New Delhi: The race to normalise India-Pakistan bilateral cricket relations in neutral venues hotted up recently as the England and Wales Cricket Board’s (ECB) invitation to host matches between the two cricketing arch-rivals was challenged sarcastically by an unlikely source — Iceland Cricket’s Twitter account.
“We are also offering to do the same [as the ECB] & can provide near 24-hour daylight in June and July, as well as better Tweets covering the matches. Sniper security too,” Iceland Cricket stated in a tongue-in-cheek tweet on 27 September that received over 5,000 retweets and 43,000 likes.
To sum up, we have offered India v Pakistan:
3 Tests in Reykjavík
24 hour daylight
Sword joust for toss
Sniper security
Volcanic Ashes trophy
15 consecutive sessions of play per TestWe will add for all fans:
Free fermented shark and brennivin
Free volcano tour by this admin— Iceland Cricket (@icelandcricket) September 28, 2022
The initial viral tweet, and the subsequent overall “offer” to host the India-Pakistan “Volcanic Ashes”, received worldwide attention not only from cricket fans but also from Pakistan Cricket Board chairman Ramiz Raja, who complimented Iceland Cricket for knowing its game and being “seriously fun-ny”.
But such ‘Twitter comedy’, so to speak, takes up just 30 minutes a day on average, according to Iceland Cricket’s secretary-cum-media manager and the face behind the account — David Cook.
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The faces behind Iceland Cricket Twitter
This is not the first time the governing body for cricket in far-flung Iceland has found itself at the centre of online attention. In December 2021, the Twitter account garnered nearly 16,000 likes for taking a dig at both cricketing legend Sir Donald Bradman and Icelandic culture. In October 2020, it received 17,000 likes for weighing in on the age-old ‘mankading’ issue by making an analogy with an MS Dhoni stumping.
A further examination of Iceland Cricket’s tweet history suggests a content creator with a natural penchant for topical humour, irreverent self-deprecation and a finger on the pulse of all happenings in cricket around the world, all the while posting from a nation known more for its footballing exploits in recent years.
But the Twitter account is attempting to change that.
“We kind of adopted this persona of stereotypical Icelandic character and it was strangely successful, because we were a board account that was also becoming a fan account. I think people really appreciated that, and just the unlikelihood of playing cricket in Iceland and developing the game here,” Cook told ThePrint over a Zoom call that also featured Iceland Cricket Board chairman Bala Kamallakharan.
As such, this 30 minutes of work involves regularly staying up to date with cricket news on a global scale and identifying contradictions and sources of humour that resonate with active fanbases, be it Indians, Pakistanis or the English, according to Cook.
“The good thing is the administrators of the sport, particularly the ECB and occasionally the BCCI, give us so much material naturally to provide comedy…If you can identify contradictions and come across such that Iceland has the answers to problems,” Cook added, responding to Kamallakharan’s claim that Cook downplays his creativity.
Peeling back the layers of this Cook-led Iceland Cricket Twitter comedian persona, however, reveals bleak realities of the long, hard road that smaller budding cricketing nations go through to establish themselves.
Not only is Iceland Cricket yet to secure International Cricket Council (ICC) membership at the associate level, but the entire board also consists of unpaid volunteers like Cook and Kamallakharan who have regular day jobs but took up the mantle of administering cricket in Iceland out of passion and love for the game.
“I’m married to an Icelander and have been travelling here since 1999. I did my graduate studies and built my venture capital career in the US…I grew up playing cricket in India, played it seriously at 12-17 and was the vice-captain for BITS Pilani’s cricket team,” Kamallakharan said about the role cricket played in his life.
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Crowdfunding cricket in a football nation
The Scandinavian island’s first tryst with cricket came in 2000, but it remained a quirky park-level sport even when Kamallakharan and Cook relocated to Reykjavik in 2006 and 2012 respectively.
While part of the issue is the sport’s sluggish pace to culturally catch on with a population that traditionally gravitates towards the likes of football and winter sports, becoming an ICC member is a stringent process that requires intensive financial investment over an extended period.
“I started playing in 2015, we had three touring teams come over from the US, Britain and Australia. That was the start of really formalising things, then we started getting club teams together,” Cook said.
Iceland currently has four full-time cricket clubs with a fifth launching soon and a player pool of over a hundred to call upon, but ICC requires at least eight clubs, eight junior teams and eight women’s teams, according to Cook.
“Of course, these requirements are kind of moving goalposts for us. When we started interacting with ICC, it was only eight senior teams. This year, the junior and women’s requirements were added on top of that. But if we put too many very big hurdles, we can’t grow the game or the sport,” Kamallakharan said. “Icelanders are athletic and take sports seriously…at the end of the day it’s just 11 people on a field, so I hope ICC encourages that interest.”
The board’s path to becoming an ICC member didn’t get a shot in the arm until April 2018. A crowdfunding campaign to support its first-ever international bilateral series against fellow non-ICC member Switzerland blossomed into sponsorship by fans belonging to the r/Cricket online community on Reddit.
We are delighted to announce the https://t.co/yanXQxRGjo community as the official sponsor of the Iceland cricket team, and its UK tours, for the next two years. We urge you to join their community and to follow @reddit_cricket. We’ll be launching our 2018 kit with them soon. pic.twitter.com/gaZQPg4d2U
— Iceland Cricket (@icelandcricket) April 23, 2018
“The Reddit funding was actually quite important. [Kit Harris] was running our Twitter at the time and I don’t think we realised the potential of how big that would become. From that money, we got a bowling machine and financed a tour to England to play Switzerland and we beat them by 215 runs in an ODI. We played the Malta Cup the following year against the likes of Hungary, Malta and the Czech Republic. That was less successful results-wise, but it’s a useful experience,” Cook added.
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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. Moreover, the team is set to resume its summer of cricket by participating in the Baltic Cup, alongside Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, Cook revealed.
Alongside 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 a greater following among local Icelanders.
“Our budget to build the sport is $100,000, which is coffee money in the grand scope of things. But what that would do is broaden the sport to countries that traditionally aren’t cricket playing. Twitter has allowed us to express ourselves and show us how this can be done,” Kamallakharan said.
As is the case with many smaller cricketing nations, including Men’s T20 World Cup participants UAE and the Netherlands, many critics and ‘xenophobic’ fans see Iceland’s potential contribution to the global game as lesser because a majority of participants belong to South Asian countries or is of British origin.
But Cook and Kamallakharan have an easy rebuttal to these cricket sceptics, consistent with the account’s strong Twitter game.
“How do you build a sport in a nation where they’ve never even heard of cricket? It’s the people who know cricket first. When we go to schools and run junior programmes, the interest is high among indigenous Icelandic people. We’re also getting increasing press coverage in Icelandic state media,” Cook said.
Kamallakharan says that for a game to garner popularity, you need people who’ve always played and understood it.
“They’re not wrong about saying that locals are not there, but that still doesn’t take away from the main idea that if you want to build the sport, you need someone who understands the sport because they played it as a kid. If you go back in time, every sport started that way,” he said.
Source: The Print
