A light rain finished a cool afternoon April 19 at Karon Stadium, but that didn't seem to dampen spirits for the fifth annual Phuket Cricket Sixes tournament. Players were scattered in clumps across the stands, chatting quietly among themselves. The low murmur was occasionally broken when someone decided a bowler or batsman on the field needed heckling. It was probably the beer talking--all in good fun, of course.
"Our attraction is a bit like real estate," explains Chairman Michael "Cat" Maher, who founded the tournament in 2004. "They've got the three L's: location, location, location. We've got beaches and hotels and palms and a stadium right next to the sand, and where else in the world can you do that? Maybe a little in the Caribbean. People love it, and they come back year after year. We have teams now from as far as New Zealand."
Matches for the tournament started on April 17 and finished with finals on April 20. The Calcutta Cricket and Football Club took the cup. The team earned a spot in the finals early in the day by beating Phuket's own Liquid Lounge Lizards with a tournament high total runs of 112. In the final match against Etihad Airways Cricket Club from the United Arab Emirates, Calcutta bested their earlier mark with 116 runs to claim the cup. Etihad's Sanket earned Player of the Tournament honors.
In 2004 during the tournament's first year, "There was no cricket at all in Phuket. It didn't exist," Maher says. "Sometimes you've got to take a bit of a crack and do it. We came up a couple of weeks before and set up and decided we just had to suck and see (take the risk). With cricket it's important that you have a reasonable quality cricket pitch, and it went off well--it played well."
When the tournament finished and everybody returned home, the cricket pitch stayed behind. Since the field at Karon Stadium is made for football, the cricket pitch has been instrumental in building local interest in the game. Maher says the tournament founded the Phuket Cricket Union, a cricket league that now has five teams. The tournament also continues to work with young players and teachers to spread the sporting message.
"A lot of kids are being taught to play the game," he says. "A big part of what we do is to give back to the local community."
The toughest year for the tournament came in 2005 immediately after the tsunami, Maher says. Many people urged event organizers to skip a year, but Maher and directors Brad Tarr and Mark "Scarfy" Whetton decided to go ahead anyway despite the challenges.
"I estimate we spent 8 to 10 million baht at a time when Phuket really needed it," he says. "We had people coming up to us and thanking us--masseurs, the shop people. The governor of Phuket was very supportive; the mayor of Karon, too. They all did anything they could to help us."
Maher estimates that this year's tournament brought 300-400 people to Phuket to see matches at the Karon Municipal Stadium during the four-day tournament. Twenty three teams played, and they stayed in some "140-odd" hotel rooms.