State of cricket in Canada - Montreal Gazette article
Qaser Ali of Canada's team in one of the few city gyms that allow cricket practice.
JEFF HEINRICH, The Gazette
Published: Monday, January 22, 2007
Cricket is huge internationally, but in Quebec it isn't even an official amateur sport.
So what's a local cricketer to do, especially in winter?
Practise in a gym, for starters, if he can find one that allows it.
After that, take the game on the road, to anywhere in the Commonwealth it's played.
Qaser Ali manages to do both.
A Pakistani immigrant who lives in Montreal, he's one of the best batsmen on Canada's up-and-coming national cricket team.
One recent Wednesday, he and five other local cricket players of South Asian origin practised from 10 p.m. to midnight - the only time they could get - in a vacant Park Extension gym.
Then Ali, a deputy captain of the Canadian team, flew to Kenya for two international tournaments that are a prelude to the sport's top event: the once-every-four-years Cricket World Cup, organized by the International Cricket Council.
The 2007 Cup will be played from March 13 to April 28 in the eight Caribbean nations hosting matches. About 2 billion people worldwide are expected to watch the matches on TV. Another 200,000 are travelling to the Caribbean to see things first-hand.
Ranked 14th out of 16 teams participating, Canada isn't expected to move beyond the first round in the tournament, which it will play in St. Lucia against Kenya and top-ranked England and New Zealand.
But the Canadians do expect to surprise their international audience with the quality of their play, thanks to newcomers like Ali, who joined the team 18 months ago.
Since beating higher-ranked Bangladesh at the last World Cup in South Africa in 2003, Canada has stepped up recruitment of immigrants like him, as well as Canadians living abroad, to play on the team.
And with organizers spending more money on the sport - paying for cricket classes in high schools and colleges, building indoor arenas in Ontario and investing in such specialized training equipment as automatic bowling machines - the future of Canadian cricket looks bright.
In Quebec, though, it's still a marginal sport. Though the players and fans are here - hundreds turn out for matches across the city in the summer - the money simply isn't.
Unlike Ontario, which subsidizes cricket with $1 million a year, Quebec doesn't recognize it as one of the province's 52 amateur sports and so doesn't fund it at all, complained local organizer Subrata Mandal.
This, despite the fact that cricket has its roots in this part of the country.
The first cricket matches in Canada were played right here in Montreal, on Ile Ste. Helene in 1785. British soldiers had introduced the game to Canada in 1759, playing it on the Plains of Abraham. Half a century later, in 1844, the sport had grown to the point that Canada played the world's first international cricket match, against the United States.
By confederation, cricket was so popular that Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister, declared it the country's national sport.
Dwarfed since then by hockey, baseball, football, basketball and more recently soccer, cricket now appears set for a comeback, thanks to rising immigration from the Commonwealth, especially South Asians and West Indians flocking to Toronto, Vancouver and, to a lesser extent, Montreal.
"It's an immigrant's game in Canada, and there's a lot of new talent coming in," said Ali, who plays locally for the Adastrians - one of the city's oldest and largest cricket clubs - and is also a member of Pakistan's national baseball team.
"I think, in the next 15 or 20 years, cricket can become as big as soccer is now in Canada," Ali said as he suited up for practice at the William Hingston Centre gym on St. Roch St.
It's one of the few public facilities in the city that allow cricket to be played, usually only outside peak hours. Indoor hockey and even baseball are permitted in others, but cricket - with its willow bats and hard baseball-size balls whizzing by at 130 kilometres an hour - is considered too dangerous by most.
"They say we'll knock out their light fixtures," said Mandal, the organizer, originally from Nairobi.
"As if you can't do that with a puck or a baseball."
jheinrich@thegazette.canwest.com
Qaser Ali of Canada's team in one of the few city gyms that allow cricket practice.
JEFF HEINRICH, The Gazette
Published: Monday, January 22, 2007
Cricket is huge internationally, but in Quebec it isn't even an official amateur sport.
So what's a local cricketer to do, especially in winter?
Practise in a gym, for starters, if he can find one that allows it.
After that, take the game on the road, to anywhere in the Commonwealth it's played.
Qaser Ali manages to do both.
A Pakistani immigrant who lives in Montreal, he's one of the best batsmen on Canada's up-and-coming national cricket team.
One recent Wednesday, he and five other local cricket players of South Asian origin practised from 10 p.m. to midnight - the only time they could get - in a vacant Park Extension gym.
Then Ali, a deputy captain of the Canadian team, flew to Kenya for two international tournaments that are a prelude to the sport's top event: the once-every-four-years Cricket World Cup, organized by the International Cricket Council.
The 2007 Cup will be played from March 13 to April 28 in the eight Caribbean nations hosting matches. About 2 billion people worldwide are expected to watch the matches on TV. Another 200,000 are travelling to the Caribbean to see things first-hand.
Ranked 14th out of 16 teams participating, Canada isn't expected to move beyond the first round in the tournament, which it will play in St. Lucia against Kenya and top-ranked England and New Zealand.
But the Canadians do expect to surprise their international audience with the quality of their play, thanks to newcomers like Ali, who joined the team 18 months ago.
Since beating higher-ranked Bangladesh at the last World Cup in South Africa in 2003, Canada has stepped up recruitment of immigrants like him, as well as Canadians living abroad, to play on the team.
And with organizers spending more money on the sport - paying for cricket classes in high schools and colleges, building indoor arenas in Ontario and investing in such specialized training equipment as automatic bowling machines - the future of Canadian cricket looks bright.
In Quebec, though, it's still a marginal sport. Though the players and fans are here - hundreds turn out for matches across the city in the summer - the money simply isn't.
Unlike Ontario, which subsidizes cricket with $1 million a year, Quebec doesn't recognize it as one of the province's 52 amateur sports and so doesn't fund it at all, complained local organizer Subrata Mandal.
This, despite the fact that cricket has its roots in this part of the country.
The first cricket matches in Canada were played right here in Montreal, on Ile Ste. Helene in 1785. British soldiers had introduced the game to Canada in 1759, playing it on the Plains of Abraham. Half a century later, in 1844, the sport had grown to the point that Canada played the world's first international cricket match, against the United States.
By confederation, cricket was so popular that Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister, declared it the country's national sport.
Dwarfed since then by hockey, baseball, football, basketball and more recently soccer, cricket now appears set for a comeback, thanks to rising immigration from the Commonwealth, especially South Asians and West Indians flocking to Toronto, Vancouver and, to a lesser extent, Montreal.
"It's an immigrant's game in Canada, and there's a lot of new talent coming in," said Ali, who plays locally for the Adastrians - one of the city's oldest and largest cricket clubs - and is also a member of Pakistan's national baseball team.
"I think, in the next 15 or 20 years, cricket can become as big as soccer is now in Canada," Ali said as he suited up for practice at the William Hingston Centre gym on St. Roch St.
It's one of the few public facilities in the city that allow cricket to be played, usually only outside peak hours. Indoor hockey and even baseball are permitted in others, but cricket - with its willow bats and hard baseball-size balls whizzing by at 130 kilometres an hour - is considered too dangerous by most.
"They say we'll knock out their light fixtures," said Mandal, the organizer, originally from Nairobi.
"As if you can't do that with a puck or a baseball."
jheinrich@thegazette.canwest.com