The Spin | How a small town near São Paulo made Brazil a standard bearer for cricket’s global growth

A chance romance helped Poços de Caldas become a hotbed for the sport that, from East Timor to Nigeria, is spreading its wings like never before

In the south-east of Brazil, about 250km due north of São Paulo, lies the town of Poços de Caldas, home to about 150,000 people and remarkable for a few reasons: its thermal baths, its magmatic rock structure – the town is home to Brazil’s first uranium ore concentration plant – and its love of cricket.

“You walk down the street and you have people with English shirts, with Australian shirts, people with Test match names and numbers on their white polos,” says Roberta Moretti Avery. “You walk around Poços de Caldas, you feel like you’re in a foreign country with how much cricket stuff is walking around.”