Adam Hopkins speaks to Victor Mills from Project Front Foot, an initiative that has been supporting disadvantaged cricketers across India and Europe since 2009.
Project Front Foot dates back to when Victor Mills had a chance encounter with some children playing cricket in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum.
Mills had already had quite a life in the game, having played decades of club cricket in Lincolnshire and Australia, as well as writing for the likes of Wisden Cricket Monthly and the Times of India. Little did he know this visit to the slum would be the start of his greatest contribution to the sport.
“I was heading back from Australia to the UK but had a stopover in India to research a writing project,” Mills tells The Cricket Paper. “I was being shown around the Dharavi slum. There’s close to one million people all living within one square mile. It was an education.
“We stopped by a schoolyard where there were some kids playing and we ended up having an impromptu net session for about 10 minutes.”
What struck Mills the most was that the children had no suitable equipment of their own and were using a shaved-down cricket bat that had been made small enough for them to play with. “The least these kids deserve is some decent kit,” he thought, and from there the idea for Project Front Foot was born.
Upon getting back to Lincoln, Mills got in touch with his contacts and finished up with a garage full of cricket kit ready to take back to India that September. British Airways then came on board, helping him get the bags of kit out to Mumbai, and “the rest is history.”
Mills initially would visit Mumbai twice a year, at the start of the season and then again in mid-season, to bring equipment to the kids in Dharavi and also provide coaching for them along with the staff from an NGO called Reality Gives.
This then developed into what became Project Front Foot’s Rural Schools Initiative. “After about six years, I managed to get some funding for the project through a cargo company in Mumbai. Every autumn we would plan a day or two out in the sticks going to far flung schools, orphanages or remote villages and we’d give them packages including plastic bats, stumps and tennis balls. In the end it took off to the extent that I was buying the kit in India to take to these places as well as bringing it out from the UK.”
Project Front Foot’s last season in India was in 2018/19, which meant a decade of work under their belts. By this time, everything was pretty much running itself via the coaches and the other NGO. Following the pandemic, Mills’ and Project Front Foot’s focus turned to Europe, in particular supporting refugees from Afghanistan.
They first dipped their toe into Europe back in 2017 when they received a call from the German Cricket Federation and that spring took a vanload of kit over to Essen in the country’s west.
“Angela Merkel had opened the borders and about a million people, a lot from Afghanistan, came into Germany. Almost overnight, about 100 cricket clubs had sprung up out of nowhere. We basically started doing the same thing we’d been doing in India.”
In the last seven-to-eight years, Project Front Foot has given kit to cricketers, clubs and communities in close to 30 German towns and cities and 16 in France, as well as others in Switzerland and Portugal. They also have strong links with the Alsama Project in Lebanon and, through a German NGO, previously sent kit out to Nepal.
They have also done good work in the UK, supporting a refugee project in Croydon, south London, where they provided kit to Afghan teenagers over several seasons.
“We’re not only looking to support refugees. If there’s a women’s team that we hear of, we’re happy to donate clothing and kit there. The same for if a club is setting up a junior section, we can certainly help out.”
Over the 18 years of Project Front Foot’s existence, they’ve received tens of thousands of pounds worth of kit donations. Lancashire CCC have been a huge contributor, providing boxes upon boxes of clothing each time they change their manufacturer, while they have also received great support from the Lancashire Cricket Foundation and the Yorkshire Cricket Foundation, as well receiving donations from counties such as Surrey, Cornwall, Nottinghamshire, Kent, Glamorgan and Northumberland.
If you wish to donate any clothing or equipment to Project Front Foot, get in touch via email at the projectfrontfoot@gmail.com.
