We tend to think of cricket as the quintessential English game, associated with tall trees, church towers, snug pubs and overgrown outfields, but in my travels I’ve seen it played in very different surroundings. Halfway up a mountain in Pakistan, where a lofted six could send the ball ten thousand feet into the Indus valley and where a boundary catch could be fatal; on the deck of a container ship; in car parks; on railway lines; and once, on my Full Circle journey, on a brownfield site in Hanoi belonging to the Vietnamese Air Force. This had many problems, one being the non-appearance of the captain who was bringing the pitch. When eventually he arrived, carrying twenty-two yards of coconut matting over his shoulder, a head bearing the cap and red star of the People’s Army popped up from behind a wall, and watched with increasing bewilderment as the two teams, India and the Rest of the World, limbered up. When the first boundary was struck hard towards the wall, the head disappeared smartly. Midway through the third over, a phone rang in the captain’s pocket as he crouched at third slip. Did we know that this was a sensitive military area? The captain vainly tried to explain that it was just a game, when an entire detachment of soldiers, the majority of them women, marched out to bring the game to a premature close of play.
Anything that the military see as a threat has to have something going for it, and if I were a paranoid general I would be extremely concerned about the revelations in Charlie Connelly’s book. It’s clear that cricket, with all its attendant subversive potential, is creeping across the world. From Antarctica to Ethiopia, from North Korea to St Helena, there are fielders fanning out and guards being taken. Balls have been struck across national boundaries and doubtless from one hemisphere to another. I know this and Charlie Connelly knows this because the indispensable oracle that is Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack has been charting every detail of cricket’s global advance. This is how we know that a hundred years ago there was a King of Tonga who inflicted so much cricket on his subjects that they had to limit the days it was played, “to avert famine”. Thanks to Wisden and Connelly I now know that Don Bradman’s grandmother was Italian, that there is an Estonian Cricket Board, and that one of the greatest of all team names, the Gondwanaland Occasionals, harks back to a time before the continents assumed their present shape, when cricket was played by the very earliest life forms. This book is brimful of the sort of esoteric facts that cricket followers love, but it’s also a terrific travel book, to be read not just with a Wisden by your side, but an atlas too. And, of course, a large gin and tonic. Or a caipirinha, a sliwowitz or a stiff pisco sour.
Elk Stopped Play is a universal pleasure and a hugely enjoyable reminder of a game which combines unquenchable enthusiasm with incomparable eccentricity. And it’s good to know that there is barely a corner of God’s earth where you can walk without at least some chance of being hit by a cricket ball.
Michael Palin
London, July 2013