Priyanka Gandhi Vadra with Sachin Tendulkar at the Amethi cricket tournament on Monday. (PTI)

New Delhi, June 3: Manmohan Singh may stick to hockey but his party is ready to bat for cricket. The Congress believes that Rahul Gandhi’s rural Twenty20 has shown how the party can notch up the electoral scores.

Congress leaders can’t stop exulting at the Amethi MP’s “success” in assembling 1,857 teams and 30,000 players as he presided over the world’s biggest cricket tourney in his constituency.

“It’s an out-of-the-box idea to draw apolitical youths into the Congress, a great mobilisation strategy,” claimed spokesperson Manish Tewari.

“Even if 15,000 players join the Congress, it will be a great achievement,” said Rajiv Shukla, Rajya Sabha MP and Board of Control for Cricket in India vice-president. It was Shukla who put together the nuts and bolts of the seven-week Rajiv Gandhi Rural Cricket Tournament, which ended yesterday.

A minister suggested that all party MPs emulate Rahul in their constituencies. “Voters are no longer enamoured of film stars; they’ve seen too many of them. But sports people are a novelty,” the minister said.

“With the kind of time and space given to them on prime-time TV and the main pages of newspapers, they have become icons and crowd-pullers. They have more credibility and are more powerful symbols of leadership and the fighting spirit.”

Congress leaders suggested that Manmohan Singh had unwittingly played a bit of a “spoilsport”. Releasing a book by Balbir Singh, Olympian and former hockey captain, the Prime Minister had said yesterday: “I am not a great fan of cricket. I do believe that to the ordinary people of our country, games like hockey and football have (more) significance.”

Rahul himself was a soccer fan when he lived in London but, over the years, has been drawn to cricket.