Afghans driving massive growth in German game
Tim Wigmore’s weekly look at the game below the Test playing nations
Afew weekends ago, I went to Bremen. This industrial city in northern Germany might seem like an unlikely setting for a cricket journalist to spend a few days in the English summer, but to go there was to see the game thriving in an unlikely outpost: a reminder of cricket’s capacity to do good in the most harrowing circumstances.
That was best exemplified by a couple of remarkable tales.
At training at the SG Findorff club in Bremen on Friday night, I meet Niamatullah. He is quite short, but firmly built. He is only 17.
Cricket has always been central to Niamatullah’s life. Growing up in an Afghan village, Zurmat, near the border with Pakistan, he played with friends and his brother in the street, with a tape ball.
The game has sustained him ever since, even as his life has been subjected to unimaginable horrors. About a decade ago, the Taliban killed his father, who was working in intelligence for the Afghan government. Soon after, his brother also vanished, and nothing has been heard of him since.
In 2014 Niamatullah’s uncle and mother decided that the situation in Afghanistan was too unsafe for him to remain. His uncle paid a smuggler $12,000 to organise Niamatullah’s escape, hoping he would get to Germany. The journey can scarcely be comprehended.
He hid in the luggage compartment of a coach to get across Iran; trekked across the mountainous border between Iran and Turkey going three days without food, and surviving shooting from the Turkish border guards; and hid in the cargo container of a boat for over 10 hours as he crossed the Black Sea and reached Bulgaria. After over a year he made it to Germany.
Hamid is also at training. He and Niamatullah are at very different stages in life: while Niamatullah has applied for asylum, Hamid is a German citizen, and has been happily settled here for the last five years. He has a wife here and a baby boy.
Yet his story is also a tragic one. Born in Kabul in 1988, Hamid and his family moved to Peshawar in 1991, fleeing Afghanistan as it became more dangerous. After 19 years in Pakistan, Hamid and his elder brother decided it was safe enough to join their father in Kabul.
There, Hamid met his wife, a one-time refugee from Afghanistan who had settled in Germany but was visiting home. They became engaged, and moved to Germany five years ago to set up their life together.
While his father and elder brother remained in Kabul, his mother and two younger brothers stayed on in Quetta: the boys were studying at university, while Hamid’s mum worked as a gynaecologist for the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières. In 2012, Hamid called his mum, and hoped to wish Rashid, his youngest brother, good luck in his final university exam. He never could. His mum told him Rashid had been killed, shot dead by religious fanatics who objected to her work.
Walking around the SG Findorff club, these horrors are hard to comprehend.We are a long way from Afghanistan, but this corner of a foreign field, nestled in between tennis courts, a children’s playground, a football pitch and the railway line, is a fulcrum of the Afghan community in Germany.
Last year, 32,000 Afghans applied for asylum in Germany, and many have found solace in cricket. There are now about 2,000 Afghans playing official cricket in Germany, and many thousands of others playing in locally organised unofficial leagues, often with tape balls or soft balls.
Each game they play is a testament to the power of cricket to change lives.
“Cricket is what the Afghan community love. It brings them together again. They lost their homes, they are here alone and cricket is like a family for them,” Hamid tells me. “I believe that I’m born to play this game. Obviously the standard of cricket is not that good here in Germany but still, I’m happy that I’m getting something to play here.”
Germany has been very good to cricket in Afghanistan, paying 700,000 towards the construction of a stadium in Khost, in eastern Afghanistan. Now Afghanistan is being very good to cricket in Germany. Seeing the enthusiasm and considerable talent at the SG Findorff club – Hamid has a whippy left-arm action and delivers a yorker at around 80mph – invites the question: what can Germany become?
There is a huge way to go. Germany is still marooned in ICC Europe Division Two, where they will compete with Gibraltar, Isle of Man, Israel, Spain and Sweden in August.
Yet there is abundant potential here. “These players are really talented and passionate about playing cricket,” Rishi Pillai, Germany’s captain, tells me. Pillai, 34, was a student from Pune but ended up settling in India. Most of elite German domestic cricket has traditionally been played by those from the subcontinent, normally from India, together with a sprinkling from Australia, England or South Africa.
That is rapidly changing: half of the U19 team already hail from Afghanistan. And, as the German media have been alerted to this remarkable story, they have taken to writing about cricket, too, slowly increasing awareness of the game among Germans who had never heard of the game, or thought of it as a quaint English ritual, like cream teas, the royal family, or driving on the left-hand side of the road.
Each week, the German Cricket Board receive about 30 applications to form new clubs, many from care workers in refugee homes. The number of teams has risen from 80 to 218 since 2012. Most pleasingly of all, there are now 50 youth teams, many with a strong presence from Germans without any links to the traditional cricket world; as recently as five years ago, there was not a single youth team.
Last winter, 20 new grounds were set up to help meet demand, but each week numerous teams cannot play fixtures – not because they or their opponents cannot raise a team, but because there are no free grounds on which to play.
Germany gets just over $200,000 a year from the ICC, which sounds like a tidy sum, but that goes very quickly in a rich nation of 80 million coping with unprecedented demand for equipment. The Lord’s Taverners have provided much but, for now, the GCB are all out of spare bats and stumps to give to new clubs.
German cricket could achieve much. Such a populous country only needs a tiny minority of the population to engage in cricket, and for a good structure to be put in place, to develop the seeds of a competitive team. Already the GCB have more participants than the Netherlands, who have twice defeated England in the WT20.
There is much to be optimistic about, and the notion that Germany could, in a generation, reach the WT20 is far from outlandish: there are already half as many regular players as there were in Ireland in 2007, the year the Emerald Isle launched itself onto the world stage.
For these dreams to be possible, Germany will need more funding. There are reasons to be optimistic: once they reach 10,000 regular participants, which should be within a year, the GCB will become eligible to receive funding from the German Olympic Committee. The ICC is also reviewing its funding model to be more generous to associates – especially those, like Germany, set on developing the grassroots game.Yet, as with so many associate nations, the really transformative moment would be cricket joining the Olympic Games, which would unlock about 1 million a year from the government.
Niamatullah, who can speak only a few words of German, only wants to play cricket, and already dreams of playing for Germany. He waits the whole week for Friday night training. “It is the day I get the most joy,” he speaks in Pashto. “It means a lot for me and the whole Afghan community. This way we get in touch with each other. It is a sport that we need.”
If it is serious about its stated aim of becoming the ‘world’s favourite sport’ and, more importantly, to do good around the globe, cricket also needs Germany.