Next in our series celebrating heroes of club cricket, Scott Oliver meets a man who has entirely transformed his club and in the process set a blueprint for other teams to follow.
Read more from the Wisden Club Cricket Hall of Fame series
This article first appeared in Wisden Cricket Monthly. Subscribe here
To say that Attock CC of the Birmingham & District Premier Cricket League (BDPCL) wouldn’t be where they are today without the input of Naz Khan is like saying Tim Berners-Lee had a bit to do with the internet.
So instrumental has Khan been in taking a team of friends from the old country playing knockabout parks cricket in inner-city Birmingham up the recreational cricketing pyramid that he has been recognised with numerous honours, including a BBC Unsung Hero award and a prize for inspirational leadership at the Asian Sports Awards.
On the pitch, Attock rose quickly up the divisions and to the top of the Combined League. Promotion into BDPCL was initially denied due to inadequate facilities, but Attock won it again the following year and were admitted. They eventually made it to Division One, also winning the Twenty20 competition in 2006, although Khan concedes they hit a glass ceiling: “Why pay several players to compete if that means blocking the progression of your own youngsters?”
Thanks to the energy and vision of Naz Khan – a man who never played a proper game for Attock – a solid club with five Saturday teams, two Sunday teams, five junior sides and a women’s section has emerged from the chaotic parks scene, where “even today, at a place like Perry Hall, there are 14 pitches and no toilets, players defecating in the bushes”.
Khan is now part of the ECB’s South Asian Initiative, a plan to ensure that cricket-crazy inner-city Asian youth don’t slip through the net, which was the whole point of Attock. “What we’ve done, our long-term vision, could maybe be seen as a blueprint for other teams that play in the parks,” he says. “They’ll put in the hard work; they just need some structure and guidance.”
The nomads of Attock eventually settled close to home, but they have come a very, very long way.
