My name is Hashem Upsal.
My name is Sarmad Khan.
My name is Hamza Tufel.
My name is Wasif.
Cricket is a sport that my dad played growing up.
It's a sport that mygrandfather played growing up.
My uncle actually used to play for the Pakistani national cricket team and he played for
for actually a really long time I think it's like 14 years.
So yeah, cricket is like, has been in my family, it's been a big part of my family.
Growing up in Pakistan cricket is very big there and I always was a crazy fan of cricket.
Like my first memories out of holding a cricket bat, holding a cricket ball.
So it's just a childhood passion that has just evolved over the years.
My parents, they're originally from Pakistan,
but my dad went to Belgium to study and that's actually where I was born,
So I never lived in Pakistan myself.
And basically after that we moved to Canada and that's where I was brought up.
I emigrated to the U.S. back in 2004. I was 13 years old, my whole family did--
my mom, my dad, my sister, and my brother.
I'm from Pakistan so all my family is back there.
My dad is a doctor back there and my mom is a housewife over there.
I'm the only family member immediate family member who is in the States.
So I came here for for Arizona State and after graduating I got a job here at Intel.
So I've been staying here and that worked out pretty good.
I'll have played more cricket in Arizona than I played back home in Pakistan.
I don't think cricket will really grow unless people that live here, Americans, start playing cricket.
I would say that cricket is really growing in Phoenix. I mean if you're in India or
Pakistan or one of these places it might seem astonishing--
who plays cricket in Arizona--but there is a very growing community.
When we see people that start playing it, I think that's when the sport's gonna grow here in the United States.
One of the biggest challenges that we face is that there is no cricket field in the state of Arizona.
even though there's a league of eighteen teams, which is called the Arizona Cricket Association
and we play here every weekend--from October to April is when the cricket season goes on,
and we have to find grounds in schools like this one.
and in public parks but there's no like, official cricket field.
So that is one of the biggest challenges that we face playing cricket in Arizona.
There isn't a proper cricketing field.
Well, in the league most of the time everything is set for you when the season begins.
It's not very, I'm not very involved with the league most of the time it's just
a couple of meetings every year. You know, the financial part of it,
you have to pay your fees to sign up as a team in the league, and then over time
you pay for the grounds you play in because we don't get ACA grounds
so every team has to organize their own ground. You just got to take care of your portion, which is,
most of it is just reserving grounds and paying for the grounds,
and dealing with the--for example this Anderson Junior High. So dealing with the faculty,
dealing with the, you know, reservations and paying your dues on time, that's mostly it.
We're fighting for exposure, you know, we're fighting to be--to get our voices heard
or you know, to find someone who can lend us a piece of land where we can build a cricket field.
we need, we need the support I think because
to develop the support to a sport in America you have to have funding behind it.
You have to have people behind it. You have to have some type of backing
where you can kind of expose it to the general American public
who love sport really, who love, you know, football, who love baseball.
I think this is another sport that we can develop people's interest in.
Pakistani Cricket in Phoenix by Hussein Mohamed 2018
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