There is a town in Europe where playing cricket is officially banned. You heard it right. At the heart of the story is the Italian town of Monfalcone.
Situated on the Adriatic coast close to Trieste airport, the game of cricket has been reportedly banned by the Mayor, who believes the game to be foreign.
Monfalcone has a considerable Bangladeshi immigrant population, which led to the growth of the team sport in the town. However, police are on the lookout for youngsters playing cricket anywhere in the town limits, and if spotted, fines of up to €100 (Rs 9324) will be extracted from them, BBC said in a report. Thus, the Bengali community travels to the outskirts of Monfalcone to play the game, the report added.
Teenagers caught and fined after CCTV cameras spotted them playing the game in a park was told by the cops that "cricket is not for Italy."
Anna Maria Cisint of the far-right League party is the Mayor of the town that has around 30,000 inhabitants. However, nearly a third of the population are immigrants -- mostly Bangladeshi Muslims who began to arrive in the late 1990s as cruise-ship builders, the British media report said.
Mayor Cisint is reportedly an anti-immigrant crusader and has vowed to “protect” the "Christian values" of Monfalcone.
Cricket balls are dangerous and the town is in no position to build cricket fields -- financially or spacially, Cisint maintains. Further justifying the ban , she told BBC that Bangladeshis consider playing cricket in Italy a privilege without offering anything in return.
“They’ve given nothing to this city, to our community. Zero,” she says. “They are free to go and play cricket anywhere else… outside of Monfalcone,” Anna Maria Cisint was quoted as saying by the English media.
