A town’s unlikely conversion to cricket was down to local enthusiasm and a large Pakistani population
A CHARACTER IN Joseph O'Neill's best-selling novel, Netherland,says cricket, more than any other sport, is "a lesson in civility".
They know all about civility in Ballaghaderreen in Co Roscommon. Some even say it was invented there – but cricket has only been a recent arrival.
The game was unknown in the town this time last year and six of the team had never played the game. But today the Ballaghaderreen cricket team are Connacht League Champions – and star player 26-year-old Waqas Ali Raja was named “Player of the League”.
The team won its first game against Galway on May 23rd and then kept winning and winning with only one defeat against Ballyhaunis, according to team co-founder John Corcoran. And that team are all Pakistanis, he points out. “They had the run of the League a few years ago.’’
So, with so many Pakistanis in the town, there was an inevitability about cricket making its presence felt sooner or later.
You could say the story of the Ballaghaderreen cricket team began in Sajjad Hussein’s barber shop. From Hroonabad, seven or eight hours from Islamabad, Sajjad and “three or four men’’ from his town have been living in Ballaghaderreen for about eight years.
Most Pakistani-born men in the town had been working at the Dawn Meats halal plant until it closed down with the loss of 200 jobs. The company transferred operations to its other plant in nearby Ballyhaunis.
Team members who do not work at the plant drive taxis and hackneys in the town, and many of the cricket team are students at St Nathy’s College in Ballaghaderreen. An estimated one in six pupils at the local St Attracta’s primary school have Pakistani parents.
ENTER JOHN CORCORAN, already something of a legend in Ballaghaderreen, having caught three of the biggest trout ever in the Lung River in 1999. The trout, weighing more than 10, eight and six pounds, are on display in three of the town's pubs – Durkin's, Clarke's and the Fiddler's Elbow. All were caught in the same week at a pool in the river which he had been shepherding for some time.
But Corcoran always had a secret passion for cricket. He remembers as a child of four or five seeing games played in the Phoenix Park and in Malahide, and thinking he would love to have a go at it some day.
He did so for the first time last year. “Another of the ‘things to do before you die’ – the list is getting shorter,’’ he says.
Corcoran and Sajjad set about establishing a cricket club in the town. The young Pakistani men they talked to were very enthusiastic and the club was established early last year.
They began fundraising to buy bats and gear, which was expensive given that most team members were students and just four of the team were working. Sajjad hadn’t played the game
for nine years, but he was by far the most experienced on the team.
Then, Corcoran recalls, they started to contact clubs locally to organise some friendlies. “We discovered to our joy that the fixture list was not yet drawn up for the Connaught League.”
They were invited to join the league, but there was a drawback. The format of the league was home and away and they had no grounds to play in.
Athlone came to the rescue and their ground also became Ballaghaderreen’s ‘home’ ground. So the club faced into a season of 12 games being the only cricket club from all of Co Roscommon in the league.
They needed somewhere to practise. “Our great friends in Ballaghaderreen golf club came up trumps. They allowed us to set up a net. We had a temporary wicket there,’’ says Corcoran. And every evening at 6pm, they practised for two hours at the golf course.
“Some of our players had arrived to Ireland when they were very young. They had never played a game of cricket, but cricket was in their blood. I got a feeling what it must have been like in Gaelic Park in New York for the Irish who arrived there. It was something like that for the club,’’ Corcoran says.
THE FIRST LEAGUEmatch against Galway, which they won, was "very exciting,'' he says.
“This was a great result for us and it gave us great confidence. We never looked back from there. We got good results against Athlone, Galway, Ballyeighan , Castlebar, Ballyhaunis and NUIG. We started playing in May and ended champions of the Connacht League in September.’’
The club has great plans for the 2009 season which is getting underway. They are hoping to play their home matches on the newly completed community park in Ballaghaderreen.
Meanwhile, young lads of various origin are now playing cricket routinely, if informally, in the great expanse that is the car park at St Nathy’s Cathedral in the town.
James Joyce wrote of Clongowes Wood College in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "And all over the playgrounds they were playing rounders and bowling twister and lobs. And from here and from there came the sounds of the cricket bats through the soft grey air. They said: pick, pack, pock, puck: little drops of water in a fountain slowly falling in the brimming bowl.'' It could be Ballaghaderreen, not least around the fountain in the Cathedral grounds.
