This article first appeared in The Voice on 12 September 2023.
Roland Ilube formed the London Nigerians Cricket Club in 1991. Here he tells of his love of the sport and the club’s future ambitions.
LIKE every little boy growing up in Nigeria, I was football mad. We’d moved from the UK when I was six and we stayed there until I was 15. But in the summer of 1981, when I was 10, I had a summer holiday back in the UK and a strange sport was everywhere. These blokes wearing white were always on the TV. I thought I’d better figure it out – and, obviously, it was the famous Ashes series. I returned to Nigeria completely hooked on cricket.
Fortunately, that summer I started at a secondary school that had been set up based on the UK public school system, which meant that cricket was on the curriculum. I was one of the only new children who knew what it was, so I was completely absorbed in this wonderful sport. I even went on to play for the national team in my 30s.
Since my schooldays, cricket administrators in Nigeria have tried to grow the sport beyond the old traditional network. Today, it’s certainly far more popular than when I started playing. About 20 clubs play in Lagos, and there are other leagues in Benin City, Abuja and in other cities too.
Anyone who’s been bitten by the cricket bug knows you just need to give people a chance. Once they’ve experienced the joy and passion, it never leaves you. It was the same for me. And that’s how, when I was just coming out of university in 1991, I ended up forming London Nigerians CC.
There’s now an opportunity to have these conversations, whether it’s connecting with the South Asian, Caribbean, or Nigerian communities. There’s an exciting future ahead.
It all came from conversations with my brother. We wanted to create a different image of Nigeria, and to bring together a community that was often quite isolated. A few cricketers with Nigerian heritage were playing on Saturdays across London. But we thought we could bring everyone together on Sundays.
It was tough at first. I called six or seven people who I’d played with in Nigeria that I knew were now living in the UK. It probably took a year until we could reliably get 11 players, but then word seemed to spread quite quickly. Over the next 10 or 15 years, we were at the peak of our playing powers. We’re now into the second generation of players turning out for London Nigerians – including some, like one of our fast bowlers Sammy, who are the children of our original team.
We probably have a pool of about 30 players and another 30 people who are interested and will come along to support us. It’s a chance to have a drink, a conversation, and some good Nigerian food. These days, we only play friendlies. We aim to get in 10 or 12 fixtures each summer. The important thing is that everyone gets a game and has fun. Those of us who want to play league cricket can do so on Saturdays. But Sundays are about our community – Jollof rice and chicken, Afrobeats, and bringing people together.
We play out of Botany Bay CC in Enfield, and we’ve got a great relationship with them. They’ve always been so welcoming – a night-and-day difference to some of our earlier experiences back in the 1990s. We’re now focused on growing our base even further, because the Nigerian community really is an untapped market for cricket.
We need to work at making cricket more accessible across the UK. That goes for facilities, equipment, and even the language of the sport – which can be completely confusing for newcomers. We also need to go directly into these communities and take the game to them. We’ve got to make it easy to get that first point of contact. Getting an elite player with Nigerian heritage would be another great step forward, just to give a role model and focal point to the community.
Since my schooldays, cricket administrators in Nigeria have tried to grow the sport beyond the old traditional network.
But I’m more optimistic now than I was maybe five or six years ago. Cricket in England and Wales now understands that if it goes the way it has traditionally gone, it will wither and die. So there’s now an opportunity to have these conversations, whether it’s connecting with the South Asian, Caribbean, or Nigerian communities. There’s an exciting future ahead.
Like Nigerian culture and cricket? Please contact London Nigerians CC to get involved and introduced to the wider Nigerian cricket community.