ORGANIZING MY NEXT game had been hard work. During the planning stages of this Slavic odyssey, as I typed away in the Glasgow flat on damp, wintry evenings, a horrid setback had occurred, one that threatened my mental well-being and batting average. My emails to the Serbian cricket captain bounced every time.
I racked my brain after a day at the methadone clinic, wondering how I could schedule a match. Then an idea popped into my head. Possibly it came from Great-Uncle Ivor. I would Google the captain’s name, find his personal or work website, and track him down. It couldn’t fail.
Except my search didn’t return a personal or work website. On-screen came the front page of a Serbian newspaper, with a photo of my contact in a suit. Below I found an article from The Sunday Times.
Serbia’s cricket captain was an MI6 secret agent whom close colleagues described as “the classic gentleman spy.” He helped mastermind the arrest of Slobodan Milošević and arranged an RAF jet to fly the Balkan dictator to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. And during evenings and weekends he scheduled cricket matches.
Let’s think about this for a second. Not MI5. MI6. That’s James Bond–level. I wondered if he bagged Milošević using a cricket trap.
“You available next weekend, Slobodan? Match starts at 12.”
The article went on to say that the secret agent’s email address had been leaked across the Serbian press. That explained my unanswered letters, then. His cover—running the Belgrade cricket team (very subtle)—had been blown, and he’d since grown a beard and gone into hiding.
Another thought stung me as I read this. Somewhere in my inbox was this poor man’s mobile number. Should I call him and ask where he left the kit? Best not. I searched for the email and deleted it. It was not safe to hold on to such information.
Over the next two weeks, my efforts to track down Serbia’s remaining cricketers proved fruitless. I wrote to soccer clubs on whose grounds they had played. The soccer clubs laughed and told me cricket didn’t exist in Serbia. I contacted the British and Australian embassies, where I imagined cricket to be an important part of their jobs. They said they didn’t have the time to play. All the evidence suggested Serbian cricket was in tatters.
A month later I received an email from a sports journalist in the city of Zrenjanin, in northern Serbia. Milos had been passed my details by the British Embassy. He wanted to found a Serbian cricket league and take his country to the London 2012 Olympics.
“This is my dream,” he wrote. “For a year I am trying to organize cricket club. Zrenjanin is the city of sports, yet when I speak about cricket here, people think that I’ve gone nuts. All my efforts were useless, nobody wants to help me. So, you are my last hope!”
How could I refuse? I knew exactly how Milos felt, having spent much of my youth searching for people to play with in the Scottish hills. I’d have my work cut out, though. I’d need to convince the Olympic Committee that London was the most worthy venue. Then there was the fact that cricket wasn’t an Olympic sport. It would mean campaigning to introduce another sport that didn’t quite fit, like soccer and tennis, where pros compete against amateurs. England versus Serbia in Olympic cricket would be like U2 taking on Belarus at the Eurovision Song Contest.
Cricket had been an Olympic sport only once, making its first and last appearance—along with croquet, tug-of-war, and the obstacle swimming race, which involved diving under boats—at Paris in 1900. After Belgium’s and the Netherlands’ last-minute pullout, there were two teams of twelve a side: Devon and Somerset Wanderers, and Paris.
It was an odd Olympics. There were no gold medals. The English cricketers were awarded miniature Eiffel Towers for their triumph. Stranger still, Germany came second in rugby.
But Serbia’s modern-day Olympic vision would not be realized easily. Milos had a few bombshells to drop in his next email. He said he had no ground and no equipment. He confessed to having no players and to never having played himself. He had never seen cricket before. And he said he hardly spoke English. Barring these small setbacks, I felt we were doing great.
“Never fear, Milos,” I wrote back. “I will bring you equipment. I will train you from girls and boys into men! And we will see Serbia there in 2012!”
I imagined this would be like a Disney film, ending in Olympic glory.
IT WAS EIGHT thirty in the morning in Belgrade, and my spirits were buoyed by the announcement that London would be hosting the 2012 Games. Things were swinging in our favor. I telephoned Milos with the good news from the hotel reception.
