Wasim Khan (MBE) was recently appointed the chief executive officer of Leicestershire County Cricket Club and in doing so became the first black or Asian to be given the post. He is also the first British Pakistani to have played county cricket in England. I caught up with him and found out about his background, cricketing history and what challenges he faced in the near future.
‘I am just like any other normal guy’ who is true to his roots and remembers quiet vividly how his cricketing journey started. ‘I was a 12 year old who loved watching cricket, especially Imran Khan, Ian Botham and Wasim Akram’. Playing in the playground, little did anybody know what this Small Heath youngster was set to accomplish over the coming years. ‘A teacher spotted me in the playground and asked me where have you learnt your cricket and I said by watching it on the television. He then forwarded me for some trials with Warwickshire and from the age of 13 I represented the age groups and when I was 19 I got offered a professional contract. For the next 10 years, every winter I played in places like Australia, New Zealand or South Africa’. He spent seven years at Warwickshire including being a part of the double winning side in 1995, followed by a three year spell at Sussex and a single season at Derbyshire.
Wasim’ s charitable work towards cricket and the community honoured him with an MBE a journey that started ‘out of the blue when former governor of the Bank of England, Lord Mervyn King approached me to reveal his vision of putting cricket into states schools. In 2004 research showed under 10 percent of 21,000 state schools played cricket and he told me to put a plan together and become the operations director’.
‘I was told it would cost £50 million and our target was to reach a third of state schools (7,000). Nine years later we had 2.5 million kids on board, 1 million of them being girls and we had surpassed our target and reached 11,000 state schools. To date it is the biggest sports development programme in the world’.
Wasim Khan is quite a high profile celebrity in cricketing terms even more so towards the south Asian community and Birmingham alone. It must be difficult finding spare time to do much else but he said ‘my two daughters keep me busy and every Saturday I come to Small Heath to see my mom and family. Aside from that I go to the gym frequently’.
Upon being named CEO of Leicestershire County Cricket Club, Wasim listed a few challenges he and the club faced in going forward ‘We don’t work with the community and Leicester has a huge south Asian community, something we must definitely tap into. Brining good players and money into the club is always key, but most importantly I must get them winning cricket matches again. They haven’t won a county championship game in two years’.
He also gave his view on a future challenges for cricket as a whole ‘corruption is quite obvious and me being a traditionalist I see T20 cricket as a threat to Test cricket. Although it has revitalised the sport and got kids and families involved, the pinnacle of cricket for me is Test cricket’.
