When I was a boy my sister and I were sent over to The Hague one summer to stay with some Dutch friends of our parents. I wasn’t happy. At Headingley New Zealand were on their way to their first-ever Test victory in England, and I’d become a little bit obsessed with Lance Cairns; he of the shoulderless club of a bat with which he’d smite enormous sixes to all corners, before lumbering up to the wicket with the grace and elegance of a prop forward learning to unicycle, and bowl out teams with his chest-on, banana-shaped outswingers.
But just as Cairns was celebrating taking seven English wickets on the first day as part of a performance that would earn him the Man of the Match award, I was being plucked from the sofa and the company of Jim Laker and Peter West and deposited on an aeroplane to Holland where, as far as I knew, they’d never even heard of cricket.
Fascinating city though The Hague undoubtedly is, in hindsight I can’t help thinking my hosts must have noticed how underwhelmed I was by the Gemeentemuseum and the Madurodam miniature park. The medieval town centre would ordinarily have coaxed forth wide-eyed wonder, or at least polite “oohs” and “ahhs”, but instead I was scanning the shop fronts in vain for signs of an English newspaper that might bring news from Headingley. It was summer, there was a Test match on, my new favourite player was taking it by storm, and here I was in a barren cricketing wasteland that might as well have been on the other side of the Horsehead Nebula as the North Sea. I’d never been wrenched from cricket like this before and at just 12 years old I was already finding life outside its comforting linseed-infused cocoon to be riddled with crushing ennui.
One afternoon, we were in the back of the car on our way somewhere and I was wondering wistfully what damage Lance’s batting might have caused windows within a half-mile radius of the Kirkstall Lane end when, between some trees, I saw what I assumed at first to be a mirage induced by my cricket cold turkey. The car slowed in traffic as we got closer, and my mouth fell open as I realised what I was seeing.
There was a cricket match going on. A proper one. Everyone was in whites. There were umpires in long white coats. There was a pavilion. There was a scattering of spectators. I wound down the window as the bowler ran up and windmilled his arms. The batsman got on to the front foot, swung, and half a second later I heard that familiar satisfying “pock” of sweet spot on leather. The fielder at cover turned disconsolately and jogged after the ball as a ripple of applause drifted across to me through the trees. Then the traffic moved again, the match disappeared behind us, and we carried on to wherever we were going as if nothing had happened.
It had either been a delicious illusion or I’d just seen a cricket match. In Holland. And it looked just like real cricket. Proper cricket, with the clatter of tin numbers as someone updated the scoreboard that stood propped against a table, floppy sunhats, bored girlfriends in deckchairs reading magazines, the billows of dust as a batsman thumped his guard into the crease, scorers acknowledging the umpires’ signals, a boy throwing down balls to the next batsman on the boundary, players padded up and sitting on benches in that legs-wide-apart pose that all impending batsmen adopt everywhere. It looked, to all intents and purposes, just like the real thing.
Of course, it was the real thing. Indeed, cricket has been played in the Netherlands since British soldiers introduced it during the Napoleonic Wars. I didn’t know it at the time but as I was staring open-mouthed at the flannelled mirages before me, it was exactly 100 years since the foundation of the Dutch game’s governing body in 1883, and the first match played by a Dutch national team had taken place right there in The Hague in 1881 against Uxbridge CC – quite possibly, for all I know, on the very same ground I’d passed that day.
I know all this now because I’ve just looked it up on the internet. In 1983 however, there was no internet. Also, in 1983 there was no “Cricket Round the World” section in Wisden, so as far as I was concerned the world cricket map consisted of nothing more than the Test-playing nations and a vast blank expanse marked “here be dragons”. To find a real cricket match in, of all places, downtown Den Haag, well, I was astonished to say the least. I’m fairly sure I didn’t even think about Lance Cairns for a good ten minutes.