“Where are you?” said Milos. “Why did you not come yesterday? I stayed up most of the night for you.”
“Very sorry, Milos. There was a seven-hour holdup at the border. Every Turk in Central Europe was driving back to Istanbul. We got into Belgrade at half past midnight. We’re staying in a hotel beside a sex shop.”
“Yes,” said Milos. “The border is slow because they arrested the son of Radovan Karadžić. But why didn’t you call me?”
“Sorry, I don’t have a phone.”
“What? You have car and no phone? How is this possible? Okay. Listen.” Milos sounded serious now. “You must be here in one hour thirty.”
“One hour thirty? I won’t make it out of Belgrade by then. Zrenjanin’s, what, an hour and twenty minutes away?”
“Yes. One hour twenty. So you must leave Belgrade right now. You must be here in one hour thirty. This is very, very important. Do you understand? Leave now.”
“I haven’t paid for the hotel yet! I don’t know my way. Why? What’s going on?”
“Every TV station, every radio station, every newspaper, and every magazine will be here for you at a reception with the mayor in one hour thirty. You must leave now!”
I ran into the bedroom and screamed, “Milos has called a press conference!”
Anarchist Ian sat upright in bed. “What?”
“He’s called a press conference for ten o’clock! What am I gonna do? I haven’t shaved in days! I’m not dressed! I need a cash machine! I need to pay for the hotel! How will I get out of Belgrade when I can’t read the street signs?”
I picked up my deodorant stick to stem the sweating. “My deodorant’s run out!” I screamed. “Aaaaaggh! D’you think I’ve got time for a shower?”
“Listen, man!” said Ian. “You haven’t got time for shit! Get packing!”
While Ian reloaded the Škoda, I tried to get directions from the hotel staff. They engaged in a ten-minute argument with each other before tearing up their map and throwing it in the bin.
“I haven’t got time for this!” I yelled, running out the door. Great-Uncle Ivor would have to go beyond the call of duty to navigate me out of this one. I just hoped he read Cyrillic.
I sprinted up the cobbled hill in search of a cash machine. It was already 68°F on Belgrade’s sterile-looking boulevards. Sweat began pouring off me.
Ten minutes later, breathless, I screamed, “Where are all the bloody cash machines?”
A haggard-looking man in a red T-shirt emerged from a darkened doorway. He was a mugger, for sure, and not to be trusted.
“My friend, I will help you,” he said, fiddling with an earring. “Come with me.”
I followed.
The mugger seemed to be taking this leisurely. “Look, I’m in a real rush,” I explained as we strolled. “I have to get to Zrenjanin!”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry. I will help you. Come under here.” He walked beneath the canopy of an empty shop.
“Look, do you know where a cash machine is, please?”
“Yes. But first, listen.”
He opened his jacket and began rolling a cigarette. “I help you, you help me,” he said after lighting it.
“Sure!” Just hurry the fuck up.
“How you travel to Zrenjanin?”
“By car, but—”
“Car? Hmmm.” He took a long draw. “I have a car … umm … Do you understand?”
“Yes!”
“Umm … some guys took … my … petrol … in the night.” His head swished from side to side as though he’d forgotten his lines. “I live in another … city … and I’m stuck … here now … Could you …”
“Spit it out, man!” I yelled.
“Take me to your car … and I will … suck out four liters of petrol … to get me home?”
“SUCK OFF!” I shouted, and ran.
I found a cash machine in another hotel lobby. I tapped in my details. My card was refused. I raced back to my hotel, almost crying.
“I couldn’t find a cash machine!” I said at the front desk.
“Do you have credit card?”
“Yes.”
“No problem, we take that.”
I paid the bill, and Ian stuffed cash in my pocket. “Good luck, man,” he bade. “I hope you make it.”
I climbed into the sweltering Škoda. It was already ten past nine. I was about to start the car when I realized something was missing. My passport! I raced inside and found it at reception, then jumped back behind the wheel. I turned the ignition. I had no gas. My tank had been sucked dry.
“Aaaaaggh!”
