Qatar’s Most Popular Sport Isn’t What You Think It Is

DOHA, Qatar — If you’ll want to purchase a cricket bat right here, everybody tells you a similar factor:

“Name Ali.”

Diminutive and well mannered, with a thickish beard and messy hair, Ali works in accounts for a tourism company. However his actual ardour is designing and promoting cricket tools from a small room in his house on the outskirts of Doha.

Cricket bats aren’t usually offered in sports activities shops in Qatar. That’s as a result of Qataris don’t play cricket. However folks from South Asia do, and there are about 1.5 million of them residing and dealing within the small Gulf nation.

Ali, who requested to be recognized by just one title as a result of he doesn’t have a license to promote merchandise from his residence, mentioned his prospects vary from laborers on rock-bottom wages to managers at Qatar’s high inns. The breadth of occupations is a reminder of the numerous methods by which Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans and Nepalis are indispensable to the workings of the state and economic system in Qatar, a nation of about 2.7 million folks that’s residence to solely 300,000 Qataris.

Regardless of its reputation among the many majority of the nation’s inhabitants, although, cricket occupies a marginal place in Qatar. Whereas Qatar has pumped billions of {dollars} into preparations for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which it should host in an array of gleaming new stadiums in November and December, cricket stays — not less than within the eyes of the Qataris who consider it in any respect — an afterthought. For greater than a decade, Ali mentioned, “the main focus is just for the FIFA, soccer.”

The neglect for South Asia’s favourite sport speaks to a wider ambivalence in Qatar towards folks from the Asian subcontinent. Whereas their labor is crucial, the sheer numbers of migrants — they outnumber residents by not less than 5 to 1 — imply they’re not often embraced as a part of the nation’s tradition.

“They’re legally precarious,” mentioned Neha Vora, an anthropologist at Lafayette Faculty in Easton, Pa. “They’re positioned within the scenario the place they’re technically not meant to cool down.”

Over the past 15 years, sports activities have develop into central to Qatar’s world branding. Alongside its World Cup preparations, Doha has performed host to the world monitor and discipline championships, tennis occasions and Method 1 auto races. Qatari cash additionally owns the French soccer staff Paris St.-Germain and helps bankroll the European soccer economic system via broadcasting offers with Qatar-owned beIN Sports activities and sponsors like Qatar Airways.

Cricket, against this, has to make do on skinny gruel. On Friday mornings — the beginning of the weekend in Doha — 1000’s of cricketers wake earlier than daybreak, earlier than the warmth turns into punishing, and head to the town’s open areas. Within the absence of the sort of lush grass fields being ready for the World Cup, they play on patches of city wasteland and empty parking tons, inside boundaries denoted by rocks, damaged sandals and empty water bottles.

The commonest type of cricket in Qatar is performed with tennis balls — both regulation ones lined in insulation tape to deaden their bounce or, extra incessantly, particular weighted variations imported from India. Not like the official model of cricket, which requires a hardball product of cork, twine and leather-based — to not point out a well-maintained discipline and protecting tools — tennis ball cricket requires merely some stumps, a bat and a flat expanse of as little as 22 yards.

Since conventional cricket bats are too heavy and cumbersome for the lighter tennis balls, Ali sensed alternative within the rising enthusiasm for tennis ball cricket and started importing lighter bats from India in 2015. However he was by no means proud of the standard. So he approached a producer in his native Pakistan with a prototype for a bat designed particularly for hitting the weighted tennis ball that’s commonest to the sport within the Gulf.

After nearly two years of experimentation, he stumble on the successful formulation. “Alhamdulillah, it’s very well-known,” he mentioned, cradling and stroking one in every of his designs as a breeder would a prize cat. He determined to call his creation after the very best rating a person shot can obtain in cricket: the Lengthy Sixer.

Lots of Qatar’s tennis ball video games are coordinated via leagues run by South Asian expatriates. One of many largest, Qatar Expat Cricket Neighborhood, has 250 groups play each Friday.

But there aren’t any skilled cricketers in Qatar. Gamers on Qatar’s nationwide staff — which is populated by expatriate Pakistanis, Indians and Sri Lankans — maintain day jobs. “It’s not like footballers; footballers have good salaries,” mentioned Faisal Khan, a batter who performed with the nationwide cricket staff till his retirement in 2021. All of the gamers on Qatar’s staff, he mentioned, “are working 12 hours a day.”

Cricketers typically run afoul of Qatar’s infamous labor legal guidelines. The laws, which used to present employers the facility to stop their employees from altering jobs and even leaving the nation with out their permission, had been partially reformed in 2020. However they’re nonetheless criticized for handing an excessive amount of energy to employers and are poorly enforced.

Khan’s firm, for instance, has prevented him from touring overseas to characterize Qatar. “They didn’t enable me to go, and I missed these two excursions,” he mentioned. “I used to be so heartbroken and so disillusioned.”

Some consider cricket’s restricted help and assets are associated to the problem of attracting locals to the sport. “Cricket could be very lengthy,” mentioned Gul Khan, the top of home cricket on the Qatar Cricket Affiliation, the physique liable for organizing the sport in Qatar. “No one is to return to observe.” Others, nevertheless, instructed that it’s the cricket affiliation that ought to take accountability for the sport’s parlous state; they accuse its officers of a misguided deal with internet hosting loss-making worldwide tournaments on the similar time they’re failing to develop and broaden the home sport.

In its strategy to cricket, Qatar is behind its Gulf neighbors. In Oman, for instance, improvement is inspired by a requirement that golf equipment in decrease divisions embrace not less than one Omani nationwide among the many enjoying 11. The United Arab Emirates is the house of the Worldwide Cricket Council — the game’s world governing physique — and in 2021 performed host to each the T20 World Cup and the Indian Premier League, two of crucial tournaments in world cricket. Unsurprisingly, Qatar lags behind Oman and the U.A.E. on this planet rankings.

There are indicators, although, that this may start to vary. “I wish to enhance the cricket right here in Qatar,” mentioned Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Saoud al-Thani, who turned president of the Q.C.A. in December. Sheikh al-Thani mentioned he deliberate to ascertain a nationwide cricket academy, create an internationally acknowledged league and have Qatar within the high eight males’s groups on this planet by 2025. Such goals aren’t essentially fanciful in a rustic with Qatar’s assets: An enormous injection of money and experience reworked Qatar’s soccer staff from regional minnows to Asian champions in simply over a decade. Many, nevertheless, stay skeptical. “It’s simply phrases,” mentioned Khan, the retired cricketer.

But even with out state help, cricket is and can stay the spine of life for 1000’s of South Asians residing in Qatar, removed from residence and household. Ali mentioned the game acted as a social community, a recruitment hub and a technique to unwind from the stresses of labor.

“Earlier than, they don’t know one another,” he mentioned, “however after cricket, they’re too shut. They’ve household, buddies. They began new companies.”

He added: “Lots of people right here, they’re utilizing this chance as making this neighborhood robust.”

John McManus is an anthropologist who writes about sports activities and migration. Attain him on Twitter at @johnmcmanus06.