Cricket is arguably the second-most popular sport in the world after football, but it is not popular in Europe. Only one country on the Continent, the Netherlands, has participated in the World Cup.
Usman Shahid, a French player, acknowledged that the game itself, with complicated rules and field positions known as “silly point” and “fine leg,” doesn’t lend itself to easy uptake. “Cricket’s rules are such that there are some even us players don’t understand, there’s such a thick rulebook.”
Europeans’ impressions of cricket fall broadly into two camps, and neither is appealing: The first is of a silly, incomprehensible game played by posh British men in sweaters. The second is based on the way India plays and enjoys it, basically as an extension of Bollywood.
But now, South Asians who love the sport — mostly Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans and Afghans — are spurring the development and spread of cricket in Europe. Large diaspora communities, recently boosted by the influx of refugees and migrants in 2015, are organizing themselves to establish, institutionalize and expand the sport. In Germany for example, where the government sees sport as a way to integrate its hundreds of thousands of new arrivals, clubs and teams are given money to recruit from migrant communities.
That has been good for the development of the sport and for the players who find a community and a place to express themselves. But its development is being held back by a lack of inroads with native populations, a lack of funding, and by India’s outsized influence on cricket’s governance and its finances. India’s role, directly or indirectly, limits the funding that national associations can access, and has also failed to draw a line under corruption scandals like match-fixing.
‘A sense of belonging’
In the three teams, almost every player was of South Asian descent. Like the cricket ball, languages — Tamil, Norwegian, Urdu, English, German, Pashto, French — were flying across the field.
Source link : https://www.politico.eu/article/cricket-europe-netherlands-germany-norway/
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Publish date : 2021-08-15 03:00:00
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