A new Canadian cricket league is hoping to entice a new generation of Canadian cricket fans with a summer tournament.
Cricket Canada will put on the first Global T20 Canada, Canada’s only professional cricket tournament. The league believes that new immigrants to Canada will help grow the popularity of the sport.
“If you look at the growing demographics of Canada as a country, we’ll start to see cricket become a lot more mainstream. And this tournament will be the catalyst for it,” tournament director Jason Harper told CTV’s Your Morning on Monday.
The 22-match tournament will be the first in a 25-year licensing agreement with Global T20. T20, or 20/20, matches are a condensed, television-friendly version of the game that only last between 3 and 4 hours, as opposed to traditional games that can last for days. Cricket Canada hopes this will draw summer sports fans to a new kind of entertainment.
“We’re competing against some bigger sports that have some much bigger mainstream attention,” Harper said.
The tournament will feature talent from around the globe on six new teams: the Toronto Nationals, the Vancouver Knights, Montreal Tigers, Edmonton Royals, the Winnipeg Hawks, and the Cricket West Indes B Team, which is made up entirely of players from the Caribbean.
Cricket is one of the most popular sports in the world with 2.5 billion fans across the globe, but has yet to gain wide popularity in Canada. According to the captain of Canada’s national cricket team, Nitish Kumar, this is likely due to the climate.
“In Canada, you really have a four-month span to really get something out of the summer,” Kumar said to CTV’s Your Morning on Monday.
Kumar hopes that the tournament will spark enough interest in the sport that Canadians will want to take the sport up full time.
“It’s very dependent on the weather and how we could create sort of an infrastructure where we are allowed to train throughout the winter and leading up into the summer,” said Kumar. “So a bit of work to do, but I think it’s on its way.”
The tournament runs from June 28 to July 15. All the games will take place at Maple Leaf Cricket Grounds in King City.
