HOWZZAT!! China Takes To Cricket!

It's a model the Chinese have followed with manufacturing. Mass produce and steamroller. Now, Beijing wants to deploy it to storm one of the last remaining bastions of sports — cricket.

Beijing has decided to make hundreds of cricket coaches out of baseball trainers almost overnight with the help of coaches and ex-players from Australia and elsewhere. With the help of this new army of coaches, it plans to churn out 150,000 Hans who wield the willow by 2020.

By 2010, it hopes to face India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka at the Asian Games in south China's Gaungzhou. It also wants to play the World Cup by 2015.

It has been just two years since the Chinese Cricket Association began promoting cricket in real earnest after joining the ICC and the Asian Cricket Council a year earlier. Since then, 30,000 cricketers have been registered with CCA and more than 1,000 baseball trainers have been identified to be shaped into cricket coaches.

A national cricket team has been put together, and has played a few matches in places like Singapore and Malaysia.

"They feel baseball coaches will be able to learn cricket fast because the hand, eye and body movements are similar," says Mayank Purwar, who plays for an Indian team in Shanghai.

The team, which has been in the field for six years, has found encouragement from Indian cricketing legend Kapil Dev, who will be playing with it on September 2.