Is the European Cricket League for real? That’s a valid question if you’ve seen any of the many comical videos on the web. Sports reporter Robert van Royen takes a look at the competition.
You’ve probably seen the footage. Whether it be of a laughable piece of running between the wickets, a comically bad dropped catch, or another scarcely believable piece of so-called fielding.
Perhaps it was the usage of plastic stumps similar to that of those from a classic Kiwi cricket set, or the use of baseball grounds, which caught your eye.
“Where do they find these guys?” one commenter asked on a video shared on social media recently of two batters running three on a series of perplexing overthrows.
From more than 400 clubs across 33 countries is the answer, as the sport booms in popularity on the back of a league created by an Australian.
The planting of the seed for the European Cricket League (ECL) can be traced back to a chance meeting between Aussie Daniel Weston and Roger Feiner, Fifa’s then head of broadcasting, in Switzerland in 2018.
Weston was in St Moritz, helping broadcast “Ice Cricket”, it is what it sounds like – a game played on a frozen lake – when Feiner told the finance and trading guru he wanted to introduce him to Thomas Klooz and Frank Leenders, the men behind the marketing of football’s Champions League.
The heavy hitters wanted to bring a new sport to Europe, and they believed Weston was the man to help do it.
Weston had a month to cobble a plan together before travelling to Zurich and pitching cricket’s version of the Champions League to Klooz and Leenders.
"I caught the bus back from Zurich to Munich, pinching myself because it was going to happen," Weston told The Cricketer after the league launched in 2019.
A handy cricketer for starters, one who was born in Perth and played state cricket for Western Australia alongside the likes of Australian representative Shaun Marsh.
No surprises, then, he was soon playing cricket for minnow Germany after selling his tech business, which built and supplied computer hardware and services, when he was just 23.
It was while he was playing for Germany against Sweden that a random bloke filmed Weston and his teammates walking off the field and streamed it live on Facebook.
The fact a few thousand people watched it grabbed Weston’s attention.
"I had a hunch that I needed to get the German team together again, stream them and record it, just to see how many people wanted to see some cricket being played by the German national team,” Weston told ABC News.
It turned out a lot of people did. So, German Cricket TV – a Facebook page dedicated to sharing highlights – was launched.
Hundreds of thousands of views were registered in the first week. Requests from clubs across the country followed, asking for them to be filmed.
So, Weston and a small team he put together hit the road, travelling Germany with 18 GoPro cameras.
Within the space of a month, the number of clubs in the country jumped from 60 to 370.
No wonder Weston was asked to help broadcast “Ice Cricket”, and caught the attention of Fifa’s then head of broadcasting.
Weston pitched an annual T10 league (10 overs), featuring league champions from across Europe.
For the first instalment, eight countries were identified to compete in Spain. They were split into two groups of four, before Dutch side VOC Rotterdam progressed through the semifinals and final and were crowned champions.
Covid-19 scuppered it in 2020 and 2021, before it was greatly expanded to 30 teams in 2022 and won by Spanish side Badalona.
Not that the pandemic stopped the increasing popularity of cricket in Europe.
Taking advantage of countries not locked down at certain times, Weston and his team shot over 900 matches in 2020.
“Nine hundred matches, live-streamed with five-camera production, live-streamed into India and on our European Cricket Network channel,” Weston said.
Weston was initially fuming when he saw Fox Cricket’s tweet, one some perceived as making fun of Romanian Pavel Florin’s bowling action in 2019.
"I was a bit numb," he told The Cricketer at the time. "I’ve played European cricket for 10 years, so it was nothing new to me someone like Pavel bowling coming out of Europe.
"My immediate reaction [to the Fox Sports tweet] was ‘these f…… arrogant p…., who are they to say that?’ That was my first instinct.”
However, Weston’s anger quickly morphed into delight as viewer numbers tripled and word of the ECL started spreading across social media channels.
And when then 40-year-old Florin, who is now an ambassador for the Melbourne stars, was later interviewed and declared his underlying love for the sport, scorn soon turned into admiration.
Even former England cricketer Dimitri Mascarenhas and late Australian great Shane Warne spoke up, with the latter offering to help out with the tournament the following year.
"I absolutely melted and I started crying. I did not see this coming,” Weston told The Cricketer.
For Weston, it’s quite simple – his dream is for cricket to become the number one bat and ball sport in Europe in the next 25 years.
Already more than 6000 cricketers from 400 clubs across 33 countries have taken part in the ECL, and it’s only getting bigger.
The European Cricket Network and the many clips shared across social media certainly has helped, but there’s something else significant at play.
That would be certain socio-political circumstances, leading to an influx of Indians seeking education, as well as refugees who have fled Afghanistan.
"Hopefully Afghanistan gets better and there won’t be a refugee crisis there again, but the fact that in 2015, 2016, 2017 they were coming across to Europe, that meant that there were 800,000 potential cricket lovers coming to Europe,” Weston told ABC News.
"They’re never going to leave, and they’re going to have lots of children, and that might never happen again when you can get such a big influx of cricket lovers.”
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