Wasim Khan has gone from tending to the game’s grassroots to attempting a full-scale revolution at Grace Road. No wonder there is a sense of urgency
Andrew Miller17-Apr-2015″You will always have doubters. You will always get people who think you’re involved in a losing cause. People have said to me ‘how could you take this job?’, but you learn to become a lot more resilient. You gain the belief that, just because nine out of 10 people tell you it won’t work, that doesn’t mean you can’t make it work.”Wasim Khan is standing in the window of Grace Road’s newly refurbished Sky Sports studio, overlooking his vast and distinctly under-furbished kingdom. With a loss of £225,000 for 2014 – and nothing but losses on the field since 2012 – cosmetic changes alone will not save Leicestershire County Cricket Club from bankruptcy.However, as the club’s new chief executive embarks on what may prove to be a make-or-break cultural revolution, he believes that addressing the image problem is as good a place as any to start.”It’s the little things we can change straight away,” he says. “See those red seats over there?” – he gestures towards an unoccupied stand next to the club offices on the north-eastern perimeter – “We’re going to put a canopy over those seats for members, and do something similar on the other side of the ground. We’ve jet-washed the back wall, we’re going to get the top of the Meet painted ahead of the Northants game. It’s all about adding a bit of value, a simple upgrading.”An upgrade in attitude has also been an early hallmark of his regime. By degrees over the previous two decades, the club had become wearyingly used to its second-tier status within the county game, not least when it came to losing its up-and-coming talent, such as Stuart Broad and James Taylor, to larger and hungrier clubs down the road.Wasim Khan has arrived at Leicestershire with a brief to revitalise the county•Getty ImagesHowever, a mass exodus of players at the end of 2014 was the final straw in that regard. For four players to leave within weeks of one another, including such outstanding young players as Josh Cobb, Nathan Buck and Shiv Thakor, told of a malaise that no incoming boss could possibly allow to fester.”Players will always move on, that’s a fact of life, but as long as they move on for the right reasons, I can accept that,” Khan says. “I don’t want to accept second-class status, but neither do I want our club to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”The atmosphere last year was toxic, but I want to create a winning environment and a learning environment. With a combination of those two factors, our players will believe they can achieve what they want to achieve in the game without leaving.”I say to the batters, average 50, score five hundreds and win us four games, that’s the way you’ll get noticed. Don’t average 35 and then leave because you’ve got England aspirations. No one’s going to pick you if you average 35.”With Andrew McDonald, the former Australia allrounder now installed as an ambitious young head coach, Khan is surrounding himself with people who will be willing to fight the right battles.”I think it brings a real vibrancy when young players, coaches and individuals off the field want to prove themselves,” Khan says. “I’ve tried to create a new approach off the field and Andrew is taking it on on the field. One lad said: ‘I can’t remember the last time we weren’t thinking about defeat’. So it will happen for us, the key thing was for us to come out this year and be competitive, because that’s something we haven’t been, and that’s not acceptable.”
