The first thing you notice about Sam Almaliki is that he’s a bundle of energy. Cricket Australia’s (CA) head of community engagement talks clearly and fast, bursting with a constant stream of big ideas, which are even more interesting when you consider the place from which they come.
A rising star of sports administration, Almaliki was only 24 years old when CA chief executive James Sutherland picked him for the role he’s filled with passion and intensity since 2013. Age dictated he was an unconventional choice, but by then Almaliki had run an entire cricket league for a decade and absorbed more life experience than a lot of people manage in a lifetime.
He is wary of discussing what he calls the “sad and sorry story” of his arrival in Australia, preferring to focus on the work he’s done in the last four years to broaden the appeal of cricket – a time in which female players have become full-time professionals and the game has built meaningful bridges to an ethnically diverse base of participants and enthusiasts.
Almaliki says he’d work 24 hours a day if he could. In January of 2015 the 27-year-old’s maniacal approach to work actually landed him in hospital with pericarditis and myocarditis. I ask him if he’s completely mad. “I guess that took its toll,” he admits. “But I think it’s being conscious of, ‘How long are you there for? What are you trying to achieve? What costs are you prepared to pay?’ I’ve been very clear about what’s needed to be achieved.”
What CA are working to achieve, he says, is for cricket to become inclusive of all Australians. “If you believe in equality and respect and inclusion, you apply that across all human beings, irrespective of gender, race, sexuality, culture or background,” says Almaliki. “That’s been so important for cricket.”
On that front, CA have actually started walking the talk in Almaliki’s time, having recently integrated their disability teams into the Australian cricket pathway system, ending the era of players paying their own way, while fully professionalising the game for the Southern Stars women’s team and making great strides in the same direction at domestic level, where even the AFL’s new women’s league, to name one, lags in terms of player payments.
“Everyone’s getting on the bandwagon of female engagement, and that is great, but there is a massive gap between their passion for what is fashionable and what is right,” Almaliki notes. “We can’t be selective about equality and respect.”
“What’s happening in the sports industry at the moment is that too many people are trying to out-do each other in the context of what is in fashion rather than what is right and what makes sense on a business and a social front. Being a sport for all Australians is fundamental to cricket’s viability.”
Which is a decent place to point out the commercial reality faced by cricket: it actually must appeal to a broader array of Australians, particularly the women it long ignored, in order to remain financially viable.
To that end, it’s also been Almaliki’s task to increase cricket participation amongst under-represented communities the game’s administrators so often neglected, and he believes participation is the key to the entire “cricket economy”. If it’s not strong, the knock-on effects are significant.
On Almaliki’s watch, for instance, Indigenous participation has risen at a national level from 8,500 to 36,000. “Automatically, as a result, if we keep at it we’re going to see kids rise through,” he says of the challenge to produce more professional players of Indigenous backgrounds. “They’re going to feel more comfortable to be proud of their Indigenous heritage through cricket.”
It also makes Almaliki and CA more focused in their attempt to commemorate 1866 Indigenous team during this year’s Boxing Day Test, which will feature 150th anniversary celebrations of the trailblazing side that toured England and the contribution of Tom Wills.
“When you haven’t got a culture of inclusion you forget these stories,” Almaliki says. “The game has developed a conscience it didn’t have for much of its existence, and therefore we didn’t tell the stories of 1866 as well as we should have, or the story of Faith Thomas, the first Indigenous woman to play a Test for Australia.”
“You only pursue the possibilities you’re aware of, and how many Indigenous young people are aware of the possibility of playing cricket? Where are the role models and the heroes that provide clear visibility of that kind of possibility? When you demonstrate possibilities you inspire dreams, and that’s where the game is getting to with the likes of Ashleigh Gardner and Dan Christian.”
Almaliki was eight years old when he, his parents and two brothers arrived in Australia on fake passports provided by people smugglers. Then, in 1997, an Iraqi family like the Almalikis could still come by plane. They came via Thailand, and were fleeing persecution they’d faced under the regime of Saddam Hussein.
A few hours after landing in Sydney, before linking up with his father and eldest brother, Almaliki, his mother and middle brother declared asylum, setting the wheels in motion for a trying eight-month period of detention in Villawood.
Almaliki’s father, Khalaf, had been a political scientist before they fled, a job that played a major role in the family’s decision to leave. “He was under constant surveillance and monitoring,” Almaliki says. “He had one of his brothers and four of his cousins killed by the government. My two older teenage brothers were facing the prospect of conscription, so the situation was pretty bad.”
At Villawood Almaliki learned English from scratch and so quickly that within three months he was acting as an interpreter to the Arabic-speaking detainees, working alongside a legal aid barrister and developing an early passion for advocacy and the law. He didn’t realise the significance at the time, but Villawood was also where he glimpsed cricket for the first time, watching Tamil asylum seekers play spirited games.
