British Asian cricket: The passion and the glory

British Asians in mainstream clubs, the recognised parks leagues and unseen streets hold the future of cricket as a popular national sport in their hands, says Sahil Dutta.

This is an adapted extract from The Show Must Go On: a century of club cricket in the south of England, published in 2015

Originally published in 2015

It felt like the first day of every English cricket season, cold. Gun-metal grey, gusting winds and under their coloured cricket jerseys, players wore two, sometimes three layers. Also, it was clearly still football season, in a football country.

The Ford Social and Sports Club in Ilford, Essex, was established in the 1950s when Ford’s Dagenham factory fed the area’s economy. It was now drab, transfixed in a style from a generation past. On a mid-April Sunday morning it played host to an endless expanse of football matches. It was also supposed to host the National Cricket League’s season opener: a charity T10 tournament.

Eight teams had arrived for the big day, and eight more were already in action at the Walker Ground in Southgate. At Ilford many of the cricketers milled about on the outfield, rubbing hands together, wincing at catches, and ‘warming up’ with stiff-looking bowling actions. Others, like much of the ‘Oceans XI’ team, thawed out at the bar. Just tea and cola, of course, since many of Ocean XI’s players didn’t drink alcohol.

Their cricket outfits were bright green (all the teams were in technicolour) and had nicknames emblazoned on the back: ‘Mr Khan’; ‘RAZZY D’. The fronts and arms were plastered with sponsors’ labels, a local fried chicken and pizza shop.

Around the ground some young men had spiked, dyed hair, others reversed baseball caps, and others still the traditional Muslim taqiyah. Almost everyone who could wore some kind of beard. It was a sweep of Greater London’s south Asian community. Dads and uncles with their boys; wives, mothers, daughters and aunties elsewhere, apparently. It was already past 11am, the tournament was supposed to have started more than an hour ago. But still everyone waited.

“There’s been a bit of a problem,” Sajid Patel, secretary of the NCL who was organising the day, told me. “The groundskeeper has said we can’t play here today. It’s a real shame, all the guys were so excited for it. I’m trying to make some calls to see what we can do.”

That is a huge change. It has been almost 50 years since people like Dilwar Patel, Salim Yasin and Gulfraz Riaz came to Britain and established a cricket welcome to migrant players. After decades of mutual suspicion with the mainstream English game, it is proof of how attitudes are beginning to thaw. A flood of cricketing love and talent is poised to burst through, but the question is whether resources can be unlocked and shared in the other direction too.

Whatever happens at the elite level, though, it is worth celebrating the weekend heroes, who in the scrappy parks and built-up cities around England, have helped keep cricket thriving.