“He was a tiny little tacker,” Sunshine Heights Cricket Club (SHCC) coach Matt Shawcross says with a laugh.
He recalls the night when the then-eight-year- old Akon Mawein first appeared at training at Ainsworth Reserve, having landed in Brimbank just a few years earlier via the world’s largest refugee camp. Cricket was not a natural fit for the boy from South Sudan.
Just eight years later, the softly spoken 16-year-old has grown into a fast bowling weapon poised to break the 130km/h barrier, and nobody’s laughing any more, especially not opposition batsmen in the Victorian Turf Cricket Association.
Few, if any, would have predicted the transformation of the little kid, who was initially afraid of the ball, into a premiership hero. Apart, perhaps, from the boy himself.
As the 2013-14 season approached, Akon admits he visualised SHCC breaking its 24-year premiership drought. A big call considering he was yet to play a match in the VTCA’s top flight.
“I could picture it all happening,” Akon says from the kitchen of his Derrimut home. “Before the season started I thought, this has to be the year.”
Now with a premiership medal, alongside 150 junior and senior matches of experience, Akon is something of a veteran among the 27 other Sudanese players at the club – and an inspiration off 19 paces.
Over the past 12 months he’s toured the UK with the Crusaders, alongside some of the country’s best talent, taking the most wickets (19); he’s played for under-16 representative team the Western Spirit; was shortlisted for the Victorian under- 17 team; and snared 31 wickets last summer at the miserly average of 6.45, winning the competition’s bowling average award.
So it should have been no surprise to anyone in the room at Overnewton Castle on April 17 when he was named Athlete of the Year at the Brimbank Sports Awards.
That magical night is a far cry from Kakuma, a Kenyan refugee camp believed to be the largest in the world, where Akon spent three years before making his way to Australia a decade ago with his mother and five siblings.
“I was too young, I don’t really remember much,” says Akon, who earlier this year saw his father for the first time in a decade.
The family would eventually settle in Derrimut after stints in Sunshine West, Keilor and Melton.
Cultural assimilation, Akon says, was fast-tracked by cricket, which he discovered in his cousin David’s backyard.
“He invited us to come down and have a look [at Sunshine Heights CC], so we trained,” Akon recalls. “We jumped into the nets. I’d never held a bat or anything before. I didn’t like batting, I was scared of the ball.
“They gave me the ball. It was kind of hard to get used to as I was smaller than everyone else. I didn’t have much power back then, but I liked bowling.”
Akon donned the whites against much older boys in the under-13 grade just so he could play alongside his brother Ringo – now a talented basketballer on tour in the states – and David. Playing cricket was only about making friends.
“I wasn’t really there for the cricket, I was there for the fun.”
And when he did think about the game, he struggled with its abundance of down time.
“It bothered me a bit [standing around doing nothing], I wasn’t really concentrating on the game, I was day dreaming,” he laughs.
“But I made friends, it all felt like family to me.”
Shawcross, Akon’s former deputy principal at St Pauls in West Sunshine and now something of a father figure [“it’s almost a father-son relationship”] says the youngster’s skills have sharpened immeasurably over the past 18 months, coinciding with a major growth spurt.
“He got really co-ordinated and took some big steps,” Shawcross says.
By age 14 Akon caught the eye of Footscray Edgewater scouts who invited him to train with the district club. But it was the Crusaders trip where Akon improved “out of sight” and began to learn the art of creating specific plans for batsmen.
“That’s what I want to do, to scare the batsmen, create doubt in their mind,” says Akon, who aspires to bowl like Ashes hero Mitchell Johnson.
Shawcross says there was one memorable match against Wyndham Vale last season where everything began to click into place.
The top-four team was rolled for 72 and Akon was the chief architect of its demise.
Defending 160, “we were in a bit of trouble,” Shawcross remembers. “He was bowling first change, he took 3-13 and turned the game on its head, all in the space of an hour.
“He showed he could intimidate batsmen and take clumps of wickets. He has the accuracy, too. I think he had close to the best economy rate in the comp [VTCA west].
“It’s the furthest I’ve sat back in slip for a long time. He can bowl high 120s in matches. If his body fills out, he’s going to bowl even quicker. He’s still got the body of a boy.”
Shawcross says the youngster has embraced the fact he’s already a role model at age 16.
“It’s tough for a kid to be a role model in their community, but he takes it really seriously,” he says. “He’s a ripping kid.”
“Victorian state players Dean Russ and James Muirhead played junior cricket in the same competition; he’s no different to them. He’s got the potential to go as far as he wants to go. He’s got a very high level of talent and passion.”
Shawcross believes Akon has a Pied Piper quality among Sudanese players.
“One of our younger Sudanese players follows him around everywhere; he wants to be Akon,” he says.
“A lot of the [Sudanese] guys come to watch me play,” Akon says.
“They come up to me and say they want to do what I do, play A-grade cricket for Sunshine Heights and take it as far as they can. It’s nice to have people looking up to me.”
