Elk Stopped Play

The Phnom Penh Cricket Club was formed in early 1999 and a small group of Indians are reported to be playing regularly on the beautiful playground at the North Bridge International School. Initially a tennis ball was used because of fears of having to use the poor Cambodian medical facilities, but the members have now become bold enough to play with a proper ball. Wisden 2000

British explorers Matt Coates and Matthew Hancock were forced to give up their attempt to walk to the Magnetic North Pole in March 2005 after Hancock suffered frostbite. However, just before being rescued, they did succeed in playing what is claimed to be the most northerly cricket ever, on the Arctic ice close to the Reindeer Peninsula (78° 45’ N, 104° 03’ W). “We managed to get an inflatable bat and stumps,” Coates said. “Unfortunately, it was minus 45°C at the time, and they broke into a thousand pieces. So we turned the ski poles into stumps and used a ski as a bat. We did have a real cricket ball and a snowman for a fielder. Matt Hancock played one really beautiful sweep shot, even with his frostbite.” Wisden 2006

An achievement though it unquestionably was to have a game of cricket way up at high latitude on the northern tip of the Svalbard archipelago, not least with frostbite and using a ski as a bat, alas for Matt Coates and Matthew Hancock they were still a good way short of playing the most northerly cricket in the world. Around 600 miles short, in fact. Indeed, there are at least three recorded instances of cricket being played at the North Pole itself.

Hancock is now the MP for West Suffolk where, on his website, he still claims to have played the “most northerly recorded game of cricket”. As someone who can’t play a sweep shot under any circumstances, let alone with frostbitten fingers and using a ski for a bat, I’m not about to belittle his achievement on that 2005 expedition, but – frostbite or not – until you’ve played your trademark sweep shot at the very top of the world itself then your northerly cricket claims are always going to ring a little hollow.

The first game of north-polar cricket took place in 1976 when the British nuclear submarine HMS Sovereign broke through the ice, a hatch opened, members of the crew emerged blinking carrying bat, stumps and ball, and a makeshift game of cricket took place. There is photographic evidence too: unable to drive the stumps into the ice the sailors had piled snow around them instead, and it seems a real wooden bat was used. For all that, and for all the smiles of those involved however, it looked a dark, cold and pretty miserable affair. Still, if I’d been cooped up for weeks in a massive tin can under the sea, a game of cricket in the dark in temperatures so far below freezing they’d need some kind of diagram to guide them back up again would doubtless seem like the last word in hedonism by comparison.

It would be 15 years until the North Pole saw cricket again, and this time the top of the world would see its first international encounter. In 1991 the British submarine HMS Tireless and her American counterpart the USS Prago both surfaced at the Pole and contested a cricket match on a matting wicket brought along especially for the occasion. A crowd of around 100 fellow servicemen watched as the British won the game, largely due to the fact that the American team didn’t really have much of an idea of what cricket actually involved.

Most recently, in April 2008, the Indian navy produced arguably the most impressive piece of North Pole cricket to date. Rather than turning up all cosy and warm in a big namby-pamby submarine, ten members of the Indian navy skied there, and in doing so completed their impressive hat-trick of skiing both poles and climbing Mount Everest. While there they encountered a party of British explorers led by David Hempleman-Adams and, as is customary when two disparate groups of people meet in the middle of nowhere at the top of the world, a cricket match was hastily arranged.

The quality on show was not bad either, considering they were using a plastic spade for a bat, ski poles for stumps and a pair of old woollen socks rolled up and swathed with tape as a ball, not to mention the trifling matter of it being 40 degrees below zero. A thrilling five-overs-a-side encounter followed, from which the Indians emerged victorious by just one run. When you’ve skied to both poles and climbed the world’s highest mountain, it’s probably no surprise that you have the steely determination to close out the tightest of finishes and make sure it goes in your favour.

