“Hey, English,” shouted a small child from the dusty hill on the other side of the barbed-wire fence at the Sylhet International Cricket Stadium.
Attention duly gained, he then held up one hand in a gesture that said, “hold on a minute, I have got something to do before I finish this sentence”.
From behind his ear, the boy of maybe eight or nine years old, produced a cigarette. He promptly lit it, cupping his spare hand in protection against the wind with all the expertise of a 40-a-day man.
After a quick draw, he was ready to continue his conversation and announced with a broad grin: “Krikeet!”
Cricket, indeed. It seems like nobody around these parts could be without it. There cannot be many places where neutral fixtures involving international cricket’s less-celebrated sides, such as the Netherlands and UAE, could attract feverish crowds in excess of 10,000 people.
Especially when the ground hosting the matches is an out-of-town, newbuild that is about as difficult to access as it is impossible to get to.
“It is no surprise, really,” Brendan Taylor, the Zimbabwe captain, said of the vast crowds who have turned out to watch. “We understand that the Bangladeshi people love the game of cricket so it has been wonderful to see them here.
“They have been very fair on who they have been supporting, they have been acknowledging cricket and hopefully they will keep turning up like that.”
Even the UAE, whose side has the fewest household names of any side in the competition, have drawn a congregation.
Some of the players have conceded to getting a hard time from their mates on Facebook after the indifferent performances in their two losses so far. But at the ground, they have been well received.
“It is lovely, all the crowd have been cheering for us and that has been good fun,” Khurram Khan, the UAE captain, said. “They have been very supportive towards us.”
Sylhet’s newest stadium, which is staging its first international matches in this World Twenty20 competition, is said to be Bangladesh’s most scenic ground.
There may not be masses of competition for that gong, but it would stand alone in a lot of places for its looks.
It was built at the top of a hill on land owned by a neighbouring tea garden.
On the right side of the approach to the main gates, life-size wooden cut-outs of the world’s leading cricketers poke out between the tea bushes.
If you get the wrong point of entry, though, good luck. Traversing the perimeter of the stadium from one gate to another is like a voyage of discovery, the sort of trip you usually take with a Lonely Planet and some travel insurance.
Between the main gate and the media centre, for instance, the route follows a muddy jungle footpath, which also takes the traveller through the back yards of people’s homes.
Those huts furthest from the path have been left in their basic state, with the corrugated iron roofs unvarnished.
Those nearer to the main road have been painted bright colours, presumably to improve the aesthetic for the passing cricket spectators.
On the western side of the stadium, behind the grass bank known as the “green hill gallery”, is a field big enough for more cricket, of the pickup, tape-ball variety.
When the international teams were training inside the ground on Thursday, there were two matches running concurrently on the field. In the further match, a cow was fielding at cover point.
The stadium has a capacity of about 13,500 and, during peak viewing hours in these preliminary round matches, it has been 90 per cent full.
If the tournament’s organisers were worried no one would come to watch these lower-ranked nations, they were wide of the mark.
“I really like the ground, I think it is a fantastic stadium,” William Porterfield, the Ireland captain, said.
“By the end of the first game they were making a lot of noise and I’d like to think a lot of it was Irish noise.
“We want to play in front of crowds like that.”
pradley@thenational.ae
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