Today Dutch cricket is more familiar to us. We’ve seen their team at the World Cup, and I’m sure most of us could even spell Ryan ten Doeschate correctly first time if we really put our minds to it. Back then, however, cricket outside the Test arena was to me no more than a rumour, the stuff of sea monsters and mermaids. When Derbyshire signed the rangy Danish pace bowler Ole Mortensen in 1983, for example, he seemed to me to be some kind of freak of nature – how on earth could a professional cricketer come from Denmark? Combined with his foppish fringe and Douglas Fairbanks moustache, even his first name seemed to lend him an air of swaggering mystery (that is until I found out it wasn’t pronounced “oh-LAY” after all, but the rather less flamboyant “Ull”). I followed his career closely, completely astounded by his sheer Danishness. Clearly, when you’re finding a former tax inspector from Copenhagen awe-strikingly enigmatic, your cricket horizons are in need of expansion, and fast.
These strange cricketing foreigners weren’t just emerging from Holland and Denmark, either. As we will see in these pages, cricket was and is happening all over the world and in some pretty unlikely locations too. In 1993 the Almanack’s new editor Matthew Engel had the foresight and vision to introduce the Cricket Round the World section in order to reflect the game’s more global aspects. There were just nine nations featured that first year, ranging in exoticism from Nepal to Belgium (Denmark and the Netherlands already had sections to themselves), but in two decades Cricket Round the World has grown and developed into such an iron horse of the Almanack that it feels as if it’s always been there. More than 140 nations or territories have now been featured, with new ones appearing every year – in the 2013 Wisden alone seven new entries appeared.
Wisden had sometimes made the occasional foray into the world beyond the traditional Test-playing nations before the advent of Cricket Round the World – as with Denmark and the Netherlands. The 1965 Wisden, for example, reported on the former Australia wicketkeeper Bert Oldfield’s month in Ethiopia attempting to introduce cricket into schools. “Perhaps the day may not be far distant when Ethiopia will be challenging England and Australia to Test matches,” suggests the piece with tongue wedged firmly in cheek. But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Oldfield’s trip was his twenty-minute audience with the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, during which the Lion of Judah was presented with a cricket bat as a gift from the Australian prime minister Sir Robert Menzies. I, for one, would love to have been a fly on the wall for that particular conversation.
Fiji featured in 1974 and Nepal in 1992, but probably my favourite pre-Cricket Round the World item is the obituary of George Tubow II, King of Tonga, who was eulogised in the 1919 Almanack.
“The last of the independent kings in the Pacific,” lamented the tribute. “Died April, aged 46. Very fond of cricket, gaining his love of the game while at school in Auckland. His subjects became so devoted to the game that it was necessary to prohibit it on six days of the week to avert famine, the plantations being entirely neglected for the cricket field.”
It may have pre-dated Cricket Round the World by more than 70 years but all the ingredients are there: the exotic location, a larger-than-life character, the idiosyncratic place of cricket in an unexpected land and the carefully underplayed “wow” moment as a pay-off; in this case how people were so engrossed in playing cricket that it nearly led to a national famine. Obituary it may have been, but that short item among the vast litany of First World War dead remains the template and archetype for the classic Cricket Round the World entry.
It’s a template that works too, and is growing and developing every year. Whenever a new Wisden appears, Cricket Round the World is the section I head for first. Before the Five Cricketers of the Year, before the Notes by the Editor – they all come behind finding out which global backwaters have sent in their couple of paragraphs. I often picture a correspondent in a snowbound tin shed, typing his copy while wrapped in furs, or despatching it with an errand boy to the telegraph station as a distant ukulele trills, before returning to the bar, patting the pockets of his sweat-stained safari suit for his pipe and matches, and ordering another banana daiquiri.