“We have to try to do things differently. It’s important that whatever we do, it has to have some real relevance to the communities and to the club”Wasim Khan
There’s an urgency to Khan’s approach, but it’s the urgency of enthusiasm rather than the sort of harmful hectoring that the club’s players and staff has been subjected to by their rulers in recent years. As the gateman says while discussing the county’s often divisive politics: “I’ve not heard anyone with a bad word to say about him.”After all, the presentation of cricket to the public has become an issue of paramount importance to the sport, as the ECB’s cack-handed PR machine has spent the past year demonstrating. And as a man who has spent the past ten years of his career reconnecting cricket’s severed ties through his award-winning work with the charity, Chance to Shine, Khan knows better than anyone what it takes to put the wind beneath a project’s wings.The first day of the county season was a case in point. Rather than charge an admission fee, the club threw open its gates – even those along Milligan Road, where an austere red-brick and razor-wired perimeter wall feels about as welcoming as Stalag Luft III – and invited the local community in for an open day.Some 1500 people came along for the ride, the county’s biggest first-day gate for a generation. The majority were residents of the rows of terraced housing that lined the streets outside the ground, invited via a leafleting campaign despite never having set foot in the ground before; families with young children, among them Asians, Afro-Caribbeans and even the local Chinese community.In scenes reminiscent of the early days of the Twenty20 Cup, which tend to invite mockery now regardless of how mould-breaking they were at the time, activities such as free coaching, face painting and a bouncy castle occupied the crowds and left the action in the middle somewhat secondary to the day’s focus – no bad thing in the circumstances, as Glamorgan subjected the hosts to another day of toil by racking up 294 for 2.”It’s important we sell an experience, and that it’s not only cricket,” says Khan. “There are probably got 1500 households in the local LE2 postcode, and very few of them have any real interest in cricket. It’s not that we don’t sell it well enough to them, really it’s because we are in a football area, so we have to do different things and engage them differently. Bring them in by other means and then say, oh, by the way, the cricket is on as well.”Grace Road’s vast acreage•PA PhotosKeeping those casual fans, however, is a problem that might require more than just cosmetics. According to some estimates, Grace Road’s playing area is second among first-class venues only to the MCG but for a match such as the one against Glamorgan, when the wicket was set lop-sidedly to the east of the square, its acreage seems inordinate.”It is vast, and in the long term we are potentially looking at how we can bring the ground in a bit,” says Khan. “At the moment, there’s a real waste in how it could be used to create a more intimate atmosphere. We look at Chelmsford, for example, which is a properly close-up and intimidating area, particularly on Twenty20 nights.”We have a capacity of 5500-6000 but any other arena of this size would hold 30,000 easily. But we have to think very carefully about any development plans. There might, for instance, be an opportunity to create a hill atmosphere, like there used to be at Sydney, to make the ground more of an appealing place to sit with your mates and have drinks. Anything that creates a bit more of an informal environment would be massively beneficial.”An adventure playground has been erected alongside the boundary•ESPNcricinfo LtdOne instant hit in that regard has been the erection of a children’s adventure playground at deep midwicket – a wooden pirate ship and slide, and picnic benches, protected by a net (although it is superfluous when the action is taking place some 150 metres away). Installed by precisely the sort of local business with which the club needs to re-engage, it bears all the hallmarks of grassroots focus that Khan cultivated so successfully at Chance to Shine.”We have to try to do things differently,” says Khan. “There are cleverer ways to develop but it’s important that whatever we do, it has to have some real relevance to the communities and to the club.”There are some easy wins, the things we can do straight away, but we’ve got to become more sustainable as a business too, which means having operations that are open 365 days a year. That might mean banqueting on non-match days and developing the facilities. What we can do to make the club open and accessible to all communities.”In a more direct attempt at engagement, and following on from a promise that he made before taking over the role, Khan recently invited 29 local inner-city clubs to an evening at Grace Road to ask how and why the local community may have felt let down by the county in the past. The upshot was the establishment of a development group, with five or six representatives to provide one voice for the local grassroots game.”There’s been a disconnect because I don’t think we’ve reached out enough, and really listened about what their needs were,” he says. “Cricket in the past has been very good at giving what it thought people wanted, but now from a customer and engagement point of view, I think you need to revolve around what people want.Wasim Khan in Warwickshire colours in 1996•PA Photos”But I also challenged those clubs in return: ‘What are you doing for cricket in Leicestershire? What do you put back?’ It’s important it’s a two-way process. You can keep holding your hand out and saying ‘Give us more’, but there comes a time when you’ve got to take responsibility yourselves. I think I was well placed to ask that question.”Indeed he is. Having spent a decade reinvigorating interest in cricket in working-class communities identical to those in which Grace Road is located, his relationship with such clubs is already robust. If the first half of his life as an executive was to bring children back into the game by giving them an opportunity that had been lost in 88% of the nation’s schools, act two is to pull through the cream of the crop, using the channels that he himself has helped to re-establish.”I wanted to be part of that challenge at Chance to Shine, and it’s a similar mission for me here,” he says. “It’s great to be back in the professional game, to feel alive and have a sense of belonging in this environment. There will be different challenges that require time and there may be some dark days ahead, but when I walk away in five or ten years’ time I want to leave the club in a better place.”
