KNOW YOUR PLAYER
Follow UsNosthush Kenjige, bowling in the powerplay, tossed up the third ball of his first over.
Usman Khan saw it, and his eyes lit up. The length was full. It was a lollie meant to be swallowed whole like a skimmed almond. Usman tried to do precisely and danced down the track, but he lost his shape while playing the shot as the ball came a bit slower in the air than he expected. The ball was skied, and Nitish Kumar caught him at long off.
Usman returned to the pavilion, and with that, Nosthush Kenjige’s story arrived in the T20 World Cup. It’s a story that began in Alabama, moved to Chikkamagaluru in Karnataka and then returned to the US. Cricket was right at the centre of it all.
Kenjige’s father worked as an agricultural researcher at Tuskegee University in the United States when he was born in Alabama. While his family moved back to India just after a year, his birth allowed him to acquire a US passport on the basis of jus soli (the law that allows the granting of citizenship by birth within the territory of that state).
His family moved back to Chikkamagaluru, a town nestled on the eastern slopes of the Western Ghats, famous for its coffee. The Kenjiges have their coffee farm there. However, Nosthush studied in Lovedale, near Ooty (Tamil Nadu), representing The Lawrence School’s cricket team across different age categories.
He then moved to Bengaluru to pursue engineering. Cricket continued for Kenjige, and he was quite active in the university and club cricket circuits of Bengaluru. He played for the Jawans Cricket Club in the city’s Sir Mirza Ismail Shield Competition.
However, career opportunities beckoned him to divert his attention from the game a bit, and that’s when he moved back to the US in 2015. He first moved to Virginia and then to New York, where he worked as a biological technician.
As narrated by the American journalist Peter Della Penna, he continued his cricket in New York by applying and then being invited to the New York Combine organised by ICC Americas in 2016. His good performance there allowed him to start coming into the reckoning for the US cricket team. Penna also tells how, due to a rule in the ICC eligibility rules, he had to do 100 hours of community service to be eligible to play for the USA team.
The man desperately wanted to play cricket at the highest level. He was even fired from his job when he had to tour Uganda with the US team. None of that went to waste. Since 2018, he has been a regular in the US side and has played 40 ODIs and 6 T20Is for the Americans - the country of birth and now the country of his cricket.
Imagine how sweet a moment it would have been for Kenjige when he took his first wicket on the day! Imagine how better today would have gotten for him when he also picked up Shadab Khan and Azam Khan in the same over? And those weren’t fluke wickets. He deserved each of the three.
Look how good he was whenever he targeted the stumps. Look at the timing of his wickets, especially the one of Shadab, as he was batting at a strike rate of 160 and was ready to take Pakistan over a subpar total.
Back home in Chikkamagaluru, the smiles would have been just a bit broader because this performance came against Pakistan - an arch-rival of the country of his heritage.
All because Nosthush Kenjige didn’t give up. All because Nosthush Kenjige took his story from India to the USA and became an inspiration.
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