With my last teacup of fuel, I zigzagged across Belgrade and reached the Danube. A skinny young man with a goatee stood clutching a piece of cardboard by the bridge. The letters “Zn” were marked on it.
“Zrenjanin! Zrenjanin!” I shouted from my window. The young man looked startled and nodded.
“GET IN! GET IN!” I shouted. “I need to find a petrol station and I’ve thirty-five minutes to get to Zrenjanin!” He came round to the passenger door at a gallop.
Just over the Danube, as the engine was conking out, we pulled into a gas station. “This is a good car,” commented my hitchhiker. I felt saddened I had to come to Serbia to hear this. But yes, compared to the donkeys and fifties tractors leading out of Belgrade, the Škoda was a miracle of modern transportation.
With the car fully fueled and f lying down a potholed country lane, my passenger told me when it was safe to overtake haystacks and Ladas. “It’s funny, you can’t see from the right?” he said. “Okay. Go! Go! Go!” He was a lunatic codriver. I upped the speed to eighty miles an hour in second gear at his insistence.
“You can pass anything in this beast,” he said, his seat belt unclipped. “This is how to drive! When I was fourteen, my friends and I stole a car and drove to Montenegro. A cop stopped us and couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘You’re crazy!’ he shouted, then let us go. This is Serbia. No one follows laws. You can go faster!”
I asked if there was a train between Belgrade and Zrenjanin.
“Yes, but our tracks are 150 years old. It takes five hours by train. You can jump off and run alongside. Come on, you can go faster!”
I explained my deadline and my hitchhiker pledged to help. “We don’t get many tourists here. Only Italian hunters and Romanians for the beer festival. Give me this Milos’s number and I will phone him now.”
After a quick conversation, my passenger said, “I told Milos we will be ten minutes late.”
Ten minutes! He had confidence in my driving. “Did you get the address?”
“No, I forget.”
“We must call him again!”
“That was my last credit.”
As we raced across the Great Hungarian Plain, past grass and sunflower fields, I asked about Belgrade in the war.
“I was nearly killed by a NATO bomb on the TV station,” said my passenger. “I was a kilometer away. It blew me off my feet. Women and children were screaming all around. You know they bombed a hospital and the Chinese Embassy?”
The thought of a seventy-six-day bombing campaign put my press conference problems in perspective. My passenger reckoned two thousand civilians had been killed.
“And NATO said they were freeing us. Now people are dying of leukemia from the bombs.”
An oncoming truck flashed its lights. “Police,” whispered my passenger, fastening his seat belt for the first time. “We are approaching the city now. Slow down, a little.”
I didn’t want to be stopped and questioned. With all the cricket gear, and without a journalist visa, I was like a gentleman spy myself. We spotted a police car parked under a tree.
“There is the bastard,” said my passenger waspishly. He unclipped his seat belt as soon as we were clear.
Zrenjanin was a former Hapsburg city with grand yellow and green buildings. Other traces of its imperial past, like order and efficiency, were hard to spot. At the major traffic intersections, none of the lights worked. It was a tentative free-for-all. And among it we were looking for one man and a press conference.
“Do you know Milos? He is a sports journalist?” we asked thirteen-year-old girls riding bicycles on the sidewalk. They had no idea.
The press conference was into its forty-fifth minute, and we were helplessly lost.
“Oh my fucking God!” screamed my passenger.
We cruised the empty residential back streets for a while, but there was still no sign of Milos. “How can we get phone credit?” I asked.
“We can stop at the next shop.”
I pulled over by a kiosk and handed my passenger some dinars. The kiosk didn’t stock the right cards, and neither did its competitor opposite. “Aaaaaggh!” my passenger cried.
At the third kiosk he bought his card and phoned Milos.
Milos was waiting around the corner. The press conference had been put back to twelve. Lunch, however, was waiting urgently on the table.
I thanked my passenger.
“I am happy to help somebody,” he said. “This is Serbia.” With that he dashed off to catch a bus.
