The council-owned Spikes Bridge Park sits 11 short miles west of the hallowed halls and pristine turf of Lord’s, august home of the 238-year-old Marylebone Cricket Club, and a gritty 15-minute suburban stroll north from Southall station.
These humble surroundings beneath the Heathrow flightpath are home to a 12-year-old cricket club where something magical is growing – a club not only engaging its predominantly South Asian local community simply by providing cricket in an area that has seen nearby clubs contracting and even folding in recent years, but actively going out into it, taking the game to kids that it otherwise might pass by.
At the heart of it, an indefatigable beacon of enthusiasm, is Mohammad Tanvir Ahamed, a Level 3 coach who in 2022 won the ECB’s Middlesex Coach of the Year prize, in 2023 was honoured as a ‘Community Hero’ in the Pride of Cricket Awards, and last year was a finalist in the London Sports Awards.
London Tigers started life in east London in 1986 as a Bangladeshi community charity.
Initially, they formed a football team and in 2010 started playing pick-up cricket games in Victoria Park, Hackney. Pining for a home of their own and an organised league in which to play, in 2013 they heard that Spikes Bridge Park, erstwhile home of the recently defunct Southall CC’s third XI, was available.
A 25-year lease was agreed, and Tigers moved their cricket operations west, joining the county’s second-tier club competition, the Middlesex Cricketers League.
It was a major step forward, but the future – the foundations for sustaining a club – lay in youth. And to run youth teams, of course, they needed the ECB’s ‘Clubmark’ accreditation.
After two failed applications, Tanvir was brought over from east London and immediately reached out to Clifford Pile, chairman of both the Middlesex Junior Cricket Association (MJCA) and its Central region, in which Tigers are based. In late 2018, after much hard work, Clubmark was granted and Tigers had their lift off.
Under-13 and 15 teams were entered in MJCA competition the following year – finishing second and first respectively in Central’s Division Two, thereby earning promotion – although Pile advised Tanvir to concentrate on recruiting five- to eight-year-olds, “because they will feed up into older teams and you’re much more likely to get their parents engaged”.
Six short years later, Tigers now enter eight junior sides in the MJCA leagues, with an under-10 side playing friendlies. Club membership, including its three adult teams, has swollen to around 200 and growing.
And the new kids on the block aren’t there to make up the numbers. Last summer, both the under-12 and under-17 sides won their regional leagues and reached the county semi-finals. Of the other six, four came second and two third.
Tanvir spends seven days a week at the club and attends every game, smiling and cajoling, always thinking big.
“In this part of the world there was hardly any cricket offering for anyone, let alone the Asian community, until Tigers came along,” says Pile.
“There was a massive vacuum. The ambition was to establish a strong community club. Every year they’ve built up not only the numbers but also the quality of players.”
It was not simply a case of setting up shop and waiting for the kids to turn up, explains Tanvir as he serves your correspondent coffee in the communal room, with its prayer mats in the corner, before showing me around the boxy and functional clubhouse, past the smart reception area and into spacious dressing rooms also used for the floodlit astroturf football pitches on the far side of the outdoor exercise area.
Lifting the anti-vandal shutters as the under-12 team starts to dribble in, he continues: “Although this is a very big South Asian community here in Southall, with a lot of passion for cricket, it is also a low-income area where many kids cannot afford kit, or cannot afford to play – or maybe their parents cannot even take them to the game.”
Take Archana Racwal, a schoolteacher who arrived from Indian Punjab 16 years ago.
“I finish work around five,” she says, “and it’s not possible to take the boys somewhere else. I’d have to think about them not playing. It’s very convenient for us here. We can walk to the ground. Without London Tigers, they’d be staying home: reading, studying, maybe playing on the street.”
The central plank of this one-man community outreach scheme has involved Tanvir going into local schools and offering free after-hours cricket sessions, a sort of miniChance to Shine not only teaching the rudiments of the game to would-be future Tigers but training teachers to put on sessions themselves. If they can find time.
Inderjit Singh, PE teacher at Villiers High School, is in no doubt about Tigers’ local impact.
“I teach 14- to 16-year-olds and have seen directly how cricket has helped several boys’ confidence and social skills grow,” Singh said.
“Without Tigers being there, offering something for them to do – whether it’s matches or training – a few of them could easily have gone in the wrong direction.”
The watchword here is accessibility. Keen to ensure as many kids as possible have a way into the game, Tigers will often waive their £60 junior summer subs – around half the fees paid elsewhere in the borough – offering free matches, kit and training to the most disadvantaged.
