by Anton Lloyd-Williams
Most Japanese cricket players get their first opportunity to play the great game in a university side, playing in an inter-university league. This often means that JCL and KCL teams only rarely get to play these sides. Chuo University has a well established cricket club with about 60 players and four of its members joined the Sharks for training in Kashiwa on the 15th of January.
This was the first time that we have managed to organise such a training session and both groups of players found the whole thing very beneficial and learned a lot from each other.
The Chuo Uni players were Mamenari Shunichi, Kamikawara Takahiro, Fujita Motohiro and Yoshioka Taira and they joined Dave, Nikhil, StatNav, Richard, Pat and Anton of the Sharks. Although all four Chuo Uni players brought with them a good range of skills, Dave still found some opportunities for some man to man batting coaching and Nikhil gave some bowling advice, all of which was appreciated by the Chuo Uni players.
In the field though, the Chuo Uni players showed the Sharks how it was done; getting to the ball quickly, regularly throwing down the stumps from distance and taking some pretty smart catches as well. All this was done with an energy that the more ancient Sharks could only pretend they once had. It kept everyone on their toes for the full 3 hours.
Yoshioka-kun has encountered the Sharks before, playing for the Japan All Stars in the Chiba Cup last season. Inexplicably, he wasn’t chosen as one of the All Stars’ strike bowlers. If he had been then the Sharks’ innings would have been over a lot quicker as he is a bowler with genuine pace who can bowl wicket to wicket. All of the batsmen really had to focus to keep him out and were often unsuccessful!. Poor Richard Dixon got cleaned up by one that he said later was just too fast to see. One suspects that if Yoshioka-kun can develop a ball that goes just outside off, to go along with his fearsome yorkers, then any batsman will find him a real handful. At the other end of the pitch, Mamenari-kun and Fujita-kun showed some good technique – unhurried and accurate, while Kamikawara-kun pulled out some sumptuous textbook drives to the back wall.
On the basis of the batting and bowling skills, commitment and energy in the field that we saw on Saturday, one has to say that the future of cricket in Japan looks very bright indeed, as long as players of this ability can stay in the game after graduation. The Sharks would like to thank the Chuo Uni players for joining us for training and we hope this is the start of many such sessions which hopefully lead to some full outdoor friendly games as well.