With each passing year there’s another spellbinding collection of tales detailing quirky circumstances and against-the-odds achievements that can only inspire cricketers and non-cricketers alike. If anyone ever asks me what makes the game of cricket special, I point them towards this section of the Almanack: there are few parts of Wisden, or indeed any cricket publication, that can eclipse the sheer variety and spirit contained in those pages. From ICC Associate Members with a half-decent chance of reaching the World Cup (organisational chicanery notwithstanding) to remote global outposts with dustbins for stumps and ingenious local rules to accommodate quirks in the prevailing conditions, all cricketing life is there. In the turn of a page you can be transported from frostbitten fingers on frozen tundra to sweltering jungle clearings or dusty rock-strewn expanses under relentless hot sun. And at the centre of it all, of course, there’s always cricket. Most of all though, Cricket Round the World celebrates two aspects of the game largely responsible for its continued existence and success: aspiration and fun.
There’s the aspiration of the stronger nations as they strive to improve themselves and challenge the established order; nations like Argentina and Denmark, blessed with fine players and long-embedded organisational structures designed to optimise their potential as far as possible despite the competing attractions of football and other more established sports.
There are also the nations and territories for whom dreams of playing at the World Cup are left behind on the pillow when waking every morning; places where cricket is played for recreation and enjoyment: the outcrops like St Helena and Niue Island; out-of-the-way places that tend to be where cricket once arrived with the military and the missionary, the game as a legacy of cultural and historical imprints that remain in the eternal struggle between bat and ball. There are examples of cricket in adversity, such as the stories found in the squalid surroundings of refugee holding camps on Nauru and Christmas Island, for example, and cricket being played among soldiers in Iraq even to the point of an “Ashes in the Desert” being contested between British and Australian troops. And of course there are the quirky knock-ups in places with no historical connection to the game; reports of matches played for the sheer devilment, literally from pole to pole, born out of a love of cricket combined with a determined eccentricity whose levels are surely unmatched in any other sport. This whole range of stories is unfailingly underpinned by an overriding and unquenchable love of the game itself.
One could argue – and in fact I would argue – that it’s in places like these that the ill-defined and much sought-after spirit of cricket shines brightest. It takes a level of commitment to play cricket that other popular sports don’t require: anyone can play football, you just need a ball of some kind and space of just about any dimensions. But while cricket utilises one of the oldest and most basic tenets of human sporting activity – hitting a ball with a stick – it does need equipment, however basic or improvised it may turn out to be. The game also needs a certain amount of flat terrain, a degree of technique and a passing knowledge of at least the basic laws before play can begin in earnest.
It takes a special kind of determination to stage a game of cricket on, say, a tiny, far-flung island, or in a country with no cricketing history where the game is met by locals with looks of bafflement, bewilderment, suspicion or even fear. The hardy souls who achieve these things – be they nostalgic expats, tourists or curiosity-piqued locals – are well worth their place in the Almanack alongside the greats of the past and present.
The existence of Cricket Round the World also reflects the global events, cultural developments and even patterns of migration of the last 20 years and beyond. Indian, Sri Lankan and Pakistani migrant workers and students are currently the most active and enthusiastic cricket evangelists, kick-starting the game in places as diverse as the former Soviet Union and tiny Pacific islands. Some of the countries featured here are younger than Wisden itself, while the presence within its pages of nations like Austria and Kazakhstan shows how the game is spreading way beyond the faded tenets of empire – and spreading faster than ever before.
Television has taken cricket into the unlikeliest of living-rooms, prompting complete novices from Iceland to Bhutan to take up the game. The internet has made the acquiring of information, inspiration and equipment more straightforward than ever before, meaning a game previously regarded in some quarters as one of empire is now a truly and undeniably global phenomenon.
Entries such as those featuring matches played by soldiers in Iraq and in the refugee detention centres also illustrate the role of cricket in preserving a sense of civilisation and normality in the most hellish and testing of circumstances. What could be further from the violence and bloodshed of war on the doorstep, or the fear and anxiety of detention in a refugee camp than the calm, reassuring rhythms of a game of cricket? In strange places and difficult situations we are always comforted by the familiar: the shared rituals and gentle nuances of a game of cricket are ideally suited to make difficult situations in difficult locations at least a little more bearable, even if it is just for an afternoon. For a Sri Lankan sweltering in roasting hot tents on the lunar landscape of Nauru after a perilous boat journey across the Indian Ocean as he waits for his Australian asylum application to be considered – something that could take many years – having a game of cricket to look forward to might just be the one thing that can keep him going through the relentless and endless slow passing of days.
