‘When I’m batting, take a good look at me’, Sandip Singh says before entering the pitch. When he’s already facing the bowler, the 15 year-old Indian firmly holds the green and white wooden bat in his hands. Until his opponent is ready, Sandip bounces lightly with anticipation, at the same time as he hits the bat against the ground. He’s so focused that, for a moment, in his mind he’s in a match in Punjab, the Indian province where he was born, and not in a public green in Portela, a neighborhood on Lisbon’s east side, where he’s been living for almost two years.
While he waits for the bowler to do his part, Sandip squirms from the effort, with his tense eyes staring at the ball. He frowns in such a way that his dark and full eyebrows become one. When the red ball finally starts cutting the air towards him, Sandip tautens his back, rises the bat, pulls it back, swings it hard and hits the sphere. The loud bang of wood hitting plastic breaks the imposing silence on that Sunday morning. The ball goes flying to the left and only after it flies for 30 meters does it land on the grass in Almeida Garrett’s Garden, on a bright green contrasting with the paleness of the buildings that surround the area, some of them with more than 10 floors.
It’s in this garden, under a canopy of concrete columns with a zinc roof, and sometimes also on N.º 1 Elementary School’s football pitch, in Portela, that Silkesh Deuchande, 29, has been coaching the Portela Cricket Club for seven years. Every Sunday morning, when he’s not working at the Piripiri, an Indian deli at Portela Shopping Center, Silkesh brings around 12 kids together. They were all born in Portugal, children of Indian immigrants. Sandip Singh is the exception, the boy from Punjab.
Sitting on the concrete bench in Almeida Garrett’s Garden, Kevin Gerage talks while holding on to his cellphone, where’s he’s playing one of the music hits from singer and actor Ayushmaan Khutana, a Bollywood star. He’s 15, lean, still with a kid’s face, although the golden circlet in his left hear shows he’s been trying hard to change that. Seven years ago, he was the first one to join Portela’s team. ‘Silkesh had a piece of paper in his shop saying practice was going to start and, since I never did anything on Sundays, I decided to try it out,” he says. The other players were easily handpicked by the coach. ‘I wrote a list of the kids whose parents I knew used to play cricket, and then I talked to them to come play with us,’ Silkesh remembers.
‘Just come play ball!’
If it was easy to bring over Portuguese people named Sunit or Pratik with Indian parents named Rajid or Kumar, the attempts to bring cricket to Portuguese people named Pedro or Tiago, sons of other Portuguese people named João or Manuel, were never successful.
‘There was a time when I was authorized to take the team to play at a school in Portela, to divulge the sport. They gave us the football field for a couple of hours at lunch time, and I took my players along. There were some kids, the sons of Portuguese people, who tried to play, but they didn’t feel at ease. They were used to kicking the ball around and playing with a bat confused them,’ Silkesh says, laughing more than feeling frustrated. ‘I even remember a kid who was playing with us. Suddenly, one of his friends who was not on the pitch told him, ‘come on, man, just come play ball!’. And he immediately went, he didn’t even finish the current play.’
‘They mean no harm, it’s just that people around here don’t know about cricket,’ Silkesh states. Proof of that is that Portela Cricket Club’s last practice was interrupted four times by people who, out of carelessness, entered the pitch during their quiet Sunday stroll: a mother bike ridding with her two kids, a gentleman with a bright colored suit and a red tie, a shirtless drunkard and a group of children getting ready to play football. None of them imagined that those 12 dark skinned and dark haired boys were waiting for them to get out of the way so they’d resume the match.
More than a sport where you look for wins worthy of being told in detail at the school gate on Monday morning before the bell, for these children, cricket is a cultural celebration. So much that, in training, although Silkesh addresses the players in Portuguese, sometimes they answer back in Hindi. The same thing happens between players – a sentence may start in Portuguese slang and then continue in Hindi. ‘We speak Portuguese all week long at school. It’s ok that we speak Hindi at home, but to our friends we always speak Portuguese,’ explains Kevin, who, when speaking in the language of Camões, treats other people as ‘dudes’ or ‘ bros’. ‘Cricket practice is the only time of the week that we can talk to our friends in Hindi. Silkesh tells us to speak Portuguese, but I don’t think there’s any problem if we speak Hindi. It’s part of it.’
While Kevin is saying this, still listening to the wavy voice of the heartthrob Ayushmaan Khutana, Sandip continues on the pitch, much more focused on the match than any of his colleagues and opponents. Being a batsman, Sandip’s goal is to hit the ball with his bat as far away as possible from his adversaries, the fielders. Then, he has to decide if he should take the risk of running as much as he can between the two wickets on opposing sides of the pitch. It’s essential that he makes it before the fielders catch the ball and hit any of the wickers with it. When he makes it, Sandip celebrates and claps his hands. When he fails, he shouts at nothing, with a jerky voice that’s still in puberty, and he’s forced to leave the match.
