Anti-Immigration Protesters Mistakenly Target Pakistan U-19 Cricketers

A group of anti-immigration protesters in southern England gathered outside a hotel housing Pakistan’s Under-19 cricket team after wrongly assuming the teenage players were newly arrived asylum seekers, British media reported on Wednesday.

The confrontation unfolded on Tuesday evening in Cosham, a northern suburb of Portsmouth, just two days after demonstrators had already disrupted the disembarkation of migrants near the port city and clashed with police in scenes widely condemned across the political spectrum.

This time, the trigger was a coach.

Reports circulated online of a bus carrying young Asian men pulling up at a Marriott Hotel in Cosham. That was enough to draw around 30 protesters to the site, according to local media, as Britain’s debate over immigration and small-boat crossings continues to fuel anger and street mobilisations.

They were not met by asylum seekers. They were met by cricketers.

The young men on the coach were members of Pakistan’s Under-19 side, in England on tour while the senior men’s team contest the third Test against England at Edgbaston in Birmingham.

A councillor from Reform UK, the anti-immigration party, arrived at the scene and, after establishing that the group were Pakistan’s U-19 cricketers, helped to calm tensions and disperse the crowd, The Guardian reported.

Hampshire Police confirmed they were alerted as the situation began to build.

“We were notified that a group of people were starting to congregate near the hotel,” a police spokesman said. Officers went to the scene and spoke to those gathered, who were “expressing concerns about a coach that had been seen in the area”.

The officers told them their fears were unfounded. The spokesman did not explicitly confirm that the Pakistan youth team had been the target of the suspicion, but said the crowd dispersed shortly afterwards and that no offences were identified.

The episode has added a fresh, unsettling twist to Britain’s already toxic immigration debate. The country has seen the arrival of tens of thousands of asylum seekers each year in small boats from mainland Europe, a trend that has become a central and combustible political issue. Protests have multiplied, and some have tipped into violence.

For anti-racism campaigners, what happened in Cosham is a stark warning.

Michael Bradley, a national organiser with Stand Up To Racism, condemned the incident as an example of “where the scapegoating of refugees and migrants can lead”.

“When a Pakistan U-19’s team is faced by protests because it ‘might’ in fact be a group of migrants, it means that effectively any group of black or Asian people coming into the city are being seen by the far right as a potential target,” he said.

His conclusion was blunt.