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Dubai’s Sindhi community loves playing cricket

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Dubai’s Sindhi community loves playing cricket
Shiva Pagarani along with V-Sindhi teammates in 2012

Sindhi Cricket Club Dubai’s teams had also been playing in UK, Kenya and India

The Sindhi communities, who are known for their outstanding achievements in the field of business and trade around the world, have also venturing out to play the lovely game of cricket thus exhibiting their love and finesse for the game.

Cricket archives show Sindhi cricketers like Naoomal, G.S. Ramchand and Narendra Hirwani have not only been outstanding cricketers to represent Sindh before partition of subcontinent but they also showed their outstanding performance while playing for India even after partition. G. S. Ramchand even went on to lead India and Narendra Hirwani created a record bagging 16 wickets for 136 runs against the West Indies in his debut game for India played at Chennai on 11th January, 1988 beating Bob Massie’s record of 16 wickets for 137 runs which was made in June 1972, while Karachi-born all-rounder Naoomal was the man who played as opening batsman of Indian at Lord’s in 1932.

Dubai-Sindhi-Cricket-ClubAnd even today, Sindhi community boys are very active, not only in India but also in United Arab Emirates. The Sindhis in the UAE who have been supporting the game of cricket by sponsoring local cricket took the lead by forming three teams a decade back and played matches amongst themselves and then progressed to participate in the local tournaments conducted by the Dubai Cricket Council (DCC).

The Sindhi Cricket Club (SCC) Dubai had initially formed three teams under the auspices of DCC and had named them V-Sindhi’s, U-Sindhi’s and M-Sindhi’s.

Dubai-Sindhi-Cricket-Club-TeamThese teams consisted of all leading Sindhi business men from Dubai, majority of them were from the Textile market of Dubai, food stuff, electronic, construction industries and other trading companies.

SCC first started playing a few friendly matches amongst the first 25 players who turned up in early November 2011 at the Seven’s cricket ground.

The enthusiasm, enjoyment and success from the first few games spilled into the community with more members signing up and the number of players jumped to ninety in next few years.

Dubai-Sindhi-Cricket-Club-1It was then decided by the SCC Committee headed by Shiva Pagarani and Paresh Amarnani to approach the Dubai Cricket Council and take their help to launch a tournament named Sindhi Premier 25-over league where the above three teams took on each other thrice on league basis and from there on the best two went up to the 30 over finals played on 20th April 2012.

The Sindhi Premier League conducted by the Sindhi Cricket Club turned out to be a huge success, with hundreds of people turning up to watch the final at the Sevens Stadium between Merlin V Sindhi’s and U Sindhi’s.

All the matches were played at the Sevens Cricket grounds on turf wickets under floodlights on Sundays from 7pm to 12 midnight.

Following the huge response and success of the inaugural edition of the Sindhi Premier League, Shiva Pagarani, had announced: “Next year we will launch the event with six teams called Mighty Sindhi’s Sindhi Kings, Sindhi Rock Stars, Royal Sindhi’s, United Sindhi’s and Victorious Sindhi’s. Each squad will be made up of 20 players.”

This great enthusiasm amongst the business community and the commitment from all and one had buoyed SCC to work towards a Cricket tour to Kenya in the summer next year.

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Sindhi Cricket Club Dubai team during its UK visits.

They planned to play against Sindhi Cricket Clubs in Kenya and other veteran teams. The Club had also plans to have this tournament every year. Sindhi Cricket Club team also played in UK during their planned visits for two consecutive years in 2013 and 2014.

After the visits, Shiva G Pagarani said, “We had enjoyable trips to UK, where apart from cricket we also got to interact with people from different countries who have made the UK their base”.

The SCC had around 35 players at that time who played practice matches in Dubai every month. And Pagarani noted there was a key difference between the playing-style in the UK.

The Squad consisted of Shiva G Pagarani, Paresh Amarnani, Niranjan Chawla, Neeraj Ramamorthy, Ranjeet Chavan, Freddy Sidhwa, Rahul Aswani, Gaurav Rajkumar, Deepak Odhrani, Vinay Mehra, Ashok Shewakramani and Rohit Bachani. All leading businessmen in the UAE swapped their suits for cricket whites on a tour arranged by City Cricket Academy in Leicester.

According to Mumbai Mirror report of 2018, the Sindhi Cricket Club visited UK four more times to play cricket while it also played with Hindu Gymkhana and Mumbai Gymkhana teams. The Sindhi Cricket Club has also been organizing cricket events with other Indian communities in Dubai including Gujratis and Bengalis.

Moving ahead, Sindhi Cricket Club started organizing Sindhi Premier League after the tremendous success of the first edition of the Sindhi Premier League at Sevens Rugby Cricket ground. And the beauty of the tournament was that it let the players play alongside their fathers, uncles, brothers in the same team. For the Sindhi Premier League played in September this year, some 150 players had got them registered.

Sindhis are among the leading businessmen in the UAE and their love for the game is likely to lift the cricket events to even greater heights.

The events have provided a stage for many talented players who have never played in domestic cricket and they performed brilliantly.

“We are overwhelmed by the huge support and requests from many businessmen are pouring in to play in our event. So far the Sindhi Community had exhibited their love for the game by sponsoring local tournaments,” says Pagarani.

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Source: Khaleej Times, Local Gyms & Fitness, The Free Library, Sport360, Emirates247