Sporting ambassadors have previously helped with big international investments. Let’s go again.
Just at the pointy end of the Indian Premier League cricket finals in May, the University of Technology Sydney hosted a conference in New Delhi themed around “Cricket, Collaboration and Commonwealth”. It took place on the Thursday between the semi-final and the final on the weekend. Accordingly, we invited Aussie cricket legends Matthew Hayden and Lisa Sthalekar, who also commentate on the IPL, to be the guest speakers.
So, what happened? Of course, we got a full house in cricket-mad India of people who wanted to meet the Aussie pair and amazing media coverage. As a result, interest in UTS courses has been flooding in from prospective Indian students who met our academics at the New Delhi conference.
We also had a sports research angle in New Delhi with the UTS Cricket Lab-Cricket NSW partnership and their investment in the Delhi Capitals IPL team. The Delhi Capitals physio, Patrick Farhart, a PhD student in Sports Science at UTS and a former physio for the Indian and Australian cricket teams, also spoke at the conference.
This experience got me thinking. If Matthew Hayden and Lisa Sthalekar can be ambassadors for Australian education in cricket-mad India, why not have the Matildas do the same thing in our many trading partners that follow “association football” or “soccer” as the world game?
Read more of Tim Harcourt's story on The Lowy Institute's The Interpreter