Football and cricket - from Italy to Australia and back

The Italian men’s team will be in a cricket World Cup, and might not be in a football World Cup. A history of how that happened.

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About 20 years ago, there was this incredibly charismatic, suave striker that came out of Italian football. His name was Christian Vieri and he was very popular all around the world.

He scored 23 goals for Italy in internationals. People absolutely loved him, and when he was a kid, he had a picture of Allan Border on his wall.

These two things are linked in a really, really weird way because anyone who knows Allan Border knows that for all the incredible attributes he had in cricket, suaveness was not really one of them. He wasn't thought of as cool, but to a young Vieri who was growing up in Australia, Border was incredible. So that was his hero.

Border captained Australia for like a million years. He was not suave, he was not striking. He was a gritty, grinding, incredible Test batter and turned Australia into this machine-like side, but he did it through grimaced facial expressions. On the other hand, Vieri was this free-wheeling footballer. But also, an Italian footballer, and Allan Border was an Australian cricketer. The idea that Vieri would grow up with Border on his wall is so bizarre. But then you need to know a little bit about the relationship between football and cricket, or maybe Australia and Italy.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a lot of people from Italy started to migrate to Australia. Vieri was one of those people. Obviously, he would eventually go back to Italy.

But Vieri and Border are not the only link that football has to cricket in Italy. As we've mentioned before, the football team AC Milan also started out as a cricket team. So there has been cricket in Italy for a very long time. At a certain point, if you go back far enough, football and cricket always sort of merge.

But the reason we're talking about Vieri, Border and AC Milan is because the Italian men's cricket team just got to the T20 World Cup.

Italy beat Scotland recently, and as a result, they qualified for the T20 World Cup. They beat some other sides as well. In fact, they've been building a pretty good team for a while now, so it's no real surprise that they would end up in a World Cup.

It's maybe more of a surprise they'd beat a team as good as Scotland, who have also been a pretty solid side at various points. Maybe that just shows you how good Italy, or the Azzurri have been. But if you skip things like AC Milan, the best place to start with Italian cricket is actually a guy called Joe Scuderi.

He was an absolute cult icon in Australian domestic cricket in the 1990s, mostly playing for South Australia. He had this incredible mullet. He could whack it a little bit, was great with the yorker and everyone loved him. Of course, the problem was that he wasn't quite good enough to play for Australia.

He did play for them at the youth level, and he was also good enough to play first-class cricket in Australia, and then go over to Lancashire and do the same.

But one of the reasons that Scuderi could go over to Lancashire is because he had an Italian passport. And so because of this, when he wasn't playing in Lancashire League Cricket, or for Lancashire or in the UK in general, he would be representing Italy.

This was absolutely fine for a while, but the ICC had different regulations than European cricket had. There's a great thread by Andrew Nixon about this on Bluesky.

Essentially, it all boiled down to what it meant to be Italian. In Italy, they thought that Joe Scuderi was one of them.

But the ICC said, no, he doesn't, and it's to do with whether you're born in a country or live in a country. And Scuderi didn't do either of those things. But the Italians were very clear he was one of them.

Italy decided to take the ICC to the Court of Arbitration for Scuderi.

That basically changed the eligibility for Associate teams. And Scuderi went on to play for Italy for ages. And not only that, but he also coached them. He's a huge part of why Italian cricket was actually so strong. However, remember that Scuderi’s family had moved to Australia generations earlier to immigrate there.

As a weird aside, remember that Italy has a city called Monfalcone, which a lot of Bangladeshis immigrated to, and then they went out of their way to ban cricket.

However, Italy had a regulation that allowed anyone with a relative born in Italy after 1861 to be considered an Italian citizen. Scuderi would've been a citizen under that. It's actually recently changed, and now it's one grandparent. But either way, it meant that a lot of people around the world, specifically for our story around the cricket world, can qualify to play for Italy.

There is Emilio Gay, a hard-hitting player for Durham whose dad is from Grenada, but his mom is Italian. There is Gareth Berg, a long-time county pro, who plays for Italy and coaches the team. There is Grant Stewart, who plays for Kent, and is also qualified to play for Italy.

All of these guys as a collective played their role in beating Scotland.

In fact, under the regulations of Italy, there's quite a few players that you've probably heard of before who also would've qualified to play for them. Michael Di Venuto, who played ODIs for Australia, England’s Jade Dernbach or Phil Hughes.

Italian cricket have realised that there are a lot of guys like these out there, and so now they have started to recruit them, which of course makes them a better cricket team.

Of course, a lot of people don't like this. They don't like the idea of immigration affecting cricket teams. But it is worth just having a look at Australia, and their first ever Test match. They had a guy called Charles Bannerman, who you may have heard of because he still holds a record in Test cricket today - which is the highest percentage of runs in a completed innings. Bannerman was not born in Australia. In fact, five of Australia's 11 players were either born in England or Ireland.

South Africa's first team had a bunch of people born in England as well. When cricket teams start, they often do so with players from other cricket nations. You can like this or not like this. But this is the history of our sport.

So after trying people like Di Venuto and Dernbach, who were at the end of their careers, Italy went to recruit players like Gay and Stewart, who are more in their prime.

That brings us to the Manentis. This is a name you might have heard in cricket, depending on how much you follow the Big Bash because they've been around in the tournament for quite a bit. They are people who can qualify to play for Australia, and as it turns out, they can also qualify to play for Italy as well. And so they did. One of them (Harry) took 5 for 31 against Scotland.

But perhaps the biggest name player of recent times who is still fairly close to his prime is another Joe: Joe Burns. Say what you will, but Italy have done very well with the Joes.

Burns played 23 Test matches for Australia, and averaged in the high thirties. He played some good knocks. He maybe wasn't quite a Test match level player, but he wasn't far off it either. And it turns out that Burns also qualified to play for Italy.

Once he stopped playing for Australia, he then waited a couple of years and then he could qualify for Italy.

He said it was about honouring his grandparents and also his brother, who passed away not that long ago. In fact, when he plays for Italy, he uses the number 85 on his back, which was his brother's old number.

Now quite clearly when we think of Italy, we usually think of football.

But there is another interesting connection between Italy and Australia. And no, it's not what Vieri had on his wall.

The Italian cricket team has a lot of people with Australian ancestry or have even learned the game in Australia. But quite a few years ago, the Australian football team, or soccer as we call it, was not a particularly good side for a long period of time. They didn't go to World Cups or anything like that.

Then through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, they got a lot better and started to qualify for the World Cup quite regularly. Some of that was to do with the changing of regulations, not ICC, but FIFA. That's a whole other piece for another day.

But also, when Australia got better at football, there were certain names in the team: Mark Bresciano, John Aloisi, and Vince Grella. They became really important Australian footballers. Those names all sound somewhat Italian because they all have family from there as well.

So when you think about it, there’s this incredibly weird situation - Australia qualifies for the football World Cup with the help of people whose families had immigrated there from Italy. Australia is currently helping Italy qualify for the cricket World Cup, and Italy helped Australia qualify for the football World Cup.

I mean we are talking about a symbiotic relationship between these two countries who are a long way from each other on the map. But perhaps the most incredible thing when you think of Italy, World Cups it’s the kicking game and not the hitting. The Italian men's cricket team has qualified for the World Cup, whereas the Italian men's football team may not qualify for their World Cup.

How much has sport changed when Italy might be in a cricket World Cup, but not in a football version?

Who's the global game now? (I mean, it's still football.) But who's the global game now?