TransCity

(Source: the Guardian)

Cricket, a game most Italians find baffling, is becoming one of the country’s fastest-growing sports thanks to a wave of immigration from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Around 20,000 people from the Indian subcontinent are regularly putting down stumps and padding up in Italy’s parks, creating a groundswell of cricket which now sustains 33 teams in a three-division national league.

In a summer punctuated by inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric from prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s ministers, a generation of foreign-born cricketers are now playing under the Italian flag to propel the national team to greater success.

With a few hundred thousand people from the Indian subcontinent now in Italy, there are real quality players moving up from the parks into the league and national side, said Simone Gambino, an Italian who caught the cricket bug while visiting England in the 1970s and who now heads the Italian Cricket Federation.

Click here to read the full article on the guardian.co.uk website