Otherwise it was a traumatic period for the family. Almaliki’s father suffered what were later revealed to be two heart attacks, for which he received no medical treatment. Worse for the families’ nerves were the constant announcements over speakers in the cramped detention centre. So often was their name called, and so frequent were the rejections of their claim, that every time a voice came through the PA system they stood and prepared themselves, anticipating some new indignity. “It was this constant anxiety and panic,” Almaliki says.
Thankfully their final appeal, to then federal immigration minister Phillip Ruddock, was upheld, but relief was tempered by a serious heart operation to Almaliki’s father in the months following and the harsh adjustment to their new life in Australia. Almaliki’s mother Najat, a university academic, had to take work in a sweet shop and the family moved into the first of eight homes they’ve lived in since migrating.
Before that, even negotiating the local shopping centre in Campsie presented challenges. “We were so exhausted after a hundred metres because we hadn’t walked that distance in eight months,” Almaliki says. “I’m sure it’s a feeling that many prisoners have.”
“That was a character-defining period. And I think it’s really made me dogged. I struggle with ‘no’ as an answer and always believe there’s a way. Sometimes that’s hopeful and optimistic, at other times it’s naive.”
Perhaps naivety helped. How else to explain Almaliki’s path from the “ESL” kid at Punchbowl Primary school to the executive suites of Australia’s national game? He says a teacher named Rowan Hall was the first in a long line of “cricket people” who sparked something in the youngster though the sport. “Villawood gave me visibility of cricket,” Almaliki says, “he inspired my interest in the game.”
Like all child refugees, he says he had to grow up fast, developing persistence, resilience and independence. “I see very few young people of refugee background who don’t inspire me to be a better person,” he says. “The necessities of life see you develop in ways you otherwise wouldn’t seek to.”
In this case, it was cricket that offered social mobility and a window of opportunity. Stubborn and independent, Almaliki walked by himself from the family’s public housing estate to a registration trial of the local Beverley Hills Eagles Cricket Club, winning a premiership in his first year with the Under-14s, bowling leg spin. “You can’t have that much life and not be a leggie,” Almaliki jokes. “Unfortunately I had the wrong temperament for a leggie. I had a fast bowler’s temperament. I wanted to get batsmen out every ball.”
Within a few years some of the coaches and administrators he came across as a player were effectively Almaliki’s underlings when he decided that Sydney needed a winter competition and started his own; three teams to start with but eventually 96 and recognition from state cricket officials who’d snubbed him to start with.
“Then and there at 15, it was clear to me that my career as a cricketer was never going to go far,” he says. “But there was a potential to become an administrator and get involved in the game that way.”
One criticism CA often face is that their leadership ranks are filled with people who have no feel for cricket, nor the people who play and administer it at grassroots level. Almaliki says that you can’t always match up the professional requirements of high level administrative roles with a burning individual passion for the game, a knowledge gap that perhaps explains his own rise.
“I seek to continue to be not too far removed from the people who make cricket happen, day-in, day-out,” he says. “We administer cricket on their behalf, rather than the other way around.”
What’s also important for the Australian game is the diversity of the current playing ranks at national and domestic level. “Usman Khawaja is a classic example,” Almaliki says. “He’s a licensed pilot, he’s finished university. He’s batting at number three for Australia and he’s captaining Queensland, one of the most parochial states when it comes to issues of multiculturalism, yet its cricket skipper is the first cricketer of Islamic faith to play for Australia. It goes to show that you can find a way.”
“Fundamentally it’s about role models if we’re really going to get people to believe that they can play for Australia, in either our women’s or men’s side. It’s so important in allowing young people of all backgrounds to see themselves in the mirror, to see heroes they can relate to.”
When we return to the framing of the refugee debate in Australia, Almaliki says that “common sense gets lost in the extremes,” though adds that his own political aspirations are “non-existent”. He can make greater societal impact through sport and business, he thinks.
“I find on an individual level that most Australians are compassionate and fair,” Almaliki says. One of his great allies and friends along the way was a One Nation member, and from his own community involvement and experiences, Almaliki says he believes that politics in Australia is plagued by elitism.
“The political debate in Australia is often dominated by elitists on the left and right, so an ordinary sense of perspective can sometimes go completely out the window,” he says. “People who live in the suburbs are the forgotten people of Australia.”
Perhaps we should be looking not to political parties but our local cricket clubs for a model of a more compassionate country. “I formed so much of my Australian identity spending time with friends at cricket matches. That’s why I feel indebted to the game,” Almaliki says. “I feel so Australian. I really don’t need a point of reference in a birth certificate to feel that Australianness.”
