Elk Stopped Play

In Angola, a country devastated by civil war since gaining independence from Portugal in 1975, cricket has formed a bond between the Indian and Pakistani communities. Kashmir and other issues are forgotten as around 20 hardy souls meet three times a week to play next to a floodlit football ground in the capital Luanda. It’s a taste of home life, apparently instigated when two Indians began playing with a piece of wood and two tennis balls in 1994. Narinder Pal Singh, Wisden 2003

The packed slip cordon at the annual Casey Base cricket match has little to do with swing, seam or – with temperatures hovering around freezing – conserving body heat. It’s more a question of knowing that a missed catch will condemn the guilty fielder to a trek down treacherous icy slopes to fetch the ball from a small meltwater lake. The fixture is traditionally played each Casey Day (February 12), the anniversary of the founding of the Australian Antarctic Research Station, some 3,880 km south of Perth and 2,580 km from the South Pole. Teams comprise Australian scientists and visitors of varying nationalities. The pitch is a cement helipad, ensuring generous bounce. Naturally, local rules apply: should the tennis ball – this isn’t the place to break the triple-glazed windows – ricochet off the Red Shed, the two-storey living quarters, it’s four; over the roof is six; hitting the station leader at the barbecue is instant dismissal, which still somehow proves an irresistible target. Post-match analysis is often fuelled by ample quantities of Antarctica’s own home brew, known as Penguin’s Piss. John Rich, Wisden 2003

The continent of Antarctica has hosted more cricket matches than you might think, not all of them lubricated by Penguin Piss either (which, all things considered, is probably for the best). Cricket remains part of the annual February celebrations at Casey Station, situated in the Australian Antarctic Territory overlooking the northern side of the Bailey Peninsula (its rugged, imposing nature suggesting it may have been named after Trevor rather than the Australian politician Richard). February is one of the more amenable months to cricket temperature-wise, settling between a balmy -5°C and a sweltering -1°C. In July and August, when most of us this side of the equator are dozing in the sun – waking only when a team-mate reminds us we’re bowling and there are still three deliveries left in the over – the Casey cricketers see the mercury plummet to a parky -37°C. It’s not just the weather that makes cricket in the Antarctic taxing either, there’s the local wildlife to contend with too. An Australia Day game at the base was once interrupted when an elephant seal lolloped on to the pitch and made its intentions to remain parked on a good length for some time stubbornly clear.

But while the seal-whispering cricketing scientists at Casey are the continent’s “home” team – and probably the closest Antarctica will ever get to a national side – a number of others have braved the ice and tundra with bat and ball. Harry Thompson’s experiences detailed in his book Penguins Stopped Play set the bar high for South Pole cricket even though the impromptu circumstances – there was only an oar available for use as a bat, for example – meant that it was never destined to be a textbook display of the cricketing arts. But others were coming. And others had been.

Antarctica’s first instance of a follow-on was arguably Captain Scott’s doomed polar expedition of 1912 in which he was always well behind Roald Amundsen with little or no hope of saving the game. Exactly 100 years later another English explorer arrived in Antarctica determined to avenge Scott’s defeat by the Norwegian at least on the cricket field. Neil Laughton, a former Royal Marine commando and ex-member of the SAS, led three men on a Scott centenary memorial expedition to the South Pole during the winter of 2011–12. Among the equipment they hauled on foot for the last 100 miles were a plastic cricket bat and a high-visibility orange ball, with which they intended to mark the centenary of Scott’s arrival at the Pole by staging a cricket match against the scientists at the Amundsen–Scott research centre at the Geographical South Pole. The pitch was cleared with a snowmobile, blizzards held off and the game was able to commence on January 17, 2012, 100 years to the day after Scott’s arrival at the Pole. The game, incidentally, was given added cricketing gravitas by the presence as umpire of former Wisden editor Matthew Engel.