Milos had the appearance of a friendly military man and the handshake of a judo player. He would be thirty-seven by the time the London Olympics came around, with a vastly experienced cricketing brain. “Thank you for coming and welcome to our city,” he said.
He jumped into the passenger seat and led me down a buckled mud track by a swamp. “This is where you will stay tonight,” he said, pointing at his parents’ two-storey home.
Contrary to what he’d written in his email, Milos spoke good English. “But I don’t understand 90 percent of what you say,” he confessed. I hadn’t even begun on cricketing terms.
We walked through his parents’ red gates and under an ancient grapevine. Chickens roamed in cages beside the path. Milos’s parents sat at a picnic table by the house, in traditional cap and headscarf. The table was spread with vegetables from their garden, yogurt from their goat, and an open bottle of home brew.
“My father makes the rakia from these grapes,” said Milos, pointing at the vine. Though not understanding English, Milos’s parents nodded and cackled at the word “rakia,” signifying its potency.
Milos poured me a tumblerful of the clear liquid. “Chinchin,” he said, indicating I should down it without delay. My eyes watered and my throat blistered.
“Another,” said Milos, reaching for the bottle.
“I have to drive later, Milos,” I protested.
“This is Serbia. Come on.” Milos placed a second tumblerful beside my plate. “We eat quickly now, then we go to the mayor’s reception at City Hall,” he explained. “After, I take you to lunch. Then we will play cricket!”
After two lunches and two glasses of rakia, I wasn’t going to be fit to bowl.
THERE WAS JUST enough time to shower and shave before the press conference. Donning cricket wear, Milos and I mounted the steps of the palatial City Hall. In the boardroom there were firm businessman-like handshakes all round, and then I was led through double doors to a roomful of journalists. I felt like a kid. What was all this about? It looked like they were expecting a foreign ambassador. Where were the Ferrero Rochers?
“You are ambassador from the European Cricket Council,” whispered Milos at my side.
“No, that’s not true. I just like the game,” I squealed.
“No, no. For this meeting, you are ambassador from the European Cricket Council.” I gulped. It would require my finest acting skills to pull this stunt off.
“Whisky, Mr. Bell?” offered a lady with a tray.
“Thanks. I’ll just have an orange juice, please. I’m driving.”
“This is Serbia!” said an official, slapping me on the back.
I plopped down on a comfy window bench between Milos and the deputy mayor. One of the radio journalists spoke first.
“We thought you would be in your forties or fifties,” she said.
My mouthful of orange juice almost sank down the wrong hole, and I spluttered over my shirt. I tried to regain composure. “Generally cricketers retire by the age of forty,” I answered, which seemed to satisfy them.
A great deal of discussion followed, of which “cricket” was the only word I understood and the one word no one else did. A TV cameraman hovered around the room, using a clunky home camcorder. I hoped this interview would recruit thousands of Serbian cricketers upon broadcast.
The room turned to me again. With my three translators, I expressed delight at Milos’s plans to form a Serbian cricket team and sadness at the departure of the MI6 secret agent. I gave my full backing for entry to the 2012 Olympics.
Then the question on every journalist’s mind was put forward, tentatively. “They have decided to call the cricket team ‘The Lowlanders.’ Is this a good name for a cricket team?” The room held its breath.
“Yes. It is an excellent name,” I said with great authority. They all looked rather pleased.
Then they began to call out that I pad up. I debated at length whether to reach down my underpants to put my box in and decided against it. This was going to be on TV after all, and what if my mum saw it?
One reporter spotted the box on the drinks tray.”What is that big curvy thing?” he asked.
“It’s a face mask.” I held it to my mouth and inhaled deeply.
Press conference over, Milos led me on a tour of the city in the Škoda. No bombs had landed on Zrenjanin during the wars, he said, only on a nearby pig farm. However, Zrenjanin was facing terrible economic problems. Out of a population of eighty thousand, nearly half were unemployed.
“This used to be a major industrial city,” said Milos. “And Serbia was like the United States of Eastern Europe. Now we are like the Africa.”
Through the Škoda window I saw scrawny men raking through skips. Litters of puppies lay on the sidewalks.
