Coliseum of cricket
Cricket is gaining popularity in Italy, a football-mad nation, thanks to thousands of subcontinental immigrants flooding into the country.
Will Luke
25-Feb-2013
Cricket is gaining popularity in Italy, a football-mad nation, thanks to thousands of subcontinental immigrants flooding into the country.
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.
Local councils have begun to provide space for games, said Gambino. "There are around 100,000 people from the subcontinent in the province of Brescia, and they want to play cricket, so the council had to provide pitches to stop people being struck by cricket balls."
Tom Kington has the full story in The Guardian.
Will Luke is assistant editor of ESPNcricinfo