Not long after this post, Anshuman Rath would be batting for Hong Kong, eager to make an impact. He has been the most dependable player for the team, scoring consistently this year and even registering a T20I hundred.
At one point, he considered giving up on the idea of playing cricket, but Hong Kong reignited his passion for the game. He was mentally, emotionally, and even physically exhausted after playing for Odisha for two years on the Indian domestic circuit. He weighed twenty kilograms more, was recovering from wounds, and was struggling with a strong sense of disappointment. He felt burdened by the game he loved as a teenager.
“I’m someone who enjoys cricket because of the camaraderie, the team environment. In Odisha, I just wasn’t feeling it,” Rath, back as Hong Kong’s batting lynchpin, tells ESPNcricinfo in Dubai ahead of the Asia Cup. “I was questioning myself, doubting every decision I’d made.”
Rath was pressured by Odisha’s senior-junior divide, regimentation, and culture. Rath, who was raised in a multicultural Hong Kong, found it difficult to accept that children would be publicly reprimanded.
“I remember once being made fun of for eating rice and dal with a spoon,” he recalls.
“It sounds silly, but when you have no one to talk to, no support system, those things hit you hard. No matter what level you play, if you’re not enjoying it or you’re not in the right frame of mind you’re wasting your time.
“So I called my dad, literally almost in tears being like, ‘what am I doing here? I just don’t want to do it.’ I had played two years of it, but didn’t have anything more to give.
“When I felt it the most, I remember getting injured during the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy [2022-23, India’s domestic T20 competition]. Wasim Jaffer was our head coach. He sent me to get a scan in Mumbai. So I went there and started punching myself in the collarbone to make it worse so that I wouldn’t have to play more. It was that bad.
“For me, I’m a massive team person. So I love playing with my teammates. That’s why I don’t think of it as work. Whereas when I was in Odisha, the environment wasn’t like that. The coaches had their favourites. I actually played the rest of the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy with that injury. It was just an awful time.”
It was around this time that Rath turned to food for comfort.
“When you’re in that state of mind, there are very few things that make you happy,” he says. ‘For me, it was food – eating just to survive, to feel something. It was the only enjoyment I was getting. I piled on 20 kilos. I completely lost the plot.”
Rath had already experienced the heartache of having his visa denied in England, which put an end to a nearly signed contract with Middlesex, and a difficult and isolating time in Christchurch while he attempted to meet the requirements to play for New Zealand in late 2018.
Rath was given a three-year work-to-residence visa by Canterbury Cricket in order to possibly be eligible for New Zealand. He had initially put his studies on hold for it, but he discovered that the move was more difficult than he had anticipated.
“Because I was 21 at the time and the whole Middlesex thing had happened, I hadn’t really processed the whole thing yet,” he says. “The trauma of going through the Middlesex visa stuff, the ECB visa stuff. I didn’t really want to do more qualifying.
“To spend another three years, it was kind of daunting. Obviously, they’re lovely people in New Zealand. But, it was the other side of the world. You know, you wake up in the morning, you don’t know who to call. Because all the people you know are asleep.”
“So, then I made the decision. I had an Indian passport, so I thought I might as well use it, so we decided to test the Indian waters,” Rath continues. “I had to start from scratch but I was fine. As long as I didn’t have all these three-year qualifying rules again. I knew I had to serve a one-year cooling off period, and I was fine with that.”
What followed was a downward spiral that eventually took him to Odisha, his home state, where his grandparents live. It should have felt like a homecoming. Instead, those three years drained him.
“No matter what level you play, if you’re not enjoying it, you’re wasting your time,” he says. “I was just going through the motions.”
Rath was prepared to give up cricket completely when he returned to Hong Kong in February 2023.
“I told my dad I was never touching a bat again,” he says. “I was ready to try my hand at the corporate world – finance, real estate, insurance, whatever. Just something different.”
That’s when Mark Farmer, Cricket Hong Kong’s High Performance manager who’d known Rath from his younger days, stepped in.
“He sat me down and said, ‘Let us know what you need. We’re happy to give you a contract right now.’ I hadn’t even played,” Rath says. “And they were willing to give me that love, that faith. It was the first time I’d felt something like that in five or six years. I almost teared up.”
Returning to Hong Kong has been a second coming for Rath, who once captained his nation at the age of 20 and pursued professional cricket on three continents before almost giving it up.
“This isn’t going to last forever,” Rath says. “So every time I walk on the field now, I’m smiling, I’m laughing. And I think that shows in my cricket too.”