Hancock and Coates may not quite have matched these achievements, but they did manage to outdo the northerliness of the only other notable cricket occasions to take place on the Svalbard Archipelago, including a remarkable achievement by one of the greatest players in the game’s history. The first occasion was in 1885 when four British ships were moored in Recherche Bay, the Active, the Calypso, the Volage and the Ruby. Two teams were selected and a game arranged in which the combined ranks of the Active and the Calypso triumphed. An old mining settlement on the southern headland of the bay is called Calypsobyen to this day. If the outcome of a cricket match results in the location being named in honour of the winners it puts shoving a few cinders into an old urn into perspective, if you ask me.

The best story of cricket on Svalbard, however, involves one of the greatest cricketers who ever lived, Alfred Shaw. In 1894 he was in Svalbard – or Spitsbergen as it was known then – cruising on board the yacht of his friend Lord Sheffield. Shaw is quoted in his memoirs Alfred Shaw, Cricketer: His Career and Reminiscences as recalling: “We were nestling in the bosom of a peaceful ice fjord at midnight, with the Arctic sun at its lowest point lighting up the snow-clad mountains and the magnificent glaciers around us. It was Lord Sheffield who at this weird hour and in these eerie surroundings suggested a cricket match. The idea was promptly taken up by all on board. Wickets were pitched, a ball improvised and at about a quarter to twelve on the night of August 12, 1894, this strange game commenced. Of course, I had to bowl and Lord Sheffield opened the batting. Between a quarter to twelve and half past twelve I had bowled out practically all the gentlemen passengers and officers, certainly 40 persons all told. It will be seen that it was pretty quick work from the bowler’s point of view.”

Shaw was two weeks shy of his 52nd birthday. He’d play another three seasons of first-class cricket.

There should be a special mention here also for the earliest recorded game to take place above the Arctic Circle. In 1823 Captain William Parry was sitting out the winter waiting for the ice that had encased his two ships HMS Hecla and HMS Fury since the previous autumn to break up in order to continue his quest to find the North-West Passage. They were wintering three degrees above the Arctic Circle near Igoolik in what’s now the Canadian province of Nunavut, and by March the endless winter darkness was at last being conquered by the returning sun, and a distinct glow was seeping over the horizon. The exploration party was in understandably good spirits and reacted accordingly.

Parry wrote in his journal on March 8, 1823, of how “the weather was now so pleasant, and the temperature in the sun so comfortable to the feelings when a shelter could be found from the wind, that we set up various games for the people, such as cricket, foot-ball, and quoits, which some of them played for many hours during the day.”

The 1995 season was dominated by Wesley Gidson, captain of the Cayman Brac Second Division team, who scored 652 in six innings, averaging 217.33 with a top score of 237 not out – and took 21 wickets at seven each. Cayman Brac is the second-largest of the Cayman Islands, and competition with the main island, Grand Cayman, only started in 1994. The highlight of the year was a festival involving several West Indian Test players who played a match with 27 sixes, watched by 2,000 spectators. Cricket began here in the 1960s; the pitch is a rubber mat laid on asphalt. Jimmy Powell, Wisden 1996

In the last two years cricket in Chile has undergone a revival. In 1999 it was reintroduced in several schools, with 50 or so boys and girls now enjoying the game. Though Chilean cricket has dwindled since its heyday in the 1920s, the game has been kept alive and is now thriving, thanks to the generosity of the Prince of Wales Country Club, which offers its splendid ground at the foot of the Andes to cricketers every summer. This offer is currently being taken up by some 50 enthusiasts, mainly British expats with a smattering of other cricketing nationalities, a few Chileans, plus the odd US baseball player. The club schedules about 20 games per season, mostly intra-club matches, with occasional visits from UK and Australian teams and a very welcome annual visit from the Argentine Cricket Association. Whenever the Antarctic survey ship HMS Endurance docks in Valparaiso a game is arranged, thus taking us back to 1829 and the very origins of cricket in Chile – when teams from two Royal Navy ships met. Recent visitors include Rosslyn Cricket Club, Old Merchant Taylors’, the Old Bedfordians, Stowe School and a Stockbrokers’ XI. Until the Stockbrokers came, only the occasional Australian had been seen fielding with a glass (or more likely a bottle) of beer in his hand. However, some of the Stockbrokers astounded their opponents by going out to field with a gin and tonic in each hand. MCC are sending a team in 2001; they are not expected to match this. Anthony Adams, Wisden 2001

