Barcelona set to have its first cricket ground, courtesy young women from India and Pakistan
It’s not common to talk about Barcelona and cricket in the same sentence as it is no surprise that Barcelona is a football-mad city. People have hardly heard about Barcelona planning to enter the game of cricket as many citizens over there are foreign to the sport.
However, in a surprising turn of events, Barcelona will be building a cricket stadium. The cricket stadium is the thought of a group of young Indian and Pakistani women who have been playing the sport for quite some time now. The group has now demanded a proper place with a cricket pitch and other equipment where they can play in real and grow their talent.
Barcelona recently put in a proposal for a €30m sports facilities package to vote. Much to the disbelief of authorities, out of 822 projects, the Catalan capital chose a cricket ground. The 20-year-old Hifsa Butt, who is the eldest member of the group, walked through the story behind the thought of exploring the gentlemen’s game.
Hifsa revealed that the desire of playing cricket formed three years back when their gym teacher in her secondary school started a cricket club after school hours. The same was followed by Hifsa’s father teaching them about the basics of the game.
We’re from Pakistan and India, countries that know about cricket: Hifsa Butt
“It all began three years ago in secondary school when the gym teacher said: ‘Right, we’re going to start a cricket club out of school hours. Who’s up for it?… He (her father) taught us a lot about how to play and then we got started on our own account,” Butt told The Guardian.
As the women started liking playing the sport, they conducted an indoor cricket league and played at a baseball ground on Montjuïc as their makeshift cricket field. However, all the young girls now want a proper space to play with a real pitch.
“We want to play proper cricket, with 11 players, with a hardball and not a tennis ball like we use indoors. So now we need a proper cricket pitch with real, not synthetic, grass. We’re from Pakistan and India, countries that know about cricket, but we also want to spread the news about the game in Spain,” she signed off.
