The inaugural Wisden City Cup, a competition to discover untapped cricketing talent in the inner cities, was won by Times Tigers, a team from East London sponsored by this newspaper, who beat Barclays Eagles by 24 runs at Hornsey Cricket Club.
The Tigers made 129 for seven in the Twenty20 match, bolstered by 45 from Maruf Chowdhury, before bowling out the Eagles in the nineteenth over for 105.
The idea for the competition came from a conversation between Scyld Berry, the editor of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, and Angus Fraser, the former Middlesex and England bowler, in a bar in Sri Lanka on England’s tour there in 2007. Fraser complained that Middlesex had only one player of Asian descent — Owais Shah — and no black players on their books.
“When I was playing we won the County Championship with five Afro-Caribbeans in the team,” Fraser said yesterday. “I realised there were a lot of cricketers in Middlesex’s catchment area who we were not aware of.”
A year later, Fraser became the county’s director of cricket and Berry, recalling their conversation, suggested a competition to find that talent. “If you don’t play Premier League cricket, it is hard to get into the system,” he said. With investment from the Foundation for Sport and the Arts and separate sponsorship for four teams, the competition was under way.
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“I wasn’t expecting such a response but on the first day of trials we had 27 people,” Shahid ul-Alam, the Tigers coach, said. “In all, about 50 turned up. Some had never played cricket on grass before.”
Berry will select a representative side from the four teams to play Middlesex on September 20 and those who perform well could end up in the county system. There are plans to expand the contest to Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham next year.
Maaz Haffeji, the Tigers captain and a fast bowler, has already trained with Middlesex second XI and even acted as a nets bowler for Australia this summer. “It’s crazy,” Haffeji, 21, said. “In the space of a few weeks I went from being a Saturday bowler to sharing a net with Brett Lee and Mitchell Johnson.”