In a workshop with a stunning view of the mountains of southeastern Brazil, self-taught carpenter Luiz Roberto Francisco is chipping at a piece of pine and turning it into a rare artifact for this football-mad country: a cricket bat. 

Francisco, 63, is the proud owner of Brazil’s first cricket bat factory, based in the small city of Pocos de Caldas in Minas Gerais state, population 170,000. Not coincidentally, the leafy spa city is also the headquarters of Cricket Brasil, an organisation headed by Matt Featherstone, an English ex-cricketer who has set the ambitious goal of getting 30,000 Brazilians playing the sport he loves in the next three years.