It's the 'travelling circus' of cricket taking Europe by storm.
The European Cricket Network is the home of the European Cricket Series, the European Cricket Championship and the European Cricket League.
It's also the home of a seemingly bottomless well of both miraculous and hilarious cricket highlights – and it turns out the man behind it all is an Aussie.
The Kerry Packer of European Cricket
Daniel Weston, a finance and trading guru, moved to Europe a number of years ago following the sale of his tech business at just 23.
Weston used to play state cricket for WA with the likes of Shaun Marsh, so it wasn't long before he was playing for the German national team.
What he decided to do next would alter the sporting landscape of an entire continent.
"We won against Sweden one night and there was a guy's brother there, and he did a Facebook live, filming us walk off the field," Weston said via Zoom at the ECN headquarters in Zurich.
"I thought, 'oh, that's really interesting', because he got a few thousand views of that, and I thought, 'who is watching the German cricket team walk off the field?''"
"I had a hunch that I needed to get the German team together again, stream them and record it, just to see how many people wanted to see some cricket being played by the German national team."
Turns out a lot of people wanted to watch, and just like that, German Cricket TV — a Facebook page dedicated to sharing highlights of the German national team —was born.
After hundreds of thousands of views in the first week, requests from across Germany came flooding in – "come film us play".
"Because of German Cricket TV and because of the influx of people, people were like, 'what cricket's in Germany? I want to start a team I want to start a club!'."
"It went from 60 clubs to 370 clubs in the space of about a month."
European Cricket is born on a frozen lake in Switzerland
Following the success of German Cricket TV, Weston and his team were asked to help broadcast 'Ice Cricket'.
That tournament is as mad as it sounds – cricket played on a frozen Lake St Moritz in Switzerland.
It was here at a gala dinner a chance meeting with Roger Feiner, the then-head of broadcasting for FIFA, would change cricket in Europe forever.
"I literally bumped into Roger on the ice, and he says, 'Danny, so great to meet you last night, I've got two friends I want to introduce you to, Frank and Thomas'."
"I asked, 'what are they up to? What have they done?'.
"And he says, 'oh, they were the founders of the (UEFA) Champions League, and we've been talking and working together, we're looking for a new sport to bring to Europe, now that I've met you, I think cricket's the next sport, and you're the guy to do it'."
Not long after this chance meeting on a frozen lake, Weston travelled to Zurich and pitched a Champions League format but for cricket, and European Cricket was born.
The travelling circus begins
European Cricket quickly became one of the only sporting organisations in the world that benefited from COVID, because they were then forced to take it on the road like a travelling circus, to wherever was not locked down at the time.
"We ended up doing over 900 matches during that 2020 Corona year," Weston said.
"Nine hundred matches live streamed with five-camera production, live streamed into India and on our European Cricket Network channel."
And that has been Weston's number-one priority — making sure all these matches, which are all T10 cricket, be streamed with a high level of production that is incredibly disproportionate to the standard of cricket being played.
But that's the point.
"A kid who is four or five years old, doesn't know if that's Ronaldo or whether that's their uncle.
"All they know is they're on TV, they're up in lights, and they must be good."
But sometimes they're not good. Sometimes they're hilariously bad.
And that has been the charm of the European Cricket Network that has not only seen it explode across Europe, but online as well.
Many clips have gone viral, and Weston says that's all part of the show.
"It's entertainment… we want to make art, we want to make cricket art, cricket entertainment," he said.
"Because they're amateur cricketers it's a little bit like a reality TV show, it's a little bit like Big Brother, right?
"Because you don't know how they're going to perform under pressure.
"So when that crazy one-handed catch happens, we've got that captured on five cameras, so we're then able to celebrate that, and sport is about celebrating."
Its watchability is undeniable, and turns out so is its growth.
"We've got 405 clubs that have been in our events now, 33 counties we've held our events in, and we've had 6,000 cricketers play in our events."
"On any metric, it's the world's biggest sporting project."
The time is now for cricket in Europe
While Weston likes to think this incredible growth is due to the ECN product itself, even he knows the reasons stem far deeper than that.
Certain socio-political situations across the subcontinent have led to a significant influx of young Indians seeking higher education, as well as refugees fleeing Afghanistan.
Because of this, Weston says it's now or never for cricket in Europe.
"This is a really important time for cricket [in Europe] because if it doesn't get seized now, it might never get seized," he said.
"Hopefully Afghanistan gets better and there won't be a refugee crisis there again, but the fact that in 2015, 2016, 2017 they were coming across to Europe, that meant that there were 800,000 potential cricket lovers coming to Europe.
"They're never going to leave and they're going to have lots of children, and that might never happen again when you can get such a big influx of cricket lovers.
"It has to be seized now."
So what’s next for European Cricket?
Weston is certainly not the kind of guy to dream small.
"The dream is in 25 years; cricket is the number-one bat and ball sport in Europe.
"This is being done to inspire those fathers and mothers and young kids to play, and that's what always gets me emotional at our events.
"When I see the eight-year-old girl take the one-handed screamer that she never thought she could take… her excitement is what draws me in and makes me really proud of what we're doing."
With gold like this being pumped of the ECN every day, whatever happens, we will be watching.
