After Hong Kong stumbled at the final 2024 Asia Cup qualifying hurdle, Kary Chan Ka-ying spent five navel-gazing days hiding from the outside world.
“I can still remember the pain in my heart … I kept asking myself, ‘what if I’d done something differently?’” Chan said.
Two years later and rather than being cooped up indoors, Chan is with her teammates preparing for a Women’s Twenty20 Asia Cup in Dubai where Hong Kong have the redoubtable task of facing Thailand, Pakistan and mighty India.
Chan was among the players who spent a short time in hospital after illness swept through the camp during their ongoing preparation trip to Sri Lanka, but it would take more than a bout of bellyache to dampen enthusiasm over the city team’s return to the tournament after 14 years away.
In 2012, proficient all-rounder Chan was a wide-eyed 15-year-old who “wasn’t even given a chance to run water onto the field … I sat next to the coach to learn”.
“From then, playing in the Asia Cup became one of my life dreams,” she said.
Ironically, Chan’s ability to realise her long-term goal stems partly from Hong Kong’s close-run thing in 2024, alongside their progress to the semi-finals of the previous year’s T20 World Cup qualifying.
Those efforts earned the women’s team entry to the Hong Kong Sports Institute (HKSI)’s individual athletes support scheme. Among 12 players currently receiving financial backing, Chan has forgone her coaching jobs, including one with the China men’s team.
“I can really concentrate on doing my best for Hong Kong,” she said. “I’m thinking about cricket training when I wake up and when I go to bed.”
Around half of the city women’s squad are full-time. The men’s contingent do not receive HKSI backing, leaving roughly 80 per cent of them to supplement their cricket with part-time work.
In Tanuja Lele, Chan and her colleagues have a strength and conditioning coach who Mamatha Maben, the head coach, credits with “making a huge difference to the way our players perceive fitness”.
They train for five-to-six hours a day, with individual running and gym programmes complementing one-to-one and team practices.
“They’re beginning to think like athletes, although there’s a long way to go,” Maben said.
Appointed nine months ago, former India all-rounder Maben said the Asia Cup would allow her world No 23 team to “see what cricket is all about at the highest level”.
Hong Kong twice beat Tanzania, ranked No 20, in a recent quadrangular series but in Thailand, Pakistan and 50-over world champions India, they have the planet’s 12th, eighth and third-rated teams waiting for them in Dubai.
“When they get this exposure it’s easier for me to take them up the ladder,” Maben said.
“Sometimes, it’s difficult to make them understand the work required, and the sacrifices you have to make, to play quality cricket. This will open their eyes.”
The captain for around five years before passing the baton to her “idol”, Natasha Miles, in 2024, Chan said being freed from leadership duties had been “amazing … you just need to focus on your game and not think too much, although I’m always there to help Tash”.
Miles is steeped in Hong Kong cricket. Her father, Rodney, is a former president of the local association. Her late mother, Anita, was at the vanguard of establishing Hong Kong’s first women’s league in 2004. Two years later, Natasha Miles was in the party for the city women’s first international series in Pakistan.
Although she “moped for a day or two” after Hong Kong failed to reach the last Asia Cup, Miles believes in hindsight that narrowly losing the decisive match to Thailand was “a blessing in disguise”.
“We probably just weren’t ready … we had to work out how to come back and really throw some heavy punches,” said Miles, who credits the HKSI support with allowing her to “play more cricket than at any time in the past 10 years”, despite ending her 15-year association with English county Middlesex 12 months ago.
In 2022, Miles, 37, and her father launched the Anita Miles Foundation, aimed at promoting “the full and equal participation of women and girls in all aspects of cricket in the Hong Kong community”.
Every year, the foundation provides fully-funded overseas scholarships for two Hong Kong cricketers. One of the 2025 beneficiaries was Chan, who played for Aldershot Cricket Club in England. She began in the sport at 14 after a coach visited her school as part of a development programme.
Although enormously encouraged that the domestic structure has grown from “three or four teams playing all season” to 23 sides competing in four divisions, Miles said it would be “unrealistic” to think that Hong Kong’s Asia Cup exploits will immediately translate into greater local interest in the sport, because “I know how long it takes to embed the grass roots”.
“But having incredible players like Kary and [right-arm medium pacer] Alison Siu Mei-wai who are local-born Chinese and performing at that level is going to be huge for the game,” she said.
“You look up to the people who look like you, so it’ll be a big deal, and it’ll help investment and interest.
“We want development across the board but we have a couple of [domestic] teams full of Chinese girls, which is incredible.”
Miles enlisted the help of a friend who regularly plays golf with Mahela Jayawardena to arrange for the silky-smooth former Sri Lanka batting champion to deliver a pep talk to the Hong Kong squad while they were in the country.
The thrust of Jayawardene’s message was that against their superior opponents in the Middle East, Hong Kong must “take away the names of their opponents and focus on the ball”.
Drawn in an identical group in 2012, the city team were rolled for 15 and 24 by Pakistan and India, respectively, and handily beaten by Thailand.
A former Lancashire Thunder teammate of India’s superstar captain Harmanpreet Kaur, Miles said: “If we put the ball in good areas, throw ourselves around in the field and bat with fearlessness, the result doesn’t matter.
“If India have that good day and tank us, it is what it is, but if we deliver our skills we’ll always be in the hunt.”
So giddy with excitement after Hong Kong won their ACC Women’s Premier Cup quarter-final against Japan to qualify, Chan double- and triple-checked that the victory had stamped her team’s Asian Cup ticket. They begin against Thailand on Friday.
One of only seven women to have claimed more than 150 T20 international wickets, Chan said: “I can’t wait for this moment to come. We’ll treat every ball like it’s the last of our careers.”
Source: www.scmp.com