Laughton explained that he’d chosen cricket because it was “an iconic British sport and a team game”. Whether it felt like an iconic sport to the players as the wind chill took the temperature down into the minus thirties and, at 10,000ft above sea level, the altitude made even nabbing a single a lung-busting challenge, we’ll probably never know. Either way Laughton’s British team beat a team dubbed The Rest of the World but largely comprising Australian trekkers who’d reached the Pole via a different route, by two wickets. There was no boundary so every run scored was actually run: this is challenging enough in any circumstances but particularly when you’re clad from head to toe in polar survival gear and the air isn’t exactly bursting with oxygen. The quality of the cricket was compromised further when the plastic bat snapped in half due to the freezing temperatures and the game had to be completed with its shattered remains. This was a game that could never be described as “one for the purists”, but then it was probably never intended as such.

Laughton was happy with the result though, not least because he felt it might offer Scott himself a crumb of comfort 100 years after Amundsen had beaten him to the punch. “With the British outcome, at least he is hopefully looking down on us and this has put a smile on his face,” he said. It was an appropriate result for other reasons too: exactly a century before on January 17, 1912, as Scott arrived at the pole to find Amundsen’s Norwegian flag planted proprietarily in the snow, J. W. H. T. Douglas’s England had also beaten Australia, by seven wickets at Adelaide, to take a 2–1 lead in the Ashes, thanks largely to Jack Hobbs’s 187 in the first innings.

I’ve tried in vain to find a cricket connection to Scott himself. It seems that, while he carried some fairly idiosyncratic items south with him – a full china dinner service, the complete works of Thomas Hardy and an upright piano, for example – a cricket bat was not among them.

Incidentally, although this was Antarctica’s first appearance in Cricket Round the World, it wasn’t the continent’s first mention in the Almanack. The 1986 Wisden featured a paragraph tucked away at the bottom of the “Scottish Cricket in 1985” entry. Anticipating in both tone and subject matter the dedicated section that was still seven years away, the item read:

“What was almost certainly the most southerly game of cricket ever played, and the coldest, took place in Antarctica, 700 kilometres from the South Pole, on January 11, 1985, between two teams drawn from the 60 scientists, lawyers, environmentalists and administrators engaged in an international workshop being held at the Beardmore South Camp and concerned with the Antarctic Treaty. New Zealand’s representative on the Treaty, Christopher Beeby, captained the Gondwanaland Occasionals with players from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. A British delegate to the conference, Arthur Watts, captained the Beardmore Casuals, a basically British team. The stumps were improvised, the pitch, such as it was, had been rolled by a Hercules transport aircraft, and the ‘midnight sun’ allowed play to continue until 11pm. The Occasionals (129) beat the Casuals (102) by 27 runs.”

One can’t help thinking that while “Occasionals” might be an appropriate name for an Antarctic cricket team, calling any side that’s made it to the very bottom of the world determined to have a game of cricket “Casuals” is a little unfair.

The match was organised by the Casuals’ skipper Sir Arthur Watts, who in his youth had played Minor Counties cricket for Shropshire, and took place on the Bowden Nevé at a latitude of roughly 84 degrees south. The wicket was a board with painted stumps, and the bails were two beer-cans whose contents froze immediately. The Casuals’ 102 featured a top score of 22 by Greenpeace’s Roger Wilson, while the Occasionals’ leading scorer was Trevor Hatheron, a scientist from New Zealand, who made a nifty 24. While these individual scores might not look all that impressive on paper, they are possibly put into context by the fact that no less than 13 batsmen in the match were recorded as “retired frozen”.

However, even this wasn’t the first game of cricket at the South Pole. Cricket’s Antarctic debut is believed to date back as far as 1969, when a match took place using the South Pole itself – a red-and-white striped shaft like a giant barber’s pole – as a wicket. The game featured the former New Zealand captain John Reid – the first man to lead them to Test match wins at home and away – but was a short-lived affair: a meaty biff by the New Zealander disappeared into a snowdrift and the proceedings had to be abandoned.

Sir Arthur Watts reacted haughtily when it was put to him that his game hadn’t been the first at the South Pole as he’d claimed. Reid’s knockabout with three colleagues was not, he protested, a proper match.