During all this, the remaining players do the bare minimum. They try to catch the ball that the batsman threw, but they don’t throw themselves on the ground to do so. They run fast, but not so that their black hair folds backwards due to the wind. They like to win as much as anyone else, but they don’t get mad when they fall back on the scoreboard. ‘The thing is that, although having Indian parents, my colleagues are Portuguese. But I’m Indian, cricket is the only thing I think about. They don’t play very well here in Portela. Back in India, when I played with my friends, I could do it with my eyes closed. When I play, I do it to win,’ Sandip explains, looking like someone who wants more.
The Portuguese King of Cricket
If the Portuguese player Akbar Saiyad, 67, had a chance to talk to Sandip, he would tell him to lead his colleagues at Portela Cricket Club, becoming an example for them. If he plays with his heart, the others will follow him, like it only happens to true leaders. Just like Akbar, the ‘oldest cricket player in the world,’ still active.
Akbar, son of Indians and born in Mozambique, started playing cricket in 1962. He was 16. His first team was the Eleven Stars – of the 11 main players, nine were Saiyad’s brothers. The Portuguese player, born in Maputo, lived in Mozambique until 1984, where he owned a textile factory. At 38, already in Portugal, Akbar started a clothing brand with his family name, Saiyad, and created a company that manages international clothing brands’ franchises. And he brought cricket along, of course.
As soon as he touched down in Lisbon, Akbar founded the Asian Cricket Club – whose acronym (ACC) leads many to believe it means Akbar Cricket Club. It was Portugal’s first team of Asian players, bursting into the national cricket elite, where, at the time, the teams were restricted to players from British families. ‘Until then, they were used to play among themselves over at St. Julian’s [private school in Carcavelos, on the outskirts of Lisbon]. They only played among themselves, at ease. But then we came and they started feeling challenged. These were no longer matches where they had tea and scones at the end, they started to be serious,’ Akbar remembers, with a serene voice that gets its cool from the Mozambique accent he still has.
Can I play, Akbar?
Akbar’s club has always been composed mainly by Muslim players, like himself. Most of his athletes are immigrants from Pakistan. Akbar got used that, right after they arrived in Portugal, they’d ask for his permission to join the team. ‘They still come to me now, because they know I love cricket. And in the old days, when there was more money, if a guy played good, besides making it on the team, I even gave him a job in my company.’ Since its creation, Akbar’s team has won the national cricket championship every year - a total of 29 consecutive trophies. These are joined by four titles by the Portuguese national team at the Indoor European Cricket Championship, in 1995, 1998, 1999 and 2001. Geared in red and green, over half the main players have always come from the ACC, one of them being Akbar himself.
If there’s a secret to the Asian club’s victories, it certainly has nothing to do with the infrastructures destined for cricket, since they practically don’t exist. Since its creation, the ACC practices at an indoor football field, on an underground floor at Lisbon’s Central Mosque. The other teams playing the national championship (Oeiras CC, Comunidade Hindu CC and Friends CC) practice in similar conditions, and also in public parks and at the basement of the Hindu Community Temple, in the capital.
After the British St. Julian’s school closed down its cricket pitch, the only place in Portugal where you can play the sport on a lawn with the official measurements is at a farm in Cartaxo, belonging to Fátima and Sandy Buccimazza, founders of the Portuguese Cricket Federation. It’s in this small town, located 65 kilometers from Lisbon, that the official national championship games take place. Inevitably, it’s in this small pitch that the biggest rivalries in Portuguese cricket are born.
Akbar Saiyad speaks from the top of his trophies: ‘Everyone looks at my team because we always win. There’s great rivalry with Friends CC, who are almost entirely from Pakistan as well, because they’re the only ones who put up a fight. They try to win now and then, but we always end up on top. And then there are the Hindu who are no match for us, because they’re weaker. It’s just jealousy…’, he says with a mocking tone.
At 67, this short and slender man, with dark hair combed over his bald head to disguise it, is starting to prepare the end of his career in sports. Akbar is ready to retire: ‘I want out, I’m done for, man. Lately, my results haven’t been good. I no longer have the strength I used to have, it’s not the same. I used to get to a match and turn it around for my team. I would get the win out of the lion’s mouth. Now, I should stop, lest something happens to me. Then, I’ll just walk around with a cane’, he jokes.
‘It’s time to let other people step up, man…’ He uncrosses his harms and rhythmically taps his fingers on the table, while he thinks the rest of the phrase over. ‘Younger people,’ he finishes, as if he was looking Sandip directly in the eyes.