[spireitematt]

Read a piece this morning about cricket starting to take off in Germany mainly down to Afghan immigrants however there is a book written by Sid Waddell's son called the Field of Dreams about German criket before and during the Second World War

Not just Afghan immigrants but immigrants from England, Australia etc are promoting and teaching the game in countries which don't normally play cricket or countries you wouldn't associate with the sport. A lot of the European countries don't understand the rules, the game or they are quite sceptical of it.

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Thanks to YouTube there's also a growing number of Americans taking an interest.  There's a couple of baseball fans who converted to the faith a few months ago, set up a channel called Cricket For Americans and they're currently getting up at 3am every day to do a livestream watch of the England vs Windies Tests.  You have to respect their commitment, and they've grown quite knowledgeable about the game in a fairly short space of time.

A lot of Americans don't know that the first ever international match was between USA and Canada in the 1800s in New York. A lot of them don't understand the rules or the game. They play American Football and Baseball which the rest of the World don't really play. The only countries I know who play Baseball is America, Japan, Taiwan etc.

They are trying to get American Football popular over here and Shane Warne and Sachin Tendulkar did play T20 games over in the states to try and get interest but I don't think it was very successful. Look at our Football or as they call it Soccer, it's only starting to be acceptable, I think Cricket will take a lot longer to be acceptable by Americans.