Abstract
This thesis examines the fandom and fan performance for the Ireland Men’s international cricket team, with a lens on fandom in offline spaces, online spaces and the affordances of networked communication to fandom of “niche” sports communities. The thesis considers fandom and the practices of fandom within the context of cricket within the British colonial mission and how this has shaped cricket fandom across cricket globally, within the context of spectator sport fandom and within the context of the Irish sporting landscape. In relation to offline spaces, the tools for ethnographic data collection were participant observation and unstructured interviews at the Ireland v Pakistan T20I series of May 2024. For online spaces, the tools for netnographic data collection combined participant observation, textual analysis and unstructured interviews of the r/IrishCricket subreddit community through the duration of the 2024 Irish cricket summer. In total, 5 unstructured interviews were conducted with participants. The results of the thesis largely confirmed existing literature relating to cricket cultures in Ireland and minimised the influence of ICC full membership criteria directly to changes within the Irish cricket community. Instead, factors which are cited as influencing the cricket community included the increase of immigration to Ireland from South Asia and increased Irish representation in global cricket competitions. In relation to the performance of fandom, many of the practices of fandom within Irish cricket aligned with established practices within global cricket fandom. The results relating to fandom in online spaces demonstrated examples of performances of fandom including the seeking and sharing of knowledge, interaction with members and alternative performances of fandom distinctive to online communities. In addition, the affordances of networked communication technology provided value to the subreddit through the aggregation of content relating to Irish cricket and the gatekeeping of content through community moderation. The key conclusions from this thesis are that although the cricket community in Ireland may not have a distinctive fan performance, there is no evidence of a subscription to the values of English cricket and theestablished values of acceptable performance of fandom within cricket. Instead, it is likely a product of the close relationship and history between Irish cricket to cricket in England and the infancy of cricket as a spectator sport in Ireland. Within online spaces, whilst the r/IrishCricket subreddit has not transformed the Irish cricket landscape and cannot be described as a component of Irish cricket fandom, the affordances of networked communication provide value to its members and the fan community through the replication of offline performances to online spaces and through the establishment of performance and interaction distinctive to the online space.
| Date of Award | 10 Apr 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
| Supervisor | Daghan Irak (Main Supervisor) |