An amazing saga of an Italian cricket club

Piazza Vittorio Cricket Club are a true sporting anomaly: a team of immigrants from around the world that won the 2012 under-18 European Cup. Chris Newbould meets the British producer who is raising funds to tell their amazing story

Rome’s Piazza Vittorio Cricket Club has brought together people from countries around the world, including Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The team also has an Italian player. Courtesy RiccShow more

It’s probably fair to say that when someone says “cricket”, the first country that springs to mind usually isn’t Italy.

In addition, the sport is, at least in terms of its English origins, traditionally a bastion of the middle and upper classes – so it doesn’t naturally lend itself to a group of left-wing activists creating a team from Italy’s immigrant community.

With just one Italian on the team, and kitted out in the red and black colours associated with anarchism, the team, improbably, went on to win the European under-18 championships in 2012.

The story of Rome’s Piazza Vittorio Cricket Club is the very definition of the type of tale you couldn’t make up. It becomes even more incredible when we learn that following the European Cup victory, the team broke up, largely under pressure from community leaders who felt that a team with such political and multicultural leanings was not a proper place for local youths.

Fast forward to this year, and two of the team’s leading players, Italian Fernando Cittadini and Indian immigrant Shince Thomas, are trying to rebuild the team in time for this summer’s cricket season.

Italian documentary filmmaker Jacopo de Bertoldi, who had chronicled some of the team’s activity before they disbanded, is recording their efforts, and British producer Suzy Gillett – international relations manager at the London Film School – is also on board.

Now the team behind the film have launched a major drive to raise money for the production – including an appeal to raise US$15,000 (Dh55,000) on the Middle Eastern crowdfunding site Aflamnah – to get things moving before the season starts in a few weeks time.

“A friend of mine had posted something Jacopo had done on Facebook, just a little bit of footage, and I thought it was amazing,” Gillett says.

“We began speaking, then met last June and a decision was taken around September to say ‘OK – let’s really get this thing going’. It probably should really have an Italian producer, but with the way cricket works here, it’s been interesting to put the production together with a mix of an English producer and a director from Italy. It seems to be working.”

She adds: “Some of the first work Jacopo sent me started with a quote from [Trinidadian Marxist social theorist and cultural commentator on cricket and colonialism] C L R James: ‘What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?’ I thought ‘if he’s read C L R James’ book, this is even more interesting than I thought. There was an intellectual depth to the documentary that I wasn’t necessarily expecting’.”

Gillett says that when Jacopo first went to meet the team, he was surprised not only that Italy had produced a European Cup-winning youth team, but also a real melting pot of a team in a country where traditionally teams are grouped along strict racial boundaries.

“Normally you’d have the Pakistani kids here, the Bangladeshi kids here, and here was this oddball team that had literally been playing in the local park that had come together from all over the world, from Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, an Italian, and they’d trained under the guidance of a local community centre and won this huge prize. The guys who ran the centre were political activists themselves, and thought it would just be funny to put them in the black and red anarchist uniforms – it’s so not cricket.”

The team members have remained friends since they broke up, and with a couple of years more wisdom under their belts, the core of four or five players are now reunited despite the social pressures, back in training, and recruiting new members to contest the 2015 season.

Gillett says: “We’ll be following their efforts on the pitch over the course of the season, and also picking three or four key characters to film at home and really work out who they are and what their life is about. It won’t all be cricket. We’ll also be asking what it is to be a young immigrant, living in Rome with xenophobic demonstrations going on, overt racism commonplace, where you can’t even get citizenship without Italian ‘blood’. For me, it’s very urgent that this sort of thing is discussed.”

Aflamnah may seem a strange place for an Anglo-Italian movie to raise funds, but Gillett says it made perfect sense to her: “Aflamnah seemed to come from the same culture of independent companies helping each other,” she says.

“On Kickstarter or Indiegogo, we’d have been a very small fish in a rather big pond. Plus it’s such an international story, and we loved the idea of putting it on a real international, independent crowdfunding platform. We thought it would be interesting to see if we could put a project there that maybe wouldn’t normally go there, and raise funding successfully. Also, of course, we want to tap into communities of South-East Asian immigrants, of whom there are thousands in the Gulf – cricket really is everywhere.”

• Learn more at aflamnah.com/en/thisisnotcricket/