Frankfurt

“Cricket? Isn’t that the game that takes two or three days to play?” was a question from the ranks of my colleagues at the Frankfurter Rundschau.

This one question says all there is to say about what most Germans think of cricket, a sport that has no lesser status on the Indian subcontinent – to use a cliché – than that of a religion.

Yet in the midst of this indifference, passionate cricket lovers have been able to establish clubs in the Frankfurt region and keep the sport alive. It is no coincidence that most of the members of these clubs come from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

“Every week, I receive a number of emails from men and woman who would like to join the Frankfurt Cricket Club. Most of them come from the subcontinent, but we also have members from England and Australia,” explains Salim Khan, the president of the Frankfurt Cricket Club – the best-known club in Frankfurt and the only one that plays on a fully-fledged cricket field. The Frankfurt Cricket Club presently has about forty members.

Khan, of Pakistani origin, has lived in Frankfurt for 41 years and has been part of the club since its founding.

“Many people from southern Asia live in Frankfurt and it was never difficult for us to recruit members. Yet it is true that the majority of the German population still has little interest in the sport and knows little about it,” Khan says.

Due to the cold temperatures, the clubs cannot hold games all year round. Therefore, the cricket season begins in April or May and lasts until October.

The most frequent false assumption is still that a cricket game takes more than a day to play. Since there is as good as no interest in the sport in Germany, no one was watching, of course, in 1971 when the first international one-day match was held or in 2005 when the first international T20 game took place (a T20 games takes about three hours and was introduced to make the game more interesting. Since then it has gained enormous popularity).

However, passionate cricket lovers are not bothered much by the lack of interest. “We play cricket because we love the game. It has nothing to do with nationality and we also have nothing to prove with it. We simply enjoy it. The locals here often throw curious looks at us, but I’ve never experienced a German showing serious interest in playing cricket. Here, football is simply at the top of the list,” says Amitabh Kumar, who works as an engineer at Tata Consultancy Services in Frankfurt and plays cricket every weekend during the summer in his leisure time.