On the ball: You are the inspiration, boys in red

"Gautam, your home team are here,” quipped one of my colleagues at the ICC Academy.
It would’ve been a first for team India, but they weren’t the ones he was talking about. Clad in red and green, toting duffle bags over their shoulder and with the khanjar emblazoned on their chests, it was Oman’s national cricket team who strolled onto the immaculately designed pitches last November.
They were there training for the Twenty20 World Cup which was held in India last March. Most teams are guaranteed automatic qualification for the world’s most prestigious cricket tournaments, but Oman and a handful of other nations that have only recently emerged on cricket’s map had to earn the right to play with the big boys through a series of qualifications.
And the boys in red did just that: They beat a much-vaunted Namibia side – who’d qualified for the World Cup in 2003 – to become one of 12 teams travelling to the subcontinent this year.
Oman’s arrival on the big stage was another marker in the sand for the nascent cricketing landscape in the Gulf, and the manner in which they trained reflected the hard work and tireless efforts these players had put in to get to India.
“Are you from Oman?” I asked one of the bowlers? “I spent 18 years there,” a response that made one of his teammates walk over and shake my hand, broad smile lighting up his face.
I was indeed excited to see them, but I had not expected them to greet me so warmly. We think of sports stars as elite athletes who live extravagant lives off the pitch, but all of Oman’s cricketers were part timers, who’d taken time off from work to train for the tournament.
For them to devote so much time and energy to their passions, and then go back to being full-time employees, was what served as a source of inspiration to me, and indeed, should serve as a lesson to all of us.
Few around the world would know what it meant for team Oman when they stepped onto the pitch at the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association in Dharamsala on the 9th of March, but for them to be recognised as one of 16 teams competing in one of the world’s biggest competitions in the world was a victory in itself.
There was, of course, more for them to savour that night, as they notched their first ever tournament victory against the Irish, who’d also previously turned up at the World Cup: In 2007, they’d travelled to the West Indies and made history when they eliminated Pakistan.
In India, though, it was the sons of the Sultanate who would triumph. Restricting the Irish to 154/5 as Munis Ansari took three wickets, Zeeshan Maqsood saw Oman over the line and gave the nation its first ever victory at a major cricket tournament.
The road Oman had to take to get to this point was long and arduous, but the dedication, commitment and sacrifice put in by the players and coaching staff had reaped rich reward, a fitting return for their hard work.
Sixteen years after their inception in 2000, Oman’s cricket team had finally reached the big time. To see their names splashed across the front pages in the sports sections of so many papers and websites all around the world would’ve been a memorable moment for everyone associated with that team.
It was, unfortunately, as far as Oman would progress in the tournament: Their match against the Dutch was washed out due to rain and they stumbled in the final hurdle against a rapidly-improving Bangladesh side, leaving them to contemplate what could’ve been.
Oman’s exploits in India, though, are surely only the larval form of greater achievements in the years to come. The journey these players have undertaken and the lessons they have learned from it is sure to inspire others to take up the bat and follow in their footsteps so that they too can one day make a full-time living from the sport.
Ajay Lalcheta, Jatinder Singh, Soufyan Mehmood, Mohammed Nadeem and the rest of the players who represent Oman are pioneers of the sport in the region, and while their names may not mean much to us right now, are sure to enter the annals of the history of the gentleman’s game in the nation in the future.
For the Sultanate of Oman, the only way is up.
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