Photo Credit: Melbourne Renegades
For the Nepalese cricket community, the Melbourne Renegades 2021/22 Champions League has provided a welcome taste of family.
The Champions League, which enters a sixth season, is an exciting tournament featuring six nations: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, with trials beginning last week.
Keshav Pant arrived in Australia in 2014 and was impressive on the turf wickets during the Nepalese trials.
“We never get the chance to come out and visit family and friends living overseas, so this is a great opportunity to catch up with them at a cricket carnival and the Melbourne Renegades have given us that opportunity” Pant said.
“After a COVID interrupted 18 months, being able to get amongst fellow passionate Nepalese cricketers has been a wonderful experience.”
Pant has been a passionate cricket fan since he was a child and he jumped at the chance to put his name forward for his country.
“I came here in 2014, I’m a cricket lover, I live around Reservoir and through Cricket Victoria I found a really good club at Yarraville and I’ve been playing Grade 1 and Grade 2.”
“I had very big support from my family, starting at Under 12’s and onto Under 19’s and I got to a high level of Domestic cricket in Nepal.”
“I want to give a big thank you to the Melbourne Renegades, they give us a really good opportunity every season, especially out of this pandemic.”
“They gave us the chance to catch up with our besties, and our players so thank you so much to the Melbourne Renegades.”
Tara Gaire is the Team Manager for Nepal and has been involved in multicultural cricket programs for a number of years in Australia.
I’ve been involved in this tournament since the inception and every year it is growing.”
“It’s a really good time for everyone to play under the Renegades banner with your country flag so it’s very important and very significant for us” Gaire said.
“We have just come out of COVID and we are hoping for the best, this is a fantastic time for our players to meet with other players and it’s a great opportunity for multicultural communities and cricketers.”
Nepal were well represented at the trials and finalising their squad for the tournament won’t be an easy prospect.
“We had 20-25 players come for the trial and we are making a good team and I hope we can give a bit of a hard time for the other teams as well, it’s really exciting” Gaire added.
“We have a few young talents who started to play professional cricket in Australia, but most of them are fairly inexperienced and started playing 2 years ago, so are settling here and engaging in local community cricket but obviously we have some names in mind but we will finalise that shortly.”
Trials continue this week with the tournament beginning on November 21.
Click here to find out more about the 2021/22 Renegades Champions League
