There are a lot of associate members. The extension of T20I status to every international side has resulted in their profiles growing. More and more people are taking notice of the matches these teams play, and that is hugely encouraging. However, there has been a common word used by certain individuals to disparage many of these sides: the "e word," expat.

Non-red means associate member. There are a lot of them

Expat isn't necessarily a dirty word. An expatriate is someone who is living outside their native country. There is no shame in moving to a different country to further your opportunities. It is a non-issue in nearly every career. Most of us either are expats or know expats. It is a product of our increasingly globalized world, where people move to find new opportunities because it is easy for them to move. The common argument used against expats playing for a national side is that they're not representative of the population, or that they're simply mercenaries who weren't good enough to play for their original country, and these nations are "Pakistani E teams" or "Indian D teams". These statements come across as ignorant and completely miss the mark.





A representative example is the UAE, and as someone that’s lived in the UAE and was briefly a part of its cricket system, I can explain it quite well. A lot of people playing for the side weren’t born there, that is true, but there are a lot of factors at play. Being able to live in the UAE is difficult, because you either need to be an Emirati citizen or you need a job in the country. As a result, not many people who live in the country were born there. The majority moved there to work or are the children of people who moved there to work. Nobody m oves to the country to play cricket, because they can’t. Playing cricket on a match-by-match basis doesn't count as a job. Until 2016 (when the Emirates Cricket Board introduced central contracts), cricket wasn’t counted as a job at all. Before then, every player was an amateur and had a second job ( Khurram Khan , the UAE's best ever batsman, was famously a flight attendant with Emirates). Even now, it doesn’t count as a job for much of the people around the side. Only those with a central contract can live in the country without a second job. Everyone else still has another full time job to juggle. I know many people who have lived in the UAE for their whole lives, or the majority of their lives (myself included), but they’ll never get citizenship because the UAE is not a country that gives citizenship. Why should these people not be allowed to play for the country they’ve lived most of their lives in, perhaps the only home they've ever known, just because their name doesn't sound Arab enough?





UAE's Khurram Khan

Now the case of the UAE (and the Gulf nations in general) are the extreme of a common story of some expat players. They are players who have been born and raised somewhere, but moved to a new country for new opportunities. They don't move to play cricket for a national side, because that doesn't get them the visa to enter the country. They move for real reasons, to start a new life with new opportunities. And, by chance and circumstance, they wind up back in the cricket system, and now have the chance to represent their new home, which they have lived in for several years and may even now hold citizenship of. For many other "expats", they moved to the country young or may have even been born there. They don't have any say in the matter, and they're certainly not moving to play cricket. My parents didn't move us to Canada when I was 1 year old so that I could one day play cricket for Canada. My parents didn't move us to the UAE when I was 9 years old so I could one day play cricket for the UAE. We moved for a myriad of other reasons, and I'm just one of many people in that exact same scenario. This place is our home now. For some, it may have always been their home. What's wrong in them playing for their home country?





The case of cricket in the UAE (and many other places with a sizeable South Asian population like many European, North American, and Gulf countries) does throw up a legitimate question: why is cricket so awful at appealing to different demographics ? In these places, it is almost exclusively played by people of South Asian descent, with people of English, Australian, Caribbean, and South African descent making up most of the remaining participation figures. It's indicative of cricket's struggles to break out of its traditional strongholds and into different communities, and that is a serious issue, but it's also nothing new. Cricket has an image problem. From personal experience I can say that Arabs in the UAE see cricket as a subcontinental sport. It's a similar perception in Canada and the US, where cricket is that weird British and South Asian sport. As a result, the Arabs, and the white and African Canadians and Americans don't play the sport, except for maybe the occasional novelty factor, because they don't think it's for them. They think it's a sport only for the South Asians and maybe the English and Australians to play.

The Canadian Cricket team that won the Americas T20 Qualifier last August

Cricket has a major problem with breaking out of its bubble, and that is a problem it has almost everywhere. In South Africa and Namibia, cricket is a sport almost exclusively played by a demographic that makes up just 10-20% of the country, and has a lot of trouble brea king into the remaining 80-90% (compare that to the UAE, where South Asians make up almost 60% of the population). They have the same image problem, where cricket is largely seen as a "white" sport. I n England, the image is settling that cricket is only a sport for the private school elites (the last five English debutants came from elite schools, and a disproportionate amount of England's recent players can be traced back to these elite private schools). Cricket has a very real image problem, and it must do so much more to engage with more of the community it inhabits. It is a problem across the cricketing world, and cricket won't be able to grow significantly and sustainably unless that issue is addressed.





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