Although cricket originated in Great Britain several hundred years ago, it has spread around the world, mostly because of England's huge colonial empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ironically, cricket is losing strength in Britain--the national team is currently ranked eighth out of the nine major cricket-playing nations. Now, cricket is most popular in South Asia. A talented cricket player named Manish Prabhu who was visiting Bombay, India noted that "the kids in the city were playing the game every minute, everywhere. They can see cricket wherever it is being played in the world, nonstop on television." In the cricket stadiums of South Asia, fans are very serious and violent, and they are sometimes spurred on by regional military conflicts. Tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir have spilled onto the cricket fields, causing riots, fans' deaths, and destroyed stadiums. The people of Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh support their teams with a strong sense of nationalism. When the Bangladeshi team upset Pakistan last year in the Cricket World Cup, millions of Bangladeshis took to the streets to celebrate. Cricket has definitely become a global sport. The populations of all the cricket-obsessed countries add up to more than 1.5 billion people, about six times the population of the United States. It is said that every one of the one billion citizens of India has seen a cricket match. Excitement surrounding the 1999 Cricket World Cup accounted for almost 35 percent of all the televisions sold in India during that year. There are even three million blind Indian cricket enthusiasts who play a version of the sport in which a rattle is placed inside the ball, enabling play by ear. Someday, cricket might be this popular in the United States.