Street cricket becomes a producer of stars
Most city streets in India and Pakistan will usually have a bunch of children playing street cricket on them. It is a very informal style of the game with a chair usually representing the wickets and a tennis ball is used usually wrapped in black electric tape to make it harder. The intensity with which the game is played can only be matched by the intensity mothers’ show when trying to lure their children back home to finish their homework and stop playing the game. Street cricket probably originated in the Subcontinent after the British Raj into India introduced cricket.
Due to poverty levels and most people not having access to a cricket pitch street cricket was born. It was very simple to set up; all you needed was a bat and a ball and maybe a chair for the wickets. Although bricks would sometimes suffice as well and if you were being particularly mean then so could your younger brother. The ease with which a bunch of kids could start a game of cricket was a major factor in the rise of this form of the game’s popularity. It could be played anywhere from city streets to villages all over the place. Street cricket took on a sort of generic identity with any sort of informal cricket match played being termed street cricket.
So how out of all this informality and good-natured fun, do genuine cricketing stars emerge. Sometimes just sometimes, a rare talent will emerge from behind the dust and grime of the game played at the street level and shows some real talent. It usually happens that the training received and the skills developed on the streets leads to a well played performance at the school level where someone spots the talent and decides to nurture and develop it further. Then as the talent develops further, and the budding cricket star moves on, maybe cricket academy will come next where the young person will hone their skills and really start to shine. But usually what happens is that the poor of the Subcontinent continue to play cricket without getting noticed even if they are very talented and then just resign themselves to the fact that nothing more will come out of it and go back to their daily lives.
What is needed is a street level scouting system where scouts go around to different cities and villages and pick up talent where they see it. Then that talent could be sent to cricket academy and nurtured further. The ones that don’t make the cut can be sent back home but it still leaves a select few who might get the chance of a lifetime to do their countries and people proud. The Sport’s Ministries of the countries in question could fund this and funding could be used to find new talent wherever it is hidden. Without this sort of scouting some very good players of the future could be left unfound in nooks and crannies where they reside.
The great cricketer Sachin Tendulker when asked how he learnt to hit the ball so straight said that it was because when he was younger he played a lot of street cricket. And what happens in street cricket is that the only place to hit the ball effectively so there is no easy chance of getting out is straight down the street. So if a great batsman like Tendulker can come from playing street cricket maybe we can find a lot more future stars just waiting in streets all over the Subcontinent wishing their moms would let them play for five more minutes.
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