The national cricket team is an example of multiethnic coexistence and sporting improvement. It could be seen after winning bronze in the 2022 European Championship held in Malaga, where the growth that this sport has experienced in a country where its practice is not easy was evident. due to lack of fields and sponsors, despite the fact that it appears on the horizon of the Olympic Games. The discipline said hello and goodbye in Paris 1900 and wants to return in Los Angeles 2028.
VEHICULAR ENGLISH
“The team is made up of Spanish players whose fathers and mothers are Spanish, others whose father is Spanish and mother is British or vice versa, other children of Pakistanis, Indians, South Africans… The coexistence is perfect, since everyone has the same passion and defends the same color, the red of his shirt,” Juan Carlos Rodríguez Martínez, president of the Cricket España Group, explains to EL PERIÓDICO DE ESPAÑA, from the Prensa Ibérica group.
Called to play in the finals week for the Spanish team. pic.twitter.com/3mnIogukAT
— Cricket Spain (@Cricket_Espana) October 1, 2022
English is the vehicular language in this diverse locker room. “In addition, it is the language of this sport,” Rodríguez Martínez insists, highlighting that it is “a very interesting factor for boys and girls who decide to start playing cricket, because, in addition to the benefits of practicing sports, they grow up in an environment where they can learn English.” Young promises who aspire to follow in the footsteps of a team that eliminated Ireland to reach the finals of a European Championship that they faced with ambition.
“Our goal was always to win the tournament. We even beat the champion and the runner-up in the preliminaries. On the last day we had to beat England to enter the final against the Netherlands. We were unlucky, because one action changed the fate of the game”says the head of a sport that is played with a paddle and ball on a normally oval field of about 140 to 150 meters in diameter.
@Cricket_Espana on TVE La 1 news just prior to their tour of @CricketFinland pic.twitter.com/g14Bw2KREN
— Cricket Spain (@Cricket_Espana) August 15, 2019
British colonies
“It is an example of integration at all levels. We can say, without mistake, that in all the teams in the world there are players with origins in the above mentioned countries. We must not forget that cricket is a sport founded by the English and that, in addition to India or Pakistan, world powers, It has been spreading in many Commonwealth countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica and Canada.”says Jaime González Molina, Director of Operations at Cricket Spain.
Precisely, migratory flows to states like Spain have allowed the expansion of cricket to other latitudes. “The origin dates back to 1975, when the Madrid Cricket Club was founded, thanks to a group of British residents in Spain who wanted to continue practicing their favorite sport away from their homeland”, explains the head of the Spanish team. In the following years, the English colonies of Catalonia, Valencia, Murcia, Andalusia, the Basque Country, the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands founded their own teams.
????ANOTHER VICTORY!
???????? Spain beats ???????? Italy in the second match of the European T10 cricket and leads the tournament
✅ 2 victories in the 2 matches of the 1st day, after the victory against the current champion ????
CRAZY, @Cricket_Espana! pic.twitter.com/LFo6EGnEuu
— José Manuel Amorós (@AmorosCuatro) October 10, 2022
“In 2000, a group of Spaniards and Britons created the Spanish Cricket Association, which was created to support and give competitions to the clubs that were being created,” explains Rodríguez Martínez, who recalls that That same year the first national team was founded, “who then competes internationally in the European Indoor Cricket Championship, organized in Valencia.” In the next edition of this tournament, the national team won bronze.
Abbreviated modalities
Since then, the team has participated in international competitions, climbing the European ranking.where it is ranked 16th, while it ranks 36th in the world cup out of a total of 84 countries, both in the T20 game mode. This is one of the two variants of shorthand cricket. The other is T10, which is the one in which Spain won bronze at the European Championship in Malaga.
What do these nomenclatures mean? “It indicates how many overs each match is played. An ‘over’ is six pitches. Therefore, in a T10 duel, each team has 60 shots to knock down the sticks and the match takes place in 90 minutes. In a T20 there are 120 pitches,” explains the Director of Operations at Cricket Spain.
