Pakistan and West Indies but today we can hardly measure to emerging minnow like Hong Kong out of which we can only extract a draw against," Odumbe said after watching the two one-day international (ODI) matches between Kenya and Hong Kong of China in Nairobi that ended in a 1-1 draw.

Kenya beat the visitors by three wickets in the first match of two International Cricket Council (ICC) World Cricket League Championships.

In the second match, Hong Kong beat the hosts by 39 runs to level the two-match series at 1-1 and in the process reviving hopes of participating in the championship.

After Kenya' s sterling performance during the 1993 World Cup and reaching the semi-final of the 2003 World Cup, the country was ear-marked to be the next Test-playing nation as a glorious reward for the side that announced themselves to the world when the bundled out West Indies during the global event 23 years ago.

However, it never happened and instead Kenya fell into oblivion at the time when pundits expected the country to move from Associate to Test-playing status.

"Mismanagement of cricket in Kenya and negligence of the national team have been the malaise that saw the standards of the game plunge to low depths locally," Odumbe said. Endit