“This deplorable attempt to deprive our game of its status as a ‘first’ wholly ignores the difference between a four-man frolic and an organised match played between two full teams,” he huffed. “And, of course, we did not use a real cricket ball, since we foresaw what would happen if we did: a lost ball buried deep in the snow, as the four-man frolic quickly discovered.”

A notable feature of Reid’s “four-man frolic” was that, with the wicket being the South Pole itself, every shot played travelled north.

Given the necessary allowances made to the laws in such extreme circumstances one hopes that at least one player at the South Pole took the opportunity to hit the ball and then run around the wicket. It would be quite something to say that you’d scored a single by running around the world.

Plans are afoot to return cricket to one of the world’s most distinctive grounds. The barren, volcanic rock of Ascension Island in the South Atlantic is believed to be the only place where “wedding stopped play” – to be resumed 40 minutes later as the last of the congregation left for the reception. The little Church of St Mary the Virgin is inside the boundary and, when it was restored in 1993, with a new slate roof, cricket moved to a new and larger ground at the island’s RAF camp, where floodlit play is possible. However, the move has not been popular with the crowds (all things are relative – the total population is only 1,200) and Dr Sukhtanker, the resident surgeon and cricketing supremo, intends to take the game back to its original venue. Cricket on Ascension, uninhabited until the Royal Navy landed in 1815, took off when West Indian workers arrived in the mid-1960s to build a relay station. They started league cricket, which has been kept going by South Africans working for the cable company, and the RAF, who returned during the Falklands War. They have provided teaching input for the workers from St Helena who are employed here. St Helenians have a natural aptitude for the game, and have developed good technique, with two exceptions: the concrete strip offers little chance of spin, and the short boundaries – combined with American influence – have encouraged some towards the high baseball slog. The cricket field by the church, which used to be the army parade ground, is actually rolled volcanic ash, with not a blade of grass in sight, and the outfield is very fast. The ball used is a composite – a leather ball would be torn to shreds – and we need several per game there, to replace those which get stuck on the church roof or among the stores waiting to be loaded onto the next ship. A dusty trade wind always blows across the pitch, but it is what people seem to prefer and it is indeed a fine setting, if you can find some shade: the four sides comprising the small, white church, a smooth, dark red, volcanic cone, the ageing, arcaded barracks, and the dark blue ocean with its giant waves crashing in towards the anchorage below. Canon Nicholas Turner, Vicar of Ascension Wisden 1996

Stuck right in the middle of the South Atlantic, a thousand miles from Africa and 1,400 miles from South America, Ascension is certainly one of the more remote places ever to have hosted cricket. Indeed it’s one of the more remote places ever to have hosted anything at all. Named after the day in 1503 it was discovered by the magnificently named Portuguese explorer Afonso d’Alberquerque (it had actually been discovered two years earlier by a Galician, but it seems he forgot to tell anyone), Ascension possibly saw its first cricket action with the arrival in 1815 of British troops on the island, garrisoned there in order to help keep an eye on Napoleon who had been exiled to St Helena some 800 miles to the south-east. With eyesight that good they must have been fair cricketers. The volcanic island’s suitability as a venue for cricket may also be detected in the comment of the 19th-century French naturalist René Primevère Lesson, when he said of Ascension that “the English nation alone would have thought of making the island of Ascension a productive spot”. If the English can make a home in such unpromising surroundings then cricket surely won’t be far behind.

Canon Nicholas Turner’s contribution to the 1996 Wisden is one of my favourite Cricket Round the World entries. With its strong sense of place, wry humour, local detail and clear love of the game, it showcases everything that’s special about cricket in unusual places.

He arrived on the island with his wife in 1991, and they would remain for five years. “I am a priest of the Church of England and my wife Ann is a deacon,” he told me from his current home in West Yorkshire. “When we got married we realised we would need to find a new parish and answered the advertisement for Ascension Island, partly because it had been vacant for a long time, and partly because it would give us the opportunity to work out our joint ministry without the interference of English bishops (liberals are so conservative – that’s a Church problem). In the end, we loved it and stayed longer than any clergy since the church was built.”