Huge congratulations to hosts Spain for a fantastic run in the Championship Week.
Shoutout to @CoreyRutgers for doing an amazing work with @Cricket_Spain#EuropeanCricketChampionship #ECC22 #CricketinSpain pic.twitter.com/fNUbQzqyxy
— European Cricket (@EuropeanCricket) October 15, 2022
González Molina considers these variants, compared to the traditional one, in which the matches last for several days, as “the present and the future of cricket in Spain, as they are developing quickly and very spectacularly”. But both cricket representatives agree that the explosion of this discipline in Spain has to do with its inclusion as a partner of the International Cricket Council, the world’s governing body.
Likewise, since 2018, Cricket Spain has been integrated into the European Cricket Network, “in charge of organizing club and national team championships. A partner very powerful, because it broadcasts the events to millions of viewers around the world.”
Lack of fields
Precisely, massive audiences are one of the arguments they put on the table to seek sponsors. “Cricket has great potential, both sporting and touristic. For example, 21 teams participated in the European Championship in Cártama (Málaga) and it was broadcast to 40 million people daily. To this we must add 450 hosted players who generated significant benefits,” they insist.
Despite the progression, cricket in Spain is far from taking advantage of these potentials. “The main problem is the lack of fields. The measurements are larger than those of a soccer field. In order to be able to practice it seriously and for teams from the United Kingdom to come to do sports tourism, The court should have a diameter ranging from 140 to 160 meters. When these surfaces are not found, the quickest thing is to share a baseball field,” they explain from the Spanish institution.
However, they see progress and indicate that more and more municipalities are interested. In Barcelona’s participatory budgets in 2021, the most voted project was a cricket field. In Madrid, the local club managed, after a 20-year struggle, to have a place to practice its sport. From Cricket Spain they say they do not feel helpless, “because this would happen if after contacting the institutions, they do not pay attention to you, but at the moment this has not been the case.”
“Our selection”
However, they defend that cricket cannot depend on transfers “and therefore the authorities have a great opportunity to invest in a sport that, beyond great sporting results, produces benefits at the tourist level as the second most practiced and followed sport in the world, which is”. A modality in which Spain has managed to place its flag between traditional banners, taking advantage of the performance of a generation that has raised a team from nothing.
“Representing your country is one of the most beautiful things that can happen to you. Listening to the national anthem gives you a great adrenaline rush. In the case of the cricket team, the emotion is greater,” claims Juan Carlos Rodríguez Martínez, president of the Cricket Spain Association.
“Because when in a football or basketball game we say that we support the team, we always speak in the plural, with ‘we’ or ‘our team’. But in the case of the national cricket team, we say it with all the law. We created that team from scratch. Therefore, pride is very great,” says one of the inhabitants of a Tower of Babel who has reached heaven without help and whose next height could be Olympic.
How to play cricket?
“It’s really no more difficult than any other sport. To a layman I would say that cricket is a sport that is played with a paddle and ball, on a field where in the middle there is a ‘carpet’ in which at each end there are two bases.
Donde two batters from team A enter the field to try to score as many points (‘runs’) as possiblethrowing the ball as far as possible to get individual points (when the two batters pass each other and reach each base safely), four points from a single hit by throwing the ball out of the field but bouncing before leaving, and six points from a hit if the ball leaves the field without bouncing inside.
The players of team B, eleven on the field, try to eliminate the batters of team A as soon as possible so that they do not score many points. They can do this by trying to touch the three vertical sticks ‘stumps’, knocking down one of the two pieces (‘bails’) resting on them or by catching the ball in the air after having been hit by team B. Team A will score a certain number of points and Team B will have to bat next to beat that score.”.
2023-09-28 09:27:53
#thousand #ways #Spanish #unusual #success #multiethnic #cricket #team
:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/elimparcial/VCH54QCUD5G4BBSFGYLFXYTHRY.jpg?fit=300%2C300&ssl=1)
