"You walk down the street and you have people with English shirts, with Australian shirts, people with Test match names and numbers on their white polos. You walk around Pocos de Caldas, you feel like you're in a foreign country with how much cricket stuff is walking around."
"The arrival of cricket in Pocos de Caldas was down to pure chance. In 2000 Matt Featherstone, once of Kent—he played six List A games for them—met and fell in love with a Brazilian woman who was studying in London, and she convinced him to try life in her home town."
"From having no organised cricket before Featherstone turned up, the region alone last year had 7,000 people under the age of 30, most under 17, playing it regularly—the town's mayor has suggested that more people play cricket there than football—and 12,000 across Brazil."
Poços de Caldas, a Brazilian town of 150,000 people, has become an unexpected cricket hub. Cricket arrived in 2000 when Matt Featherstone, a former Kent player, moved there after meeting a Brazilian woman in London. Years later, Roberta Moretti Avery, who initially dismissed cricket as boring after watching the 2005 Ashes, married an Englishman who encouraged her to play. She discovered her passion for the sport, eventually becoming captain of Brazil's national team and president of the Brazilian Cricket Confederation. The sport grew dramatically from zero organized cricket to 7,000 regular players under 30 in the region and 12,000 across Brazil. Cricket programs began in orphanages and primarily serve underprivileged communities, with players often wearing donated English and Australian cricket apparel.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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