Anti-Immigration Protesters Mistake Pakistani Cricket Team for Asylum Seekers

Anti-immigration protesters descended on a Portsmouth hotel expecting to confront newly arrived asylum seekers. They went home minutes later after discovering they had tried to target the Pakistan Under-19 cricket team.

The episode, jarring and faintly absurd, unfolded against a far darker backdrop.

From harbour flashpoint to hotel doorstep

Portsmouth has been on edge. On Sunday, a large dinghy carrying an estimated 140 asylum seekers landed at Eastney harbour, triggering a sizeable protest and drawing in a black-clad vigilante group that tried to block streets around the port.

Police eventually broke up that demonstration in the early hours of Monday after securing a dispersal order and threatening arrests. By then, the images of crowds, flares and blocked roads had already ricocheted around social media.

Andy Burnham, the prime minister, condemned what he called “intimidating and thuggish behaviour” and warned of the “politics of poison seeping into our streets”.

Those streets did not stay quiet for long.

On Monday, word began to spread online: a coach had been spotted outside the Marriott Hotel in the city, and a group of young Asian men were seen going inside. In the current climate, that was enough to summon protesters back out.

Around 40 to 50 people gathered. Among those called to the scene was George Madgwick, leader of the Reform UK group on Hampshire county council.

‘It was a Pakistani cricket team’

Madgwick later described, in a Facebook post since deleted, how the stand-off fizzled out almost as soon as he walked through the hotel doors.

“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.

“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.

“I’m glad I could do my bit to help the situation and stop tensions rising. 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.”

The scene outside the Marriott evaporated almost as quickly as it formed, but the implications lingered. A group of teenagers, in the country to play cricket, had briefly become the focus of anti-immigration anger purely because of how they looked and where they were staying.

‘Racism in action’

Anti-racism campaigners saw nothing comic in the mix-up.

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.”

For the Pakistan Under-19 squad, the incident has prompted concern at the highest levels of the sport. The England and Wales Cricket Board has contacted the Pakistan Cricket Board to check on the players’ wellbeing and is reviewing security arrangements for the remainder of the tour.

The teenagers have little time to dwell on events off the field. They lost a four-day Test to England Under-19s by 10 runs last week, a tight contest that underlined their quality as much as the result stung. They face the same opponents again on Wednesday in a one-day match at Arundel, about 25 miles from Portsmouth, before a final ODI in Guildford on Saturday.

Pakistan’s senior men’s team is also in England, contesting the third and final Test against England at Edgbaston. One side is playing in front of packed stands and television cameras, the other in the quieter world of age-group cricket.

Both, though, now find themselves part of a much bigger question: what kind of country are these tours being played in, and who feels welcome when the team bus pulls up outside a hotel?