Maninder Singh and Shivan Mittal stood at attention alongside their teammates waiting for the national anthem to ring out, part of a familiar pre-game ritual that any Toronto Maple Leafs fan would know well.

But it wasn’t hockey the pair of University of Toronto engineering students were preparing to play, nor was it the Canadian anthem they were preparing to belt out. It was Jana Gana Mana, the national anthem of India, that Singh and Mittal were gearing up for, to be followed by the national anthems of Pakistan and Bangladesh, the kickoff to a Sunday afternoon intramural cricket tournament at the school’s Athletic Centre in mid-November.

A Canadian flag loomed large on a wall at the back of gym where the University of Toronto St. George Cricket Club hosts many competitions, a symbol of a new home for a sport already popular in South Asia, England and Australia.

A $2.2-billion master facilities plan for Toronto, endorsed by city council back in late October, called for five more cricket pitches in the city and upgrading roughly three by 2038 and local cricket plays and fans are hardly surprised by the demand in a multicultural city such as Toronto, where English and South Asian immigrants each represent more than 12 per cent of the population, according to the 2016 census.

Singh, a native of Dubai whose parents are from India, and Mittal, who moved to Vancouver from India at the age of 12, started the cricket club on U of T’s St. George campus in 2017, following the lead of similar clubs on the university’s Mississauga and Scarborough campuses, as well as at Ryerson University and York University.

“There was a lot of people who wanted to play cricket,” Singh said. “We’d see a back campus, we’d see a field empty, we’d just go, a couple of guys, playing, even on local roads, stuff like that. A lot of the guys have the same stories, they have been playing cricket since their childhood and they would continue to want to play that.”

The club’s membership has grown to 183 players in just over two years, with 30 to 50 players who show up regularly for the various leagues, drop-in nights and tri-campus tournaments organized by the club.

The Canadian climate during the school year means most of the club’s game must be modified to be played indoors, but they did rent out Varsity Stadium last summer for a match.

“When you play a sport how it’s supposed to be played, people enjoy it way more than when you play indoors,” said Singh, who started playing cricket at 12 or 13 years old.

Still, Varsity Stadium is not a cricket-specific pitch, missing the 22-yard clay or concrete strip between the wickets in the middle of the field where much of the action takes place. And playing with a typical cricket hard ball is not possible indoors because of the damage it could cause, forcing the U of T players to use a tennis ball wrapped in electrical tape to get the bounce a bowler, similar to a pitcher in baseball, needs before his bowls reaches the batsman he is facing.

Having more cricket-specific pitches in Toronto would give players the opportunity for better practice, Mittal said.

“We only get four months of the summer to play outside and if we get more and more booking and we have more pitches available to us we can train (players) in the summer as well.”

The Toronto and District Cricket Association — a decades-old cricket league and one of the most populous in North America with 2,500 to 3,000 active members in 2019 and thousands more social members — have long used cricket-specific grounds at G. Ross Lord Park, Eglinton Flats and Sunnybrook Park, seven fields in total, according to Farhan Khan, the TDCA’s vice-president of operations.

The club is currently speaking with city councillors about upgrades to those existing grounds. Brampton and Mississauga are ahead of Toronto when it comes to cricket in terms of the number of fields, the pitch quality, lighting at the facility and hourly rates, according to Kahn, a member of the TDCA’s board for six years. His club has lost players to Brampton and Mississauga, down from seven divisions to five in recent years.

“Brampton and Mississauga came into the game late but have state-of-the-art facilities with Astroturf in the middle,” said Khan, who grew up playing cricket in England and South Asia. “It’s low cost, you don’t have to put matting on it, don’t have to worry about the rain.”

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Jon Hack, a longtime member of the Toronto Cricket, Skating and Curling Club and an executive on its cricket committee, has also taken notice of the swell of interest in cricket in Brampton and Mississauga and is happy to see Toronto following their lead.

“There’s so much demand for different kinds of sports and use of fields and whereas 10, 15 years ago cricket was always told, ‘Well, you can use the soccer field when they’re not using it,’ or ‘We’ll put a field between two fields but we won’t cut the grass.’ Now communities, cities are talking about putting in dedicated fields and that makes a huge difference,” said Hack, who immigrated to Toronto from England.

Developing shortened forms of cricket — such as the popular Twenty20 format used by the Indian Premier League, the most attended cricket league in the world that was valued at $6.9 billion US earlier this year — has also helped to increase its popularity as a global sport. A T20 game takes about three hours to complete, while a more traditional match can last upwards of six to eight hours.

“I think it all depends on whether people can pick up and play the game locally,” Hack said. “If you can’t do that, it’s difficult for them to maintain interest.”

Singh and Mittal have eyes on getting varsity status for cricket at the University of Toronto and Hack dreams of a popular professional team here, but the City of Toronto’s pledged investment in cricket will give locals more than just another sport to play. It also offers people like Singh, Mittal, Hack and Khan a taste of home, as well as a chance to share part of their native culture in their new digs.

“Cricket really connects me with my home and reminds me of my home ... and it’s the same thing for a lot of other people,” Singh said. “It’s a really overwhelming feeling.”

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