Despite playing down his cricketing talents (“I was a wicketkeeper in the school second eleven, but the only cricket I played as an adult was in a San Francisco league: one summer while I was looking after a parish there I discovered a moderate ability as a spin bowler”), Canon Turner was at the heart of Ascension cricket during his entire time there and was the ideal Wisden correspondent. Two aspects of his Ascension entry stood out for me: the day a wedding stopped play and the desire of Dr Sukhtanker to return Ascension cricket to its spiritual home. When I asked about the wedding incident, 17 years on he remembers the important things first: “The score was 83 for five,” he said, “that has stuck with me for life.”

The groom, a young RAF corporal, was only scheduled to be stationed on Ascension for a few months, but saw the posting as an ideal opportunity to circumvent some tricky issues.

“He and his fiancée had been under pressure from their families to do the wedding just so, but instead they came up with the simple idea of having it 4,000 miles away. This made for a simpler, smaller affair, free of interference and with wonderful photos at sunset on the beach. A whitewashed open-top Land Rover stood in for the Rolls-Royce.”

The necessity for a nuptial-related cessation of play came about because the church didn’t have glass windows, only wooden louvres that let in light, air and, potentially, the boisterous hullabaloo of a keenly contested cricket match right on its doorstep.

“I hadn’t realised there was going to be a league fixture that day,” said Canon Turner, “but the teams were very good-natured about it and took their enforced break with equanimity.”.

While marital and cricketing bliss was mutually assured, alas it appears that Dr Sukhtanker’s dream of bringing Ascension cricket home was never realised. And the church was again the catalyst.

“As far as I can tell, the move never happened. The church roof was the main problem. For its 150th anniversary in 1993, the RAF had adopted St Mary’s as a garrison church and undertook a comprehensive restoration, which involved constructing a complete new roof. It was this work that forced the closure of the cricket field, because half of it was covered with building supplies and huts. Cricket had to move up to the Travellers playing field, further up the volcano and therefore cooler – Georgetown has always been the hottest part of the island.

“When the work was finished, the old lead roof had been replaced with smart black tiles, and the cricketers were fearful of breaking the new tiles. The old rules were that if you hit the roof it counted as a six, hit the wall and it was a four: the entire church and surrounding wall were inside the running track which formed the boundary so we needed these local adjustments to the laws. In hindsight I suspect my reason for writing that 1996 piece was to add weight to the campaign for a return to the island’s historic ground. Perhaps I’d even been urged to do so by ‘Shub’, as Dr Sukhtanker was affectionately known. I do remember that there was a very large supply of surplus tiles that were carefully stored away, and promises were made that at the end of each season any broken tiles would be replaced. I can clearly remember checking all this out and speaking to team captains and so on, but despite those assurances I don’t think we succeeded.”

Most of the remote places featured in Cricket Round the World enjoy aspects of the game unique to their location. The local rule concerning the St Mary’s church roof is a prime example, albeit one that inadvertently contributed to cricket leaving the ground altogether for fear of ecclesiastical tile-breakage. These out-of-the-way places often face their own unique cricket-related problems and issues, with Ascension being no exception.

“As with every other part of island life, individuals could make a huge difference for a short time, only to leave just when you got used to them,” recalled Canon Turner. “Certainly, the RAF brought a fair number of good sportsmen into the pool of players, though the longer serving Saints – as the island-born residents are known – had much greater experience of the conditions. Balls were the big expense, as they deteriorated so rapidly and so many were lost, particularly on the pier-head side among the containers and other portside clutter.

“Even in the ‘winter’ season, it was always extremely hot and humid. Bowlers would seek to bowl fast, but with as short a run-up as possible. Batsmen were keen to hit boundaries, so as to minimise the need to run. In that sense, they brought a little of the feel of Twenty20, long before its time. A really good six would occasionally go right over the church roof and land in the vicarage garden. We had a good garden – watered by treated effluent, brought round each week in a tanker.”