“People are very nervous about work,” said Milos. “Fights can break out in seconds. I was in a fight myself a few weeks ago.”
I felt sure Milos had won that fight. Apart from being a regular participant in handball and water polo, he was a judo wrestler who’d come third in pole-vaulting at the 1994 Yugoslav State Championships.
“It is a dangerous sport. Someone was killed when they missed the mat,” he said.
I asked what had caused Zrenjanin’s economic decline.
“Tito ruined us,” said Milos. “And under Milošević, Serbia was a Mafia state. In 1993 we had hyperinflation. My newspaper today costs twenty dinars; back then it cost one billion. People had to spend all their savings. We lost everything.”
Between October 1993 and January 1995, Serbia’s prices rose five quadrillion percent. That’s 5,000,000,000,000,000 percent.
“It was like a hurricane,” said Milos. “People wrote cheques for everything: for bread, for a newspaper. Shops had to accept them by law. By the time cheques were cashed, inflation had rocketed again, and they were worthless. One friend went to see his girlfriend in Belgrade every Friday. They stayed in a hotel all weekend. Their cheques were cashed three days later, so he got his stays for free.”
Though Serbia’s economy had since stabilized, and steps were being taken towards E.U. entry, the situation for career people like Milos was grim. He could barely afford to catch a bus to Belgrade to see his girlfriend. For a while he thought of getting out of the country and moving to Iceland. “But they don’t play cricket,” he said jokingly.
“They have two teams,” I corrected him.
We parked and Milos led me on foot to a rotting concrete bridge. There was no road or river under it, just grass. “They diverted the old river flow because it was too stinky,” explained Milos. “The Romanians were throwing in poisons upstream.”
I felt quite depressed about this place. It had faced a rough run. But it was credit to Milos and those around him that they set their sights high. Forming a cricket team was a sure sign of recovery.
“Last year people were beating each other with bats. Now we want to get them hitting balls,” said Milos. He had the right philosophy.
“Would you take a tour to Croatia?” I asked. “To the island of Vis?”
“Oh! This would be my dream!”
We walked into town and entered a gloomy internet café. While Milos tottered off to the toilet, I jumped on a terminal. No internet connection was possible on any PC. I followed Milos to the toilet and discovered there was no paper. “In Serbia you need connections even for this,” said Milos.
We left to join the president of Lowlanders Cricket Club, Mr. Beard—so named because he had a gray beard. He was waiting by the fireplace in a traditional Germanic restaurant when we arrived. Stuffed boars’ heads were mounted on the walls. Business was quiet.
Milos translated for Mr. Beard. “He says he wants to make a rule all players must have a beard. And tonight he will marry you with a Zrenjanin girl.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I’m taken.” Mr. Beard had hoped I would impregnate as many local girls as possible during my stay, creating a generation of Serb cricketers.
Over many Cokes at the table, Milos, Mr. Beard, and I talked about the plan for Serbian cricket. Milos said that he had secured a soccer ground for the afternoon’s game, but it would not be available every week. I suggested they take up indoor cricket.
“We have a war going on between basketballers and hand-ballers for the courts,” he replied gravely. “This will be difficult.”
I drew field placings on the back of a napkin, while Milos and Mr. Beard squinted and nodded. As the meal progressed, it struck me that this pair knew absolutely nothing about cricket except that Iceland had two teams. A curdling sensation formed in my gut. Within an hour an unspecified number of confused people were going to be arriving at a soccer ground to play a complicated game they’d never seen. We had one partial translator, and everyone would be looking to me as the sole director. What in Greater Yugoslavia was I going to do?
IT CAME TO me as we assembled on the ground in soccer strips and polo shirts. What would Borut do? He had formed a Yugoslavian cricket team with fewer resources and less experience than me. A single-wicket competition! Borut should have patented the model. The man was a genius. I could see how he’d won twice on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
“Thank you, Borut!” I said aloud. This time the players would have the option of batting right-handed.
I ran to the Škoda and dug out twelve copies of The MCC Laws of Cricket. I distributed one to each player. “You may use these to defend yourself in court,” I said. They smiled. Already they were warming to cricket, and this was the boring part.
