Pakistan Under-19 Cricket Team Sparks Controversy in Portsmouth

The crowd gathered with a purpose. They left with an apology of sorts, if not in words then in silence.

Outside a Marriott hotel in Portsmouth, anti-immigration protesters turned up ready for confrontation, fuelled by rumours that a fresh group of asylum seekers had been moved into the city. What they found instead was the Pakistan Under-19 cricket team.

The scene unfolded less than 24 hours after Portsmouth had already been on edge. On Sunday, a large dinghy carrying an estimated 140 asylum seekers landed at Eastney harbour. A black-clad vigilante group moved quickly, attempting to block streets around the port to prevent the new arrivals from leaving the area. Police eventually broke up the demonstration in the early hours of Monday, using a dispersal order and the threat of arrest.

The political temperature rose with it. A spokesperson for the prime minister, Andy Burnham, condemned what they called “intimidating and thuggish behaviour”, while Burnham himself vowed to stop “the politics of poison seeping into our streets”.

That poison did not take long to resurface.

On Monday, with tensions still raw, images began circulating online: a coach parked outside the city’s Marriott, a group of young Asian men seen entering and leaving. To some, it was enough. Protesters were back on the streets.

Among those called to the scene was George Madgwick, leader of the Reform UK group on Hampshire county council. In a Facebook post since deleted, Madgwick described arriving at the hotel and speaking directly to the manager, who told him the truth: these were cricketers, not asylum seekers.

“The hotel explained it was a Pakistani cricket team staying. The team coach came to speak to me personally and I saw proof,” he wrote. Madgwick then walked back out to the waiting crowd, 40 to 50 people by his count, and relayed what he had been told.

“I then went to speak to the crowd gathering of 40-50 people and confirmed with them and assured them that it was a cricket team. Immediately the crowd respectfully accepted that. Within five minutes they were gone.”

No chanting. No stand-off. Just a quiet dispersal once the facts cut through the anger.

Madgwick cast himself as a calming presence. “I’m glad I could do my bit to help the situation and stop tensions rising,” he wrote, before turning his fire on central government. “But the government need to understand why things like this happen. It’s not because the protestors and crowds are bad people. Local residents just want to protect the city they love in the best way they know how.”

Others saw something far darker in the instinct that brought demonstrators to a hotel simply because a group of non-white young men were inside.

A spokesperson for Stand Up to Racism told the Portsmouth News: “Allowing racists to mobilise like this every time they become suspicious of any group of non-white people is extremely dangerous. It is racism in action and it has to stop.”

While the politics played out, cricket’s authorities moved quickly behind the scenes. The England and Wales Cricket Board contacted the Pakistan Cricket Board to check on the wellbeing of the Under-19 squad and began reviewing security for the remainder of the tour.

The team itself has had little time to process the episode. Pakistan Under-19s lost a four-day Test to England Under-19s by 10 runs last week. They face the same opponents again in a one-day match at Arundel on Wednesday, around 25 miles from Portsmouth, before a final ODI in Guildford on Saturday.

All this with Pakistan’s senior men’s team also in the country, locked into the third and final Test against England at Edgbaston.

For the teenagers in that Portsmouth hotel, the tour was supposed to be about new conditions, new opponents, a taste of English cricketing culture. Instead, they became an accidental flashpoint in a domestic argument that had nothing to do with them.

They will move on to Arundel and Guildford, to runs and wickets and selection debates. The question for Portsmouth is whether it can move on from a weekend when the sight of a coach and a group of young Asian men was all it took to summon a crowd to the streets.