European cricket returns to the Cártama Oval

The European Cricket League (ECL) is set to begin on 7 February at the Cártama Oval, in the Guadalhorce Valley. The international club tournament will last six weeks, with 30 teams from 29 countries taking part.

Cártama will welcome cricket back to its Oval again after England won the European Cricket Championship (which crowns the best European nation) that was held there last October.

This competition will be the second one of the 2022 cricket season after the European Cricket Series started at the end of January. The ECL consists of an initial five weeks of group matches being played, before finishing off with a four-day championship week.

The group stage matches are going to be played from 7 February to 11 March. There will be a total of five games played every weekday, starting at 9am, 11am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm. The winner of each group will then progress to the championship week, with teams facing off against each other.

The European Cricket League will see some of the sport’s biggest names take to the Oval.

The Dutch duo of Julian de Mey and Musa Ahmed, who play for HBS Craeyenhout and V.O.C. Rotterdam respectively, will hope to bring their form into the tournament after impressing in the ECC.

Fayez Nasseri and Nasrullah Zadran, both of MSC Frankfurt, will also hope to replicate their performances in the ball-hitting department for the national team, where they almost beat England.

Belgian Faisal Mehmood will hope to lead Exiles Cricket Club to success, while Sweden’s all-rounder champion Azam Khalil aspires to do the same.

European cricket has shown huge numbers in the last few years, in terms of the amount of teams, viewers and consumers of the sport. There are currently 30 contracted national federations with European cricket, and between them they offer over 300 days of live cricket action to over 20 million European fans of the sport, with over one billion worldwide.

Moreover, there are over 40 million daily viewers of the ECL and the ECC, while the European Cricket Series (ECS) pulls in three million people to their TVs.

The tournament is played in a T10 format and is considered a short form of the sport, with games lasting around 90 minutes. Teams play a single innings and they are limited to a maximum of ten overs per side.

For more information on the ECL, you can visit the European Cricket Network website.