Pakistan Under-19s Experience Hotel Protest Over Mistaken Identity
The knock on the hotel doors was not room service.
Members of Pakistan’s under-19 cricket team found themselves at the centre of a bizarre and uncomfortable scene in Portsmouth on Tuesday night, after protesters wrongly assumed they were newly arrived migrants.
Around 30 to 40 people gathered outside the Marriot Hotel in Cosham after rumours spread online that a coach carrying migrants had pulled up at the venue. It hadn’t. The coach was transporting a touring junior cricket side.
According to Sumair Syed, chief operating officer of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), some of those who had converged on the hotel made their way up to the floor where the players were staying.
The team, he said, reported people “knocking on their doors” during the incident. The players, teenagers far from home and preparing for a match, chose not to respond.
“They behaved responsibly and didn't escalate the situation,” Syed explained, underlining how the squad kept their composure in unsettling circumstances.
Hampshire Police attended and quickly established that no offences had been committed. With no confrontation and no migrants present, the crowd drifted away, dispersing by about 21:00 BST.
By the next morning, Pakistan’s youngsters were back to doing what they came for. They played their scheduled match as planned, refusing to let the episode derail their tour.
Syed called the incident “unfortunate” and said he had been in direct contact with the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) in its aftermath. The message from the hosts was clear: security would be tightened around the team.
He said the ECB had “assured us that every possible measure should be taken for the security of the escort”, stressing that protecting visiting players was a shared duty.
“This is the responsibility of the whole sport to ensure the safety, security and well-being of the visiting team,” Syed said. “They are on it and we are hopeful that nothing of such sort will happen in the future.”
On the ground in Cosham, Reform county councillor George Madgwick was among those who went to the hotel as the rumours swirled. Once inside, he said staff showed him “proof” that the guests in question were, in fact, the Pakistan under-19 cricket team.
Madgwick said he then urged people online not to attend, as it became clear the narrative circulating on social media had been wrong from the start.
“Someone online saw a group of what looked like foreign nationals leaving the coach and put a photo of it online and that's where it spurred from,” he told the BBC.
“It was mere speculation rather than based on truth or fact. In this case they have made a grave error, a grave mistake.”
The images, the assumptions, the rapid mobilisation — all of it built on a single misreading of a scene outside a hotel.
Madgwick later faced criticism and a flurry of comments on his Facebook post about the incident, with some accusing those who turned up of racist motives. He rejected that characterisation.
He insisted the chain reaction stemmed from one person’s assumption, amplified by others who followed it without checking.
“I think one person made the assumption and everybody else followed that assumption,” he said.
What remains is the uncomfortable reflection for a city that watched a junior sports team become the accidental target of a misplaced protest.
“It isn't a good reflection on our city. It's not something I want our city to be known for,” Madgwick admitted.
The Pakistan under-19s, meanwhile, will continue their tour under closer watch, carrying with them the memory of a night when a knock on the door said more about a country’s anxieties than about a cricket team.