Away from the game and the necessity of avoiding being brained by cricket balls while tending to their rosebushes, Nicholas and his wife Ann were kept very busy during their time on Ascension. It’s clear that even nearly two decades on he still looks back on his time there fondly.

“There was such a range of work. I was also the lay advocate defending all those who came to court; Ann did much of her pastoral work as manager of the video and sports shop and so on. But one cannot be giving out spiritually and pastorally for too long without renewing contact with the rest of the Church. It would have been indulgent to have stayed longer, but it was a great experience while it lasted. We miss Ascension hugely.”

The current state of Ascension cricket is hard to discern. Canon Turner told me that the website of the island newspaper The Islander, which he used to edit, has no mention of cricket in its archives after the year 2000. Perhaps the clerical begonias are now safe from being peppered by an artillery of little red missiles, but if that’s the case it would be a terrible shame. There’s something strangely comforting about the thought of cricket being played all the way out there on a big lump of volcanic rock hundreds of miles from anywhere in the choppy waters of the south Atlantic, and one hopes that the game continues and flourishes.

For one thing, on the eastern side of the island, the opposite side to the capital Georgetown, there is a Cricket Valley. For another, the island has a first-class cricket legacy to perpetuate: William Delacombe is the only Ascension-born cricketer ever to feature in the first-class game. His father, Captain William Addis Delacombe of the Royal Marines, had been posted to Georgetown and was there when young William arrived in 1860. His stay on the island was brief: the family returned to England soon afterwards when William senior was appointed Chief Constable of Derby. William junior would grow to a strapping 6ft 5ins, become a keen cricketer and turn out on ten occasions for Derbyshire, where he also held the post of club secretary until 1908. His greatest cricket moment, however, came not for Derbyshire but at Dunstable in 1897 when, while playing for the Incogniti against L. C. R. Thring’s XI, he took all ten wickets, including a hat-trick.

The 1912 Wisden obituary of William Delacombe noted that “although he was not a great cricketer, he was certainly a useful one”.

In April 1995 a small but determined band established the Baku Cricket Club, the first in the Caucasus. Five years on, a multi-ethnic collection of 25–30 cricketers play every Sunday from May to October on a football pitch. The first one used was far from ideal: covered with rubber matting taken from a running track, it had short boundaries and a rough outfield littered with dog dirt. Two years ago, however, the club got the opportunity to play on a surface more conducive to cricket; it was still used for football but with bigger boundaries and better grass (though inclined to be over-watered by the zealous groundsman). And the players have a proper mat. That the BCC is playing at all owes much to its hard-working first honorary secretary Caroline Adams, who was a regular spectator along with her cairn terriers Benji and Susie. Initially almost all the players came from the Indian subcontinent. The first Azerbaijani player was a 13-year-old called Emin. He was a natural batsman, rarely playing a cross-batted shot, and was being coached by the Pakistani chargé d’affaires Raja Masood, and Lutful Kabir, then head of the Azerbaijani branch of the charity Save the Children. Emin enjoyed playing, but, after six weeks or so he was set upon by a group of youths. He came to training only once after that, by which time he had been transformed from a slim, unimposing figure into a broad-shouldered, tall young man. When asked where he had been during the previous two months, he replied, “I’ve been learning karate.” Alum Bati, Wisden 2000

There was drama in the final of the Austrian Open League in September, Lord’s CC triumphed over Pakistan CC thanks to A. Ajay, who took the first recorded hat-trick in Austrian championship cricket. An English touring team visited Vienna in May, and formally opened Austria’s first full-sized ground at nearby Seebarn. France then arrived to play the first two internationals there, but Austria won both matches – the first by just two runs after setting a target of 301. Another new cricket ground was inaugurated at Velden in September, becoming the third purpose-built venue in the country. Two of them are surrounded by breathtaking Alpine mountains, and the last, Seebarn, is in the centre of one of Austria’s wine regions. Andrew Simpson-Parker, Wisden 1997