T20 cricket tournament returns to Brampton with hopes of surpassing 200M viewers worldwide

Vancouver Knights player Saad Bin Zafar reacts while bowling against the Cricket West Indies B Team in the first half of their final of the Global T-20 Canada Cricket tournament in King City, Ont., July 15, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Fred Thornhill

A cricket tournament that attracted more worldwide viewers in 2019 than any other North American sporting event apart from the Super Bowl is returning to Brampton after a three-year hiatus, and organizers say this year’s edition will be the biggest yet.

The GT20 Canada cricket tournament is set to begin on Thursday at the CAA Centre in Brampton, with six teams from across the country playing a total of 25 matches over 18 days.

The Brampton Wolves, Montreal Tigers, Mississauga Panthers, Surrey Jaguars, Toronto Nationals and the Vancouver Knights will compete to be crowned the nation’s best cricket club.

Despite not having a mainstream foothold in North America, cricket is the second most watched sport in the world, after soccer, and a massive audience tuned in to watch the last edition of the GT20 Canada in 2019.

“In 2019, we had a television audience of 133 million people worldwide and we were broadcast live in 84 countries,” said Karan Singh, the event’s director.

Organizers say that number was up from 55 million during the tournament’s inaugural year in 2018, and they’re expecting a TV audience of more than 200 million this year.

The tournament’s global appeal is due in part to the fact that it has attracted some of the world’s biggest cricket stars to participate.

The first two tournaments included legends the likes of Chris Gayle, Yuvraj Singh and Lasith Malinga.

Gayle, a Jamaican cricketer considered one of the greatest batsmen to ever play T20, returns to the tournament this year as a member of the Panthers.

Each participating club was permitted to draft two “marquee stars,” a total of eight other international players and six Canadians to their respective rosters.

Some other notable stars participating in this year’s tournament are Harbhajan Singh, Shakib Al Hasan, Shahid Afridi and Rassie van der Dussen.

Singh says that when organizers were putting together the first edition of the event in 2018, it took some convincing to get world-renowned players to participate in a Canadian tournament.

“When this tournament was still a concept and not a reality, it took our team – and our team comprises of people who've worked in this sport for decades – a lot of maneuvering, a lot of convincing and leveraging relationships to get them here,” Singh said.

“But once that happened and they saw that cricket is possible; the facility that we built, the infrastructure that we built, although it was temporary, was still fit for international cricket. It became a lot easier to get them to come back for this three-week period every year.”

In addition to cricket’s massive international audience, the sport is also growing in popularity in Canada, and is particularly beloved in the many South Asian and Caribbean communities across the GTA.

Singh says that having some of the sport’s most well-known players compete on Canadian soil will help to grow the game’s popularity even more, and inspire the next generation of Canadian cricketers.

“We have so many South Asian members of the Canadian community, so many members from the Caribbean community, so many members from the Commonwealth community, all living here, and everybody has grown up loving this sport,” Singh said.

“For them, the ability to actually see [cricket stars] live and in person is a pipe dream, but because of this tournament, that pipe dream becomes reality. It allows them to connect deeper with the Canadian community as well because it helps ease that transition of becoming Canadian and having familiarity with things that they grew up with in their home.”

Cricket’s recent surge in popularity in the GTA has also prompted calls to improve the sport’s infrastructure in the region, as the demand for space to play cricket is now far outweighing the supply.

Earlier this year, the City of Brampton launched an expression of interest process for a 112-acre city-owned parcel of land near Highways 401 and 407, with the goal of creating a “new urban core” that would be anchored by a “state-of-the-art, multi-purpose cricket facility,” but the project is likely still years away.

“Infrastructure is only developed when it has purpose. This tournament serves as a catalyst for that purpose,” Singh said.

“We’ve been working with the City of Brampton and Mayor Patrick Brown, who has been a big proponent in pushing the sport forward, and now the province of Ontario has backed us as well, we’re seeing the GTA come alive with the sport. But it's not just restricted to the GTA, on the other coast, in B.C., this sport is growing in popularity; in Calgary, in Montreal, everywhere we go."

Singh says the GT20 Canada tournament is also an opportunity to introduce cricket to a whole new set of sports fans who may not yet be familiar with it – a process he says is already underway.

“We’re seeing the effects of cricket spilling over into traditional mainstream sports and we're starting to see acceptance of the sport from non-traditional fans. It's something really encouraging,” he added.

Singh says he hopes sports fans of all stripes will tune in to this year’s tournament, which begins with a Peel Region clash between the Wolves and Panthers on Thursday at 3:30 p.m.

“What fans can expect if they tune in or come to the venue – and I'd love for them to come to the venue, I think the in-person experience is the best experience of the sport – is they're going to get world-class cricketing action,” Singh said.

“They're going to see their superstars who they grew up loving play right in their backyard, and it's going to be an amazing atmosphere. It's going to be loud, it's going to be fun, and everybody's going to enjoy the sport.”

With files from CP24's Chris Fox