If you need to buy a cricket bat in Doha, everyone says the same thing: “Call Ali”.
Tiny and polished, with a bushy beard and disheveled hair, Ali works in the accounting department of a tourist agency. But his real passion is designing and selling cricket equipment in a small room in his apartment on the outskirts of Doha.
Cricket bats are not usually sold in Qatari sporting goods stores. And this is because Qataris do not play cricket. But people from South Asia do, and there are 1.5 million of them living and working in the tiny Persian Gulf country.
Ali, who asked to be identified only by his first name because he is not licensed to sell products from home, said his customers range from low-paid workers to executives at Qatar’s biggest hotels. The vast array of occupations serves as a reminder of the many ways in which Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans and Nepalese are indispensable to the functioning of the state and economy in Qatar, a nation of some 2.7 million. , of which only 300,000 are of Qatari origin.
Despite its popularity among the majority of Qatar’s population, however, cricket occupies a marginal position in the country. While Qatar has pumped billions of dollars into preparations for the 2022 Football World Cup, which will host a gleaming array of new stadiums in November and December, cricket remains just a footnote for footballers. few Qataris who are interested in him. For more than a decade, Ali said, the focus has been “just FIFA and football.”
The neglect of South Asia’s favorite sport points to greater ambivalence in Qatar towards its residents hailing from the Asian subcontinent. While their workforce is essential, the sheer number of migrants — there are at least five times as many of them as nationals — means they are rarely embraced as part of the nation’s culture.
“Their legal position is precarious,” said Neha Vora, an anthropologist at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. “They are put in a situation where technically the expectation is that they will not settle in the country.”
Over the past 15 years, sport has become a centerpiece of Qatar’s international branding efforts. In addition to its World Cup preparations, Doha has hosted world athletics championships, tennis tournaments and Formula 1 races. Qatari money also controls French football club Paris Saint-Germain and helps fund the European football economy through from television contracts with beIN Sports, a company controlled by Qatar, and from sponsorships such as those of Qatar Airways.
Cricket, in contrast, has to make do with little. On Friday mornings – the beginning of the weekend in Doha – thousands of practitioners of the sport wake up before daybreak and the heat becomes unbearable and head to the open spaces of the city. In the absence of the kind of luxuriant turf being prepared in World Cup stadiums, they play in unoccupied urban spaces and empty parking lots, on fields lined with stones, broken flip-flops and empty water bottles.
The most common form of cricket in Qatar is played with tennis balls – either official balls, covered in electrical tape to dampen the rebound, or, more often, special versions containing additional weights, imported from India. Unlike the official version of cricket, which requires a solid ball made of cork, fabric and leather – as well as a well-maintained field and protective gear – cricket played with tennis balls requires just a few boards, a bat and an open space. which can be only 20 meters.
Because traditional cricket bats are too heavy and uncomfortable to use with lighter tennis balls, Ali saw an opportunity in the growing enthusiasm for tennis ball cricket and began importing lighter bats from India in 2015. But the quality did not satisfy him. So he went to a manufacturer in Pakistan and sent him a prototype bat designed especially for hitting the tennis balls that are commonly used to play the sport in the Persian Gulf.
After nearly two years of experimentation, he came up with a satisfying formula. “Alhamdulillah [Deus seja louvado]he’s very famous,” Ali said, showing one of the stick models and stroking it like a cat breeder would a high pedigree animal. He decided to name his creation Long Sixer, which is the name of the highest scoring play that can be played in cricket.
Many of the games in Qatar with tennis balls are coordinated by leagues organized by expats from South Asia. One of the biggest, the Qatar Expat Cricket Community, has 250 teams that play each Friday.
But nobody plays professional cricket in Qatar. The members of Qatar’s national cricket team – almost all migrants, from Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka – have regular jobs. “It’s not like football; footballers have good salaries,” said Faisa Khan, a hitter who played for the Qatar national team until he left the sport in 2021. All the Qatari national team players, he said, “work 12 hours a day.”
Cricketers occasionally run into problems with Qatar’s notorious labor laws. The rules, which in the past gave an employer the power to prevent its people from changing jobs or even leaving the country without authorization, were partially reformed in 2020. But they continue to be criticized for granting too much power to employers and a lack of oversight.
The company for which Khan works, for example, prevented him from traveling abroad to defend the Qatar national team. “They wouldn’t let me go, and I missed two tours with the national team,” he said. “I was very sad and disappointed.”
Some believe that the limited resources and support for cricket are related to the difficulty of attracting locals to the sport. “Cricket has very long matches,” said Gul Khan, director of national cricket at the Qatar Cricket Association (QCA), the sport’s federation in the country. “No one is interested in leaving the house to watch.”
Others, however, insinuate that it is the federation that should be held responsible for the sorry state of the sport. They accuse their leaders of unduly focusing on promoting international tournaments that are always losing money instead of developing and expanding the sport within the country.
In its approach to cricket, Qatar lags behind its neighbors in the Persian Gulf. In Oman, for example, development is encouraged by a requirement that clubs in the lower divisions include at least one native-born player in each team.
The United Arab Emirates is home to the International Cricket Council – the sport’s world federation – and in 2021 it hosted both the T20 World Cup and the Indian Premier League, two of the most important tournaments in world cricket. It is not surprising, therefore, that Qatar is behind Oman and the United Arab Emirates in the world cricket rankings.
But there are signs that this could be starting to change. “I want to improve cricket here in Qatar,” said Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Saoud al-Thani, who became chairman of the QCA in December. He stated that he planned to establish a national cricket academy, create an internationally recognized league and place Qatar in the top eight men’s cricket teams on the planet by 2025.
These goals are not necessarily fanciful, in a country endowed with the resources that Qatar has. A massive injection of capital and expertise has transformed the Qatari national football team from a small fish in regional tournaments to an Asian champion in just over a decade. But many people remain skeptical. “They just talk,” said Khan, the retired hitter.
Even without official support, cricket is and will continue to be the backbone in the lives of thousands of South Asian migrants living in Qatar, far from their homes and families. Ali said that sport works as a social network, a job search resource and a way to relieve work stress.
“Before, these people didn’t know each other,” he said. “But after cricket, they got closer. They formed families, friendships. Started new businesses.”
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