I returned to fetch the rest of the equipment from the car. As I carried an enormous cardboard box to the center of the field, I remembered there was kiddies’ equipment inside. And on the field were eleven full-grown men, aged twenty to sixty, and one nine-year-old.
But none of them would know it was kiddies’ equipment, would they? “Sure, we play with knee-high bats,” I could tell them. Hell, I could even bowl wides and pretend I was good. I could convince them Scotland had the best cricket team in the world.
No. I didn’t want any surprises when they made their Olympic debut. I brought two more full-size bats from the car and laid them before the gathering. They reacted as though a flying saucer had landed.
Milos had done superbly in his recruiting. No longer did people think him nuts. He had sourced the top marksman in all of former Yugoslavia, whose accuracy would serve him well in all disciplines. He had found a chemical engineer whose expertise in fertilizers singled him out as the groundsman. We had a psychologist—the Mike Brearley of the team—who, although never scoring runs himself, possessed the brain to outwit Australia. Also making the lineup was a member of the regional parliament. He would be able to cut through bureaucracy and lobby the Olympic Committee.
“My neighbor is a musician and a carpenter!” said Milos, picking up a bat for the first time. “He will make us one thousand like these!”
“And he will sing songs of your great victories!” I declared.
Best of all, here to play was the mainstay of the Zrenja-nin baseball team. They’d formed three years before, yet never played a game because they had no equipment. Once they had managed to find a stick and played a game of “šore” (sockball). It was an ancient sport from the region, traditionally played by shepherds. The bowler would stand three feet from the batsman and deliver a ball of socks. The batsman would swing with his crook and run fifty-four yards straight and back for a single point. The fielders would try to catch the socks and hit the batsman with them. Legend had it that local hero Mihajlo Pupin, the inventor who developed the long-distance telephone, took sock-ball to New York in 1874, where it lent its traits to baseball.
“You will all love cricket!” I said. “You only have to run twenty yards for a point!”
Riding on the crest of this confidence, I set up stumps and began coaching. “You pick up the bat like this …”
Already five pupils had hands up. “What is a bat?” asked one, bravely.
Oh boy, I thought. Where to begin? They didn’t know what a run was, or a batsman, or, crucially, the purpose of a box. How would I explain “wicket” when it meant four things? As far as they knew, “googly” was a search engine.
“This is a bat. This is a ball,” I said, holding them up for all to see.
Over the next fifteen minutes something remarkable happened. Twelve men who that morning wouldn’t have known what cricket was if they were standing in the middle of a Lord’s World Cup Final became full-fledged internationalists. They learned how to bowl, where to stand, and how to defend their stumps. After five tryouts they were swinging the ball away on a length.
With them more than ready for their first game, I spread the field as indicated on the restaurant napkin. We would rotate the field after each over. Bowlers would bowl one-over spells, and batsmen would retire on 24.
Standing at cover, I told the batsmen when they ought to run. Soon they learned to pick up cheeky byes. The fielders counteracted by cutting off wild overthrows. The very first Serbian square cut produced the greatest stop in their game’s history. Milos, crouching with his camera, dived and copped the ball on his lens, thus saving four. And when a bowler, releasing off the wrong foot, tripped and cartwheeled into the stumps, he still managed to deliver the ball straight. I wiped a tear from my eye.
After an hour and a half, when every player had racked up a personal best, the equipment was packed away in its bag and handed to Milos for safekeeping.
“We will train like this every week,” promised Milos.
As we were leaving the field, a camera crew arrived in Chelsea shirts. Milos went over to speak to the giggling journalist and returned with the news we’d have to play again. Out came the stumps, and I urged the team to show Serbian television what they could do.
Somewhat weary from their debut efforts, only four players made it to the middle for the news mock-up. It looked promising for me. Now there were so few fielders I could rattle up runs.
My stumps were flattened first ball, as I tried an arrogant whip to the legside. The bowler seemed to have forgotten if this was a good thing or not. My pupils had outstripped their master.