Cricket revival bowls over Kilkenny

THE CLASSIC summer sound of leather on willow, long consigned to folk memory, is again echoing through Kilkenny.

Cricket, once upon a time the most popular sport in a county now synonymous with hurling, is enjoying an unexpected revival following the establishment of a new club by a group of migrant workers from Bangladesh.

Mafi Choudhury (25) came to Ireland five years ago and settled in Kilkenny after spells in Dublin and Thurles.

The waiter, and keen sportsman, found hurling “too fast” and missed cricket, “the most important game” in his home city of Sylhet in northeastern Bangladesh.

So two years ago he put up posters looking for other potential players and gradually assembled a dozen fellow-expatriate Bangladeshis who also work in local hotels and restaurants. As a result, he founded the Bangla Cricket Club – Kilkenny.

While the club is looking for a proper ground, they currently play two or three evenings a week on hurling fields behind a CBS primary school.

During a recent evening game, onlookers more used to hearing the familiar sound of the “clash of the ash”, seemed bemused.

A very few stopped to enjoy the play; others looked stumped by the sight of a crease marked out with little white flags and the unfamiliar rituals of sticky wickets, howzat and maiden overs.

Choudhury said the team is gradually becoming known and is starting to receive invitations to play at other cricket clubs in Leinster.

Last month they played games against teams from Waterford and Portlaoise.

The club has begun to widen its membership base and recent “signings” include players from Kilkenny, Tyrone and Lancashire. The latest recruit is Rohan Persaud, who moved to Kilkenny from Singapore to be director of operations for pharmaceutical multinational Merck Sharp Dohme.

The firm is building a new plant in Carlow.

Persaud, who grew up in Guyana, a former British West Indies colony, “saw an ad for the club and thought it would be great to play again”.

But the establishment of the club has not gone unnoticed by Kilkenny’s Pakistani community.

Nawaz Mohammad (33), who moved to Ireland two years ago and works at the Eastern Food and Spices shop, said he had “already signed up 21 men” and plans to launch the “Kilkenny Pakistan Cricket Club” this summer.

Their home nations are fierce cricketing rivals and tentative plans are already afoot for an “international one-day test” in Kilkenny.

Cricket is a national passion in both Bangladesh and Pakistan – countries carved out of the break-up of the British Raj on the Indian subcontinent.

Long decline of the "forgotten game"

In the 19th century, cricket was, by far, the sport of choice in Kilkenny. Historian Michael O’Dwyer, author of The History of Cricket in County Kilkenny – the Forgotten Game, records that there were 50 clubs in the county during the game’s late Victorian heyday when the GAA had “little hold”.

A visitor from Munster in 1887 noted that the state of hurling in the county was “the worst and most spiritless” he had ever seen. But Kilkenny won its first All-Ireland hurling title in 1904 and cricket went into a gradual and steady decline thereafter.

The game had virtually disappeared – apart from outposts at Mount Juliet and the Church of Ireland’s Kilkenny College. The game’s recent resurgence has followed Ireland’s greatest modern cricketing achievement – the sensational defeat of former world champions Pakistan during the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies.