Tallinn – the ball crunches off the bat's sweet spot, travelling into the distance past seemingly moored fielders. The batsman jubilantly leaps in the air and is embraced by a mob of ecstatic teammates. The ICC European Division 3 Championships concludes. Bulgaria salvages a disappointing tournament with an impressive chase to topple hosts Estonia in the competition's finale. The victory avoids Bulgaria the ignominy of a winless campaign after three losses to Estonia and Slovenia.
Saif Rehman composes himself amid the euphoria. Bulgaria's indefatigable captain-coach sports a grin, which might baffle observers considering the result was merely consolation. The Pakistani-born Rehman understands it was more than merely a dead rubber booby prize for a fledgling cricket nation.
Rehman introduced cricket to his adopted country more than a decade ago, craving to induce the game, so worshiped in his homeland, to the populace.
"There was no cricket when I came to Bulgaria 19 years ago and nobody knew what it was," he says.
While it would be folly to deem cricket a mainstream sport in Bulgaria, it has started to make an imprint in the sports fabric due mainly to Rehman's passionate deeds.
Bulgaria has steadily climbed to Division 3 in the ICC world standings. Their lone victory in Tallinn appears an inglorious campaign but the team's efforts were startling considering seven of the starting eleven were locals. It is one of the highest ratios of locals in a team in continental Europe, an astonishing achievement considering the Bulgaria Cricket Federation formed in 2003.
The future is bright for the Bulgarian national team, with Rehman hopeful continuing youth development could propel them to the continent's elite by 2020.
But Rehman, an actor and businessman in Bulgaria, is focused on a deed far more imperative than the national team's success or the game's growth.
Rehman believes cricket can become a symbol for egalitarianism in a land at times struggling to elude half a century of ingrained Soviet Union totalitarian socialism.
After Bulgaria escaped the vicious clutches of the Soviet Union in 1990, Bulgarian disability advocate Gallina Atanassova said "the Soviet slogan ‘the Soviet society is of harmonically developed and physically healthy people' resulted in the absolute isolation of disabled persons from society by making the built environment inaccessible for persons using crutches or wheelchairs".
Atanassova also noted that prejudices "were the moral values of Bulgarian society, or perhaps more accurately, the deformation of the social moral values and principles".
In 2008, Europe's highest social rights body found Bulgaria had violated international law by discriminating against children with disabilities in not providing them with an education.
Despite two decades since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet's cruel stigma for those with special needs is still a bane across many communities in the region. Lamenting this lump on the afflicted, Rehman recently started a disability development program for children in an impassioned bid to help eradicate the plight.
And he's banking on the power of cricket as a unifying tool. The program has introduced cricket to young children with special needs at medical centres in Sofia and across the country.
About 100 children (aged 6-17) suffering from cerebral palsy, epileptic syndrome and learning disabilities are playing table cricket, akin to a board game, where six players play during a game.
Rehman recently launched Bulgaria's inaugural national table cricket tournament for children suffering with disability.
"People with disability are not treated well in Bulgaria and are often neglected by their parents," he says.
"I want to integrate Bulgarian society. These kids are often forgotten but I want to show what they are capable of. We are now in the 21st century. Society should be one and there should not be discrimination, particularly to the disadvantaged."
Widespread commendation has prompted the program to broaden its scope, leading to the commencement of blind cricket and a national Bulgarian blind team, who hope to play in England next year.
"Cricket is helping them and I believe it is good for them to have the opportunity to play sport," Rehman says.
"We have had great results. Doctors have told me that a 16-year-old opened his hand for the first time after he started playing cricket because he was getting movement in his hand and was so determined to play."
Disability cricket is played worldwide in countries with an intrinsic cricket culture but Rehman hopes Bulgaria will become a trailblazer for novice nations of the bat and ball game.
"My ambition is to form a disability cricket league and to eventually establish a national team that can compete in a global event," he says.
"I will keep promoting it across the country and perhaps in nearby nations. This is my duty."
Cricket is mostly popular in the UK and in Asian and Commonwealth Countries, but it has been played in other parts of the world. In Italy the first cricket game was played in 1793 in Naples and was organised by Admiral Horatio Nelson. In Canada early cricket matches were played in Montreal around 1785. A long way before the establishment of stadiums and Canadian casino !