DILI: Navigating pigs and goats as they practise on a dusty paddock, a group of young East Timorese are hoping to copy the fairy-tale rise of Afghanistan by making it as Asia’s latest emerging cricket nation.
In the impoverished, once war-ravaged country, which only gained independence from Indonesia in 2002, the manicured pitches of Lord’s are a world away for aspiring cricketer Juvelino Mique “Micky” Rama Pinto, 16.
His 14-year-old batting partner, Joana Gonsalves Borges, has seen cricket on TV and is excited by “watching big sixes and wickets being taken”. Like Micky, she wants to play for East Timor.
The vision to turn soccer-obsessed East Timor on to cricket originated with Mark Young, who played at league level in Lancashire and Gloucestershire before emigrating to New Zealand in 1997.
Young and a Pakistani colleague, Muhammad Tayyeb Javed, argue that East Timor can use cricket as part of its revival just like Afghanistan, whose players learned the game in refugee camps but have risen to the elite Test level.
East Timor, one of the world’s youngest nations, is still suffering the effects of a violent, decades-long independence struggle which destroyed infrastructure.
With high levels of poverty, one of the world’s worst rates of malnourishment and 60 per cent of its 1.3 million population under the age of 24, there is an urgent need for new opportunities for young Timorese — including, now, cricket.