Italian city bans cricket in parks after a two-year old kid got injured

In an eventful incident, which took place recently, an Italian city has banned the game of cricket in parks. A two-year-old boy was struck by a ball while he was in the balcony of his house. It hasn’t really come across as a good news for the Afghan and Pakistan migrants there. After the ball struck the boy in the head, the mayor of Bolzano in northern Italy banned the game in the city’s parks.

The boy was about 100 meters away from the game, and he recovered from a concussion after a while. Bolzano has now regulated an order restricting cricket to tennis courts and a baseball field.

Parents sent an email

Mayor Renzo Caramaschi said the ban was prompted by an email he had received from the boy’s family about the cricket ball having hit their son and the after effects. Even though very few Italians play the game of cricket, it is a huge hit among Afghans and Pakistanis over there.

“We will soon make an assessment with representatives of the Pakistani community,” Caramaschi was quoted as saying. Italy’s Corriere della Sera daily reported that Brescia, another northern Italian city, banned the gentle man’s game from the city in 2009.
Bolzano is in the mainly German-speaking Alto Adige region, called South Tyrol by German speakers, which has a mountainous border with Austria, as reported by TOI.

In the year 2015, exactly around October, the regional Alto Adige website reported that Bolzano was home to 900 Pakistanis, with another 3,000 in the whole region. The figures for Afghans were 100 and 300, respectively.

There have been plenty of such incidents in the past, related to the game of cricket. Due to the lack of sporting fields or spaces, the localities usually prefer playing near by rather than traveling to certain areas, to play a two-hour game.