Features

’24 hour day for Indo-Pak match’ – a trip to Iceland for cricket relevance, one tweet at a time

October 2, 2022
Bharat Times

New Delhi: The race to normalize India-Pakistan bilateral cricket ties in neutral venues heated up recently as the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB)’s invitation to host matches between the two cricketing arch rivals was turned down by an unexpected source – Iceland Cricket’s Twitter The account was sarcastically challenged.

“We are offering to do the same [as the ECB] & can provide almost 24 hours of daylight in June and July, as well as better tweets covering matches. Sniper protection too,” Iceland Cricket Having said In a verbal tweet on September 27 that garnered over 5,000 retweets and 43,000 likes.

The initial viral tweet, and later the overall “proposal” to host an India-Pakistan “volcanic reef”, attracted worldwide attention not only from cricket fans but also from Pakistan Cricket Board chairman Ramiz Raja, who congratulated Iceland Cricket to know your game and be “seriously fun”.

But this kind of ‘Twitter comedy’, so to speak, takes only 30 minutes a day, on average, according to David Cook, Iceland Cricket’s secretary-cum-media manager and the face behind the account.

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The Faces Behind Iceland Cricket Twitter

This isn’t the first time the governing body for cricket in far-flung Iceland has found itself in the center of online attention. In December 2021, the Twitter account received nearly 16,000 likes for to dig Both in cricket legend Sir Donald Bradman and in Icelandic culture. In October 2020, the . Received 17,000 likes for to weigh One on the age old ‘Mankading’ issue by drawing an analogy with MS Dhoni stumping.

A further investigation into Iceland cricket’s tweet history reveals that a content creator has a natural penchant for topical humour, irresistible self-deprecation and a finger on the pulse of all the happenings in cricket around the world, a Known for posting from a country that is more known for itself. The exploits of football in recent years.

But the Twitter account is trying to change that.

“We adopted this personality of a stereotypical Icelandic character and it was oddly successful, because we used to have a board account that was also becoming a fan account. I think people really appreciated it, and playing cricket in Iceland and developing the game here is unlikely,” Cook told ThePrint over a Zoom call, which also featured Iceland Cricket Board chairman Bala Kamalakharan.

A promotional shot for the Iceland cricket team | by special arrangement

As such, this 30-minute task involves staying regularly updated with cricket news on a global scale and identifying sources of contradictions and humor that according to Cook resonate with active fans, be it Indian, Pakistani or be english.

Cook said, “The good thing is that the administrators of the game, especially the ECB and sometimes the BCCI, naturally give us so much material to provide comedy. underestimates.

Leaving behind the layers of the Cook-led Iceland Cricket Twitter comedian personality, however, reveals the bleak realities of the long, arduous path the small budding cricket nation takes to establish itself.

Not only has Iceland cricket yet to gain membership of the International Cricket Council (ICC) at an associate level, but the entire board also includes unpaid volunteers such as Cook and Kamalakharan, who have regular day jobs, but cricket in Iceland took over the management of Passion and love for the game.

“I’m married to an Icelander and have been traveling here since 1999. I did my graduation and pursued my venture capital career in the US… I grew up playing cricket in India, playing it seriously at 12-17 And the vice was – the captain of BITS Pilani’s cricket team,” Kamalakaran said about the role of cricket in his life.

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Crowdfunding Cricket in a Football Nation

The Scandinavian island first came along with cricket in 2000, but it remains a quirky park-level sport, even as Kamalakharan and Kuk relocated to Reykjavik in 2006 and 2012 respectively.

While part of the issue is the sport’s sluggish pace to catch up with the cultural population that traditionally gravitated toward the likes of football and winter sports, becoming an ICC member is a strenuous process that requires intense financial investment over an extended period of time. is needed.

“I started playing in 2015, we had three touring teams from the US, UK and Australia. That was the beginning of really formalizing things, then we started getting club teams together,” Cook said.

According to Cook, Iceland currently has four full-time cricket clubs, with a fifth launching soon and a pool of over a hundred players, but the ICC requires at least eight clubs, eight junior teams and eight women’s teams.

Iceland Cricket Team | by special arrangement

“Of course, these requirements are kind of moving goalposts for us. When we started talks with the ICC, it was only eight senior teams. This year, the requirements of juniors and women were added at the top. But if we put up too many hurdles, we cannot progress the game or the game,” Kamalakaran said. “Iceland players are athletic and take the game seriously… at the end of the day there are only 11 people on the field, so I hope the ICC encourages that interest.”

The board’s road to becoming an ICC member did not come in hand until April 2018. A crowdfunding campaign to support their first international bilateral series against fellow non-ICC member Switzerland blossomed into sponsorship by r/related fans. Cricket online community on reddit.

“The reddit funding was actually quite significant. [Kit Harris] Ours was running Twitter at the time and I don’t think we realized the potential of how big it would become. With that money we got a bowling machine and we raised money to tour England to play in Switzerland and we beat them by 215 runs in one ODI. We played the Malta Cup the next year against Hungary, Malta and the Czech Republic. It was less successful result-wise, but it is a useful experience,” Cook said.

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The Covid pandemic halted further international cricket activity in 2020 but Iceland Cricket found itself in the news from time to time. Also, the team is set to resume its summer Cricket Cook revealed by participating in the Baltic Cup alongside Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.

With the lofty financial goal of ICC associate membership “hopefully in the next 2-3 years”, the other long-term challenge for Iceland cricket is generating more and more followers among local Icelanders.

“Our budget for producing the game is $100,000, which is coffee money in the grand realm of things. But this will expand the game to countries that are not traditionally playing cricket. Twitter has allowed us to express ourselves and show how it can be done,” Kamalakaran said.

As is the case with several smaller cricketing nations, including the United Arab Emirates and the Netherlands, which participate in the Men’s T20 World Cup, many critics and ‘xenophobic’ fans underestimate Iceland’s potential contribution to the global game as most of the participating South Asian nations Of or relating to or of British origin.

But Cook and Kamalakharan have a handy rebuttal to these cricket skeptics, in line with the account’s strong Twitter game.

“How do you build a game in a country where they have never even heard of cricket? These are the people who know cricket first. When we go to schools and run junior programs, the interest in indigenous Icelandic people is high. We are also increasing press coverage in Icelandic state media,” Cook said.

Kamalakhran says that to gain popularity for a game, you need people who have always played and understood it.

“They’re not wrong in saying that there aren’t locals, but it’s still not that far from the main idea that if you want to build a game, you need someone who understands the game because they did it. Played as a kid. If you go back in time, every game starts the same way,” he said.