Italy’s World Cup debut: Cricket team on the rise as storied soccer team falters

Italy is finally heading to the World Cup — just not in the sport most people might expect.

Amid dark times for the country’s storied but ailing soccer team, some salvation comes in the form of the Azzurri’s unheralded cricketers after their first-ever qualification for a global tournament.

Add Italy to cricketing superpowers like India, Australia, England and South Africa competing at the T20 World Cup starting Saturday.

“Just to be there and playing,” Luca Bruno Malaspina, CEO of the Italian Cricket Federation, said “is the end of 45 years of hard work.”

That’s a reference to the formation of the sport’s national federation in 1980, but cricket in Italy dates back much further than that — to the late 19th century when it was played by expatriated British textile workers.

Genoa, Italy’s oldest soccer club founded in 1893, was — and still is — called Genoa Cricket and Football