Maurice Ling played one match for the Hong Kong national team in 1994 at the Tuanku Jaafar Cup. He didn't make any noteworthy contribution, but his mere presence highlighted the fact that the game had reached the Chinese community.
Today, 18 years later, Ling has been lured back to the game and his presence now could be more significant. Ling is a mentor to a group of young Chinese men who banded together a few months ago under the umbrella of the Craigengower Cricket Club (CCC) to play in the Hong Kong Cricket Association's Saturday Championship Division.
They called themselves the Gay Lay Hung Sze - or Craig's Lions. Like their female counterparts, formed in 2010, they lost every match, but it didn't matter, as it was a new beginning at a club which more than a century ago had nurtured the idea of the local community playing the game.
'Results and winning are great in sport, but at some point we have got to detach ourselves from these goals and tell ourselves, 'We have a great opportunity in front of us, let's grasp it',' says Kevin Styles, one of the forces behind the game's renaissance at the second-oldest cricket club in Hong Kong.
Craigengower was the name of the home William Drew Braidwood left in Scotland when he arrived in Hong Kong in the 1890s. In 1894, Braidwood, 37, the headmaster of the Victoria English School, converted a turfed piece of ground in Bonham Road into a cricket field to instil the game's discipline into his body of students.
The story is told in A History of Craigengower Cricket Club 1894-2012. It explains that cricket was enthusiastically received both by the students and their parents. But there was one drawback - hitting the ball over the boundary was an easy matter, recovering the ball was less straightforward. The land beyond the boundary was the site of an old cemetery and the students had to find the ball among a scattering of skulls and bones from damaged urns. It wasn't an enjoyable task.