Leagues start as workers from subcontinent bring cricket to football nation. Tom Kington in The Guardian:
Gayashan Munasinghe, the son of a Sri Lankan immigrant who plays for the Italian national cricket team.
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.
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