Poignant human stories like these stud the knockabout fun and straightforward enthusiasms that make up much of the Cricket Round the World section: the emergence of Afghan cricket is an obvious example, and I’ve often wondered whatever became of the man Prague CC unearthed, as reported in the Czech Republic entry in the 1998 Wisden, apparently “a talented Pakistani batsman; unfortunately he was in a refugee camp and is believed to have been deported”.
In every Cricket Round the World entry, from whichever nation or territory it might have come, whether the game is being played in trying circumstances or just passing an afternoon among a group of friends, there are always the common cricket themes of hope, fair play, achievement, aspiration and fun, shared across borders, oceans and continents, far away from the hype of the IPL and the endless treadmill of Test and one-day international cricket. This is why I strongly believe that the heart of cricket can be found beating in those few pages each year.
What can also be found in the Cricket Round the World section is some extremely good travel writing. These nuggets of prose from places many of us would be hard-pressed to point to on a map provide some eloquent, valuable and evocative portraits of life in places we’ll never see. Viewed through the prism of the game we love, the collected Cricket Round the World entries of the last 20 years or so provide a fascinating portrait of human life all over the planet, and these portraits are usually couched in some very fine writing indeed. As a travel writer myself, I have to read some pretty awful travel prose – all “cities of contrasts” and “colourful markets” – most of which never comes close to capturing the real spirit and essence of a place. Wisden eschews the flowery and the clichéd in favour of understated prose that tells a cricket story while adding a remarkable amount of local colour. Canon Nicholas Turner’s entry about cricket on Ascension Island that appeared in the 1996 Wisden, for example, told me in a few sentences more about culture and life on a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean than just about everything else written on the subject put together.
Elk Stopped Play revisits, contextualises and expands upon the amazing accounts that have appeared in the pages of Wisden over the last two decades. Each year Cricket Round the World bursts with wonderful achievements, outstanding performances, laugh-out-loud anecdotes and frequently poignant human stories, often against considerable odds. I’ve tried to reflect all of these in selecting my favourites here. As a travel writer who has always looked for the unusual, and a (bad) cricketer who’s always enjoyed playing in unexpected places – I believe I still hold the record for the westernmost cover-drive on the European continent, a satisfying tonk through sheep droppings and boulders at the western tip of Valentia Island off the far south-west of Ireland – I have unashamedly favoured the more niche and quirky locations and stories in this collection. Some of the stories I’ve chosen speak for themselves and stand alone; in some cases I’ve fleshed out the detail, added a little more context and brought things up to date, and in others they’ve been a stepping stone to a wider exploration of that nation’s cricket. I hope I’ve succeeded in my aims of celebrating the diverse and fascinating nature of cricket around the world and of paying tribute to some of the loyal and gifted Wisden correspondents scattered across the globe. It’s been my pleasure to correspond with some of them in the course of preparing this book and wherever I’ve tracked them down, however long it’s been since their Wisden contribution, I’ve found exactly the same levels of passion, enthusiasm and kindness flourishing wherever in the world they happen to be.
As I write these words the 150th Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack is upon us. I sincerely hope that John Wisden himself would approve of this selection of stories, just as I’m sure he would enjoy the Almanack’s annual tour of global cricket. After all, Wisden – as a member of the 1859 All-England squad that undertook the first-ever overseas cricket tour to America – was a pioneering cricket globetrotter himself. In his wonderful history of the Almanack, The Little Wonder, Robert Winder tells of how on the rough Atlantic crossing that sent passengers stumbling and had crockery shattering on the floor, Wisden recorded in his journal that the pitch required “the immediate use of the heavy roller”.
With its dry, understated wit inspired by a desire for the normality of cricket in the face of extreme circumstances, it’s a line that could have come straight from the pages of Cricket Round the World itself.