Sahib Jot Singh, a 13-year-old “left-arm pacer” in only his second year of cricket and still glowing after dismissing three of Ealing’s county players in two overs the previous evening, had his first contact at school and, after Tigers offered free training, “told my parents that I really like cricket and want to play”.
It’s a common story. Any financial shortfall can be made up through the winter training programme (£130) and extra one-to-one sessions for the most talented cricketers, while Spikes Bridge hosts 10 to 15 multi-sports events days through the summer, not only raising revenue but offering vocational training and vital work experience for young Tigers.
“I was involved in helping organise events, supporting day-to-day operations, and assisting with admin tasks, learning communication and practical skills, software skills, how to work independently,” said Sowad Hossain.
“I now work as a finance assistant and the experience at Tigers helped me transition smoothly into employment.”
Besides these socio-economic barriers, Tanvir has tackled multicultural Southall’s inter-faith hurdles, leafleting churches, mosques, synagogues, temples.
The junior membership has Sikh and Hindu boys who in the past might have travelled to Indian Gymkhana CC and Pakistani boys who, before Tigers, gravitated to Osterley, both of them a long rush-hour drive away. There are Afghan refugees, and kids with Sri Lankan, Nepali and Bangladeshi heritage.
“It was hard for me in the beginning, but through a love of cricket things are changing,” says Tanvir.
“It’s the same umbrella, a club for everyone. The Indian kids and Pakistani coaches are like a family. You can’t tell who is who - same smile, same enjoyment, same dedication, same respect. They sacrifice themselves for each other, like brothers.”
Or sisters, for here is a third barrier Tigers are addressing.
“With South Asian women - we’ve started a women’s softball team now and a women’s walking cricket team, and we’re hoping to start women’s and girls’ hardball teams in the future,” Tanvir added.
A couple of girls have already made it onto the Middlesex pathway while playing in Tigers’ boys’ teams, with 20-year-old Rachana Cambampaty now in the Middlesex first-team squad having previously been on Sunrisers’ performance programme, and the 14-year-old Prabseerat Kaur making the county under-15 side after just a season of club cricket.
She plays hardball at Ealing but would return as and when Tigers could offer this. And with Southall being ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ country, she too is aiming high: “I want to make it as a professional. If I work hard, I think I can achieve it in two to three years.”
“What they’ve achieved here is amazing,” reflects Pile. “I’ve always said that sport breaks down barriers – religious, social, gender, whatever. Once kids are playing together, they forget what people’s backgrounds are.
“I was at the club’s awards night, with over 100 people crammed into their tea room, enjoying each other’s success, and it’s largely driven by Tanvir’s infectious enthusiasm.”
For all that Tigers’ junior section is thriving, pointing toward sustainable long-term success, the aim is also to build competitive senior teams that can make their own waves among the storied old clubs of the Middlesex County League, eight of whom have reached national knockout finals, four lifting the trophy, while four-time runners-up, neighbours Ealing, have won two national T20 competitions.
The first team’s promotion last year lifted them into the third tier, where they will compete with former national champions Enfield and finalists Brentham.
The mood at Spikes Bridge Park is bullish. It is a club on the move, with three lanes of high-spec nets and a square that’s improving all the time, Tanvir spending any rare spare hours supplementing the cursory rolling carried out by council workers who don’t always mark out the correct length of wicket.
An adjacent pitch is being developed on the north side of the park, its square due to be ready for use next summer, thus providing a home for the third team and a place for the outdoor practice that 19-year-old seamer Muhammad Suhaib, a recruit from Tanvir’s after-school sessions who is now in the adult teams, believes can kick Tigers’ first team to the MCCL Premier Division “within two to three years”.
Pile isn’t sure the facilities are yet up to scratch but confirms that the local MP is in talks with the club about building a new pavilion and further improving facilities here. For Tanvir, such rarefied heights would be an extraordinary icing on the cake.
Meanwhile, he continues to collect his ingredients and diligently bakes, ensuring the flow of talent into and through London Tigers is as strong as it can be, and that the inclusive mood around the club reflects his interest in the sport’s wider community impact.
In many ways, the victory has already been achieved.
“At the end of the day,” he says, as ever with a smile, “I just wanted to show that people who come from a faraway country like me can come to England and build something positive.”
This story first appeared in Wisden Cricket Monthly magazine.