Monday’s launch of This is Europe, the Guardian’s series focusing on, well, Europe, handily coincided with the launch of a new competition that organisers hope will transform the way cricket is perceived on the continent. The new era for the game dawned in the unlikely location of Alicante on Spain’s Costa Blanca, where in balmy temperatures but howling gales the Dream11 European Cricket Series got under way in front of a small crowd of local enthusiasts and a potential global audience of millions.
None of the players involved – this week’s teams are Sporting Alfas (the hosts), Alicante Intellectuals, La Manga, Levante, Madrid United and the Pinatar Pirates – are household names quite yet, but there’s time for that. With every minute broadcast live on FanCode, where the competition sits only slightly uneasily alongside the NBA and NFL – for which the site holds Indian streaming rights – as well as I-League football and ACC Twenty20, there will certainly be plenty of exposure. The title sponsor, Dream11, is an Indian fantasy sports platform that already works with La Liga, the NBA and the IPL, and it comes from the same fevered imagination as the European Cricket League, which held a small-scale but successful debut event last year.
“I believe there’s a huge untapped cricket-loving market in mainland Europe that’s been asleep for many, many years,” says Daniel Weston, the expat Australian who is the driving force behind the competition. “My belief is there’s around 20 million cricket fans in mainland Europe that have just never had the opportunity to play or watch games that are being livestreamed and broadcast. We held a three-day event last year and what we saw was a huge amount of love and passion for the game that was ignited. But the problem is it’s such a short time in the whole year.”
The idea for a tournament that could run from the start of spring to the depths of autumn was hatched only last October. A little over four months later six teams, four cameras and a game group of commentators gathered for its debut, the first of 400 matches Weston hopes will be played over 100 days of competitive action spread across the next six months. The competition has been organised so quickly that as it starts its conclusion remains unplanned, with future weeks in Frankfurt and Hamburg to be followed by one in Prague, while beyond that it is hoped that, once word spreads, other European locations with passable pitches, a few plug sockets and decent internet connections will raise their hands. “I can talk about it and people are a bit conservative, or I can actually produce it and people say: ‘We have to host that,’” Weston suggests.
Like in the ECL teams play innings of 10 overs each, reducing matches to an ultra-streamlined 90-minute duration (and thus making the sport an easier sell to football fans). Every week will feature a round-robin, followed by semi-finals, a final and the presentation of a handsome trophy (though this week’s is currently stuck in customs). Like in tennis, individual tournaments can run alongside an overall title race. “The problem with cricket is the rules are so damn hard it’s not filtered into sporting TV channels,” says Weston. “People think the game’s too long and the rules are hard to understand. That’s what I’m trying to change with T10 – it’s all done in 90 minutes, just hit the ball as hard as you can. What I’ve found is that in T10 you get similar scores to T20 but also at the top of every hour there can be a new game or a new innings starting. It’s a beautiful spectacle.”
Weston’s background is in finance – in 2013 he founded a hedge fund, Aimed Capital (Aimed stands for Aspiration, Inspiration, Motivation and Dedication) – but he played in Western Australia’s second XI before moving to Europe, where he eventually started playing for Germany and through them glimpsed a gap in the sports broadcast market. “I was playing for Germany against Sweden and when we won the match the brother of one of the players started livestreaming us walking off the field, and thousands of people were watching a livestream of a German cricket team walking off a field,” he says. “In 2016 I financed some cameras to come to one of our practice matches – the idea was to film the game, but the power didn’t work and the cameraman didn’t know what cricket was or where to point the camera. But I cut together some highlights and they ended up being seen by 700,000 people on Facebook. I thought, there’s something here.”
He started putting out social media clips, which appears to have led to a Teutonic cricket boom as fans of the game who assumed no one played it in Germany saw the error of their ways. A serendipitous meeting with a couple of people who worked on Uefa’s Champions League during its gestation helped him on his way – “I’m literally meeting the guys who started the greatest competition in European football – what I need to do is start the Champions League of European cricket” – and last year the first, eight-team European Cricket League, complete with professional-standard livestreaming, was won by VOC Rotterdam. This year’s event will last twice as long and feature twice as many teams, from 15 countries, while the ECS makes continental European cricket a more long-term proposition.
“I want T10 to be played more and more, I need more clubs in Europe playing,” says Weston. “More games of cricket will inspire more players and more parents to say, now there’s a reason to teach my kids how to hit a ball. I just want to see the game grow and develop. What I believe we can do is make cricket the No 1 bat-and-ball sport in Europe. It’s a long-term vision, which can only happen if people see it and get involved. I believe if we start livestreaming it’ll make club cricket stronger, which means more kids get involved, which means more people watching and more sponsors. The only way people are going to invest in cricket is if people can see it.”
• This is an extract from the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. The Spin.
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