Tennis ball cricket also is known as ‘tape-ball cricket’ is played mostly in countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. It is a most-widely played variant of cricket all over the world. This game is also played by middle-east counties like UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Tennis ball cricket started its popularity in India and Pakistan cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, Karachi, and Lahore. The rules were different in those cities earlier. It became popular in the early 1990s. Some of the international leather cricket players like Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Kedar Jadhav have played tennis ball cricket in their younger days. It is said that this game helped players like Sachin Tendulkar, Shoaib Akthar and Wasim Akram in their days.
In India, tennis ball cricket is played almost every corner of the country. Now a day, big tournaments are organized by various organizations, political leaders to promote tennis ball cricket at the highest level. In middle-east some of the leagues have started comprising players from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
Officially, there are no stats or records maintained for the tennis ball cricket-like in international cricket. The main reason behind this is the tournaments arranged in tennis ball crickets are no managed by any central body like BCCI or state board. But the way its popularity has grown over the last decade, in future we can see a centralized system who operates the entire tennis ball cricket fraternity.
