Dylan Bettencourt
After 20 years, a Madrid Cricket Club will finally get a stadium they can call home.
The club will use the newly refurbished La Elipa stadium, which is also a baseball ground, as reported by The Times.
The club had been playing their home games in the city of Toledo, an hour and a half away from Madrid for 20 years.
Vice-president Lewis Clark said their temporary home could be described as playing extreme cricket as the pitch was made of stone. The game was forced to pause once when a horse and cart went by.
The club was initially founded in the 1970s but was abandoned in the 1990s before being revived in 2001.
In 2016 the team shared a home with a local polo club where former Indian cricket captain MS Dhoni played a game with them.
When the polo club went bankrupt the cricket club was left homeless once again.
That meant their home games moved 900km away to Murcia in the south of Spain and even that didn’t stop the team from spending their own money to pay for hotels when they travelled for games.
The team of 60 registered players includes players from Britain, Afghanistan and India.
Vice-president Clark said he spent his days attempting to get politicians to assist the club by building a stadium they could use.
“If politicians don’t see demand for it they’re not going to bother because there’s no votes in it for them,” he said.
“It’s been a bit of a Catch-22. You need to show there’s a demand but you can’t show there’s demand if there’s nowhere to play. We’ve been going around in circles,” he said.
Last year Sofia Miranda finally answered their requests and got the cricket club a three-hour slot on Sundays to host T20 fixtures.
The Madrid Cricket Club is next hosting a charity tournament in their new home for refugees from Ukraine.
Image source: @ElPais
