Often, what you don’t know can surprise you.
Originally from Mahabubnagar in India, Ramm Goud Sama had spent four years working in the tech industry in South Africa when he felt it was time for something new.
“I didn’t know anything about Ireland,” he admits. “One of my friends was living in Letterkenny at that time and they were recruiting for IT professionals.
“He said that [Donegal] is one of the most peaceful places on the earth. It has a better work-life balance, the people are welcoming, and it is a small town.”
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Another draw was cricket. Having played to a high level in India, where he says the sport is more akin to a religion, the assurance that he’d have no difficulty finding a place to play helped tip the scales in favour of the move.
“I said, okay, let me come here for six months or a year and see how it goes,” he recalls.
Knowing few people in the area, he sought out a glimmer of familiarity in unfamiliar terrain, opting to join St Johnston Cricket Club, about 30 minutes from Letterkenny, but his timing proved just a little bit off.
“I arrived in September, so by the time I came, the cricket season was over. But we always used to play badminton and indoor cricket, something like that, and I made good friends.
“When I look back, I played 16 years for the club, and now all my friends, the players, they’re like my extended family.
“I never felt like an outsider. Sometimes you get that feeling that ‘oh, all of them are local and I’m from outside’, and you feel like you might be left out, but I never felt that.
“That’s the beauty, and that was the main reason why I was able to stay in this place for so long.”
The Letterkenny trial period quickly became permanent, with Goud Sama bringing his wife and their newborn daughter to Ireland in June 2005. More than 20 years later – a spell which also saw the birth of their son in 2009 – he says they still have no designs to leave the northwest.
A lot of that is down to the roots they’ve put down in the area over the last two decades, during which cricket has continued to offer them community. St Johnston had been his first introduction to cricket in the northwest, but he soon found a way to pay forward the welcome he received closer to home, helping to establish a new club in Letterkenny.
“There used to be a small [cricket] community, and it started growing because of the IT companies and Letterkenny Hospital, there was a lot of inflow from other Asian countries.
“We used to play in St Eunan’s College every Saturday morning during summertime. When we started [around 2011], it was like 15, 20 people, and then suddenly that group started growing over the next two or three years.”
Their numbers ballooned to closer to 80 by 2016/17 when they decided to give indoor cricket a go to get around the temperamental Irish weather, and their healthy playing numbers allowed them to adopt a new team format so everyone, adults and children, could play regardless of experience or ability.
The club now has about 120 players making up six teams – four adult, two underage – and the men’s first team beat Brigade to win the North West League 1 Cup last September, and will play in Senior Two in the North West League this summer. All despite having no home ground.
“It’s very difficult to attract the local talent who can play without facilities,” he says, explaining that their teams travel 30 minutes to Strabane or Bready for training and play many of their home games an hour away in Limavady.
He adds that seeing as “cricket and hurling go hand in hand”, they’d love to tap into Donegal’s GAA population, “but again, the problem is we don’t have facilities ... If you’re asking them to travel half an hour [for training], nobody’s interested.”
Although the push for bricks and mortar (or, more urgently, a field and nets) continues, the club has already succeeded in offering a place for newcomers to get involved in the locality.
“Cricket brings people together,” he says. “If someone new comes [to the area], they come and they play and they start making their own network.
“A lot of players tell me the best thing that happened to them in Letterkenny is cricket. They came and played one cricket match and made so many friends.”
