Cricket in Dubai? When I first heard of the phenomenon, I had visions of Bedouins on camel-back trying to turn chinamen upon the desert sands, and scorecards bearing the regular notation "dust storm stopped play". Enlightenment soon followed, however: I learned about the Air-India Sports Club, the Dubai cricket development programme, and the "subkha grounds" with their sand outfields. Not to mention, of course, the famous stadium in next-door Sharjah, and the stunning performance of the United Arab Emirates team in the ICC trophy. Now Abu Dhabi has followed, even staging Test matches as a "home ground" for Pakistan.

So cricket in Dubai is no trifling matter. And that is increasingly true in many of the game's less likely outposts around the world. In the course of a peripatetic life I learned not only that Italians and Israelis played cricket, but ended up playing the game myself in two less likely countries, Singapore and Switzerland.

If ever Singapore gets around to nominating a national sport, you can be pretty sure it won't be cricket. Most Singaporeans appear to believe that the term applies either to a noisy insect or a trademark cigarette-lighter. So the fact that, during my years there, I would dress up every Sunday like a poor relation of the Great Gatsby and venture hopefully into the drizzle clutching my bat invariably mystified my Singaporean friends. Bats, of course, they associated more with vampires than umpires. And the notion that anyone would spend the best part of his Sunday on an uneven field in undignified pursuit of five-and-a-half ounces of cork provoked widespread disbelief. "You mean they still play cricket here?" exclaimed one Singaporean. "I thought that ended with the Japanese occupation!"

 

In fact there were 20 teams in the two Sunday Leagues run by the Singapore Cricket Association when I was there in the early 1980s, and innumerable others playing "friendly" matches on Saturdays. They ranged from the sometimes plebeian Patricians to the tavernless Tanglin Taverners, from Non-Benders who chased every ball to Schoolboys who didn't, and from the two teams of the elite Singapore Cricket Club to the more esoteric acronyms of SAFSA and SPASA (known to the initiated as the Armed Forces and the Polytechnic respectively).

"I do not play cricket," Oscar Wilde once wrote, "because it requires me to assume such indecent postures." Most Singaporeans, a notoriously serious and straitlaced breed whose recreations are golf and economic growth, appeared to share his disdain. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who described cricket as "organised loafing" and the Nobel Prize-winning author who termed cricketers "flannelled fools" would have felt right at home in Singapore.

Many a local utilitarian with the national devotion to statistics pointed out to me that cricket simply wasn't cost-efficient enough. The amount of space and time it took to give 22 players a game could, I was reliably informed, be more productively allocated to 100 squash players, 200 swimmers or 300 joggers. When I responded that 88 cricketers could have more fun and exercise in the space taken up by the prime minister's daily game of golf, the silence that greeted me could have made central air-conditioning obsolete.

Of course, neither Singaporeans nor Swiss, law-abiding citizens to a fault, can be expected to approve of any sport based on the principle of hit-and-run. So expatriates tend to dominate the game

Source: https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/_/id/22439609/hit-run-singapore-switzerland