Singh gets top billing in Aussie cricket

By Asia Samachar Team | AUSTRALIA |

The surname Singh pops up quite a bit for players in the Australian cricket teams.

There were almost 1,500 people registered as Singh playing cricket in the 2018/19 season among 247,000 unique names on the MyCricket website last season, according to a Sun-Herald analysis of Cricket Australia data.

Two of the three most popular names in Australian club cricket were of Indian origin last year, though Smith and Jones are still near the top of the order, reports Sun-Herald.

The second-most common surname, Smith, had 954 unique player registrations. Patel was the third most common name, with 604 registrations, while Jones (553) and Brown (546) round out the top five.

Australian Indian Sports, Educational and Cultural Society founder Gurnam Singh told the newspaper that most Indians would take a bat and a ball everywhere so they could play cricket, be it at the beach, a barbecue or in the bush.

“For Indians in Australia, cricket is like a religion,” said Gurnam, a Cricket Australia community ambassador. “Who I am today, what made me, is cricket. “Many Indians in Sydney and Australia run small clubs that play cricket day and night. My friend has a cricket league and they have 40 teams who play every Sunday.”

A wave of Indian migrants has helped grow the ranks of local cricket teams with their passion for the game filling both local and representative levels across the country, the report [What’s in a Name? Singh Gets Top Billing, Sun Herald, 21 July 2019] added.

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