Afghan refugees bring cricket to Germany – but the locals are stumped

One refugee team's battle to overcome the country's bureaucracy in pursuit of their beloved sport

The Neuland Lions are the first cricket team in Germany made up entirely from refugees living in asylum accommodation. Photo: HSB / Hamburger Sportbund

For cricket fans, the “sound of willow on leather” is one of the joys of summer. But, in one field in Germany, the “plonk-plonk-plonk” of a ball striking a makeshift wooden surface was enough to make a neighbour call the police.

As a result, cricket is banned on the field on Sundays under its Ruhezeit quiet laws, and outsiders such as a team of refugees from Afghanistan have one less place to put bat on ball, make new friends and try to become part of the community in their new German home.

Team captain Noor Wahedy, who has lived in temporary refugee accommodation for 13 months because housing in Hamburg is full up, has more than one reason to wish for extra space. “The most important thing we need is time and grounds to play,” he said, ideally including not just 11-a-side fixtures but informal games where “on a Saturday evening we just play cricket with German people in the park”.

Obscure to most native Germans, cricket has grown in numbers thanks to migrants from India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. But sports halls are booked up by footballers, leaving little space for cricket. Few German sports shops sell stumps and bails. Any earnings from coaching (which requires a licence) would be deducted from Noor and his brother Nazir's refugee benefits, which also leave little room for compulsory indoor training shoes.

If cricket has something in common with Noor, 25, and Nazir, 23, in having to adapt to Germany and its penchant for rules, it also points the way to a brighter future for the brothers from Kabul. Their team, the Neuland Lions, has won them friends and a way into the venerable social circles of Germany's sports clubs.

A chance of integration?

To integrate people in Germany “the best tool is sport”, said Siegfried Franz, the president of Cricket Hamburg and a native of the north German city. “Germany has had to accommodate, since 2015, more than three million refugees, and to accommodate doesn’t mean you put them into a camp. It means you have to integrate them.”

Germany's patience with the refugee wave is wearing thin and a first deportation to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan took place in August, as a rising far-right piles pressure on politicians to get tougher. A general election in February looks likely to bring a more migrant-sceptic government to power in Berlin.

Expectations for migrants to adopt German norms are growing and the hope is that the Neuland Lions can show they are doing just that. “Without sport, we had no common topic to speak with people,” said bowler and captain Noor when The National visited the Hamburg club. “The first German person we were friends with was in the gym.”

Thanks to spirited efforts by Mr Franz, the Harburger Turnerbund (HTB) sports club and the Hamburg-Harburg branch of the Red Cross, which runs the refugee accommodation where most players live, the team has gathered enough equipment to train once a week and play indoor fixtures on Sundays.

But cricket remains a mysterious import to many in Europe. A town in Italy banned the game in a culture clash with Bangladeshi migrants. Even in diverse and anglophile Hamburg, it is a struggle to book a sports hall. “If you’re a club with 20 members playing cricket, forget it. Not an hour,” Mr Franz said.

Rules and restrictions

The noisy wicket that offended a neighbour was already a pain because it took an hour to lay down wooden boards. A replacement artificial pitch was vetoed by an authority in charge of mowing lawns. “Nobody understands why cricket is important,” said Carla Rook, the HTB sports club's deputy chief executive.

Katja Hahne, a co-ordinator at the Red Cross refugee accommodation, had to look up cricket on Google when the Afghans struggling through a first winter in Germany asked about organising a game. Fifty tennis balls were borrowed from a neighbour and a local shooting club donated money for shoes.

Coaching at the HTB sports club will soon be made possible with lower German language requirements than the legalese usually needed for a licence. “It’s a very colourful neighbourhood, and therefore it’s great that there’s a club that acts on this and takes these people under their wing,” Ms Hahne said.

Joining a club could help refugees such as Noor, a computer scientist, and Nazir, a student, to land a job, Ms Hahne said. “It’s good for their CV that everyone can see that you give your spirit and your time and your talents.”

A second integration benefit is that “there is no better opportunity than a club for making contacts, regardless of whether they are of a sporting kind or friends and family,” said the club's chief executive Torsten Schlage. “If you need a lawyer, someone will say 'ask your mate who plays tennis next to you'. He’ll give you a quick tip and you don’t have to put €200 on the table so that he talks to you for 15 minutes.”

Nazir, a batsman, said he had brought German friends to matches who were “really interested” in the rules. “If we played more they will know much more about cricket,” he said. “The thing which we need is more practice sessions because we would like to practise more.”

“I am proud to be a part of this team because it’s a big opportunity,” said Noor. “There was nothing like this in the past, so why not be the first? We have the opportunity and we will use it as well as possible. We are looking forward to more achievements for our team, for our guys and for cricket.”

Promoting women's cricket is made harder by a lack of suitable equipment and pitches. Large Hamburg employers such as Airbus and container shipping giant Hapag-Lloyd have been approached about possible sponsorship. The hope is that politicians will also be won around to cricket's role in integration.

“You have to raise your voice against all those who give the easy solution ‘send them home’,” said Mr Franz, who said meeting the Afghan cricketers had opened his eyes to refugees' living conditions in Germany. “No, we don’t send them home, they’re here.”

His hope is that cricket's return to the Olympics at Los Angeles 2028 will generate enough interest in Germany to bring an international side to Hamburg. “This is my dream, that one day in the summer break, St Pauli will lend us their stadium,” he said, referring to the cult German Bundesliga football team.

“We find a sponsor to put up a pitch just for a long weekend, and get one of the world’s top teams, maybe Afghanistan or India, playing the German national team. I know it’s going to be sold out, 25,000 tickets in a minute. It’s my dream but I think it’s not far from reality.”