This was Chile’s second appearance in Cricket Round the World, and its tone is markedly different to the faintly Eeyorish 1996 entry that lamented how there was only one cricket club in Chile, barely 30 players and that the only visitors of note had been Bath Schools. A year after this 2001 entry, however, Wisden reported the formation of the Chilean Cricket Association, that the MCC had visited as part of a tour of South America, that Santiago boasted four teams, and that plans were afoot to revive cricket in Valparaiso, where the game in Chile was born. Affiliate Membership of the ICC followed a year later.

Details of the 1829 match between two Royal Navy ships at Valparaiso are hard to verify. Now a thriving city of more than a quarter of a million people, in 1829 Valparaiso was a small port town and the base for the new Chilean navy. An 1830 drawing of the town reveals a few buildings scattered over some steep-looking hills – any prospective cricketers might have had a job finding a piece of ground flat enough to accommodate a half-decent game. It’s possible that one of the Royal Navy vessels was the frigate HMS Seringatapam under the command of William Waldegrave, which was certainly in the area at the time, but otherwise the vessels – and hence the names of the teams – remain a mystery.

However, it seems that the 1829 match wasn’t the first recorded cricket match in Chile after all. In fact it wasn’t even the first cricket match in Valparaiso. According to Volume 28 of Josiah Conder’s whopping 30-book series The Modern Traveller: A Popular Description, Geographical, Historical and Topographical, Of The Various Countries Of The Globe, published in 1829, cricket was being played 11 years before that. In 1818 Lord Thomas Cochrane, a famous naval captain from the Napoleonic Wars (and quite a character: both Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey were based at least in part on Cochrane), arrived in Valparaiso to take charge of the Chilean Navy in their war of independence with Spain, having been forced out of Britain following his conviction for involvement in a stock-exchange fraud. He arrived in November 1818, was immediately granted Chilean citizenship and appointed the nation’s first vice-admiral. His arrival was marked with “grand dinners, cricket-matches, races and picnic parties” that apparently “rendered Valparaiso unusually gay”.

Still, whether the first match was played in 1829 or 1818 or even earlier, Chilean cricket is now in the twilight of its second century even if it took until 1860 for the first official club to be formed, fittingly in Valparaiso.

By the 1920s Chilean cricket was thriving mainly thanks to British expats involved in the nitrates industry. Clubs sprang up in the capital Santiago, including one at the Prince of Wales Country Club in 1925, taking its name from the future Edward VIII, who had officially opened the ground. The Prince of Wales complex would become effectively the home of Chilean cricket (the 1996 Wisden reported that membership at that time cost $500,000 – fortunately the cricketers were given use of the facilities without having to take out membership). Pelham Warner led a touring side to Chile in the 1920s, and the nation’s cricket pedigree was boosted when Freddie Brown, who was born in Peru and went to St Peter’s School in Santiago, captained both Northamptonshire and England in the 1950s.

After the Second World War British expats began to leave and the game dwindled steadily throughout the 1950s. There were still pockets of enthusiasm and activity in the country and Argentina continued to be regular tourists. In March 1954 the Argentineans lost a thrilling game by four runs, a match arguably more notable for being the only recorded game played by the distinguished English historian Eric Hobsbawm. He had relatives in Chile, and it was presumably while visiting them that he was invited to turn out for the Prince of Wales Country Club. A member of the Communist Party of Great Britain at the time, Hobsbawm made an incongruous recruit to what was clearly a pretty lah-di-dah cricketing set-up. Batting at No. 10 he made one in the first innings and what turned out to be a crucial 15 in the second. He took one catch.

It was the first Argentinean tour of Chile in 1893 that is most worthy of note here, though. For a start, the Argentina team had to cross the Andes by mule, a journey of three and a half days.

“It is quite possible that in the future the lasting reconciliation between Argentina and Chile will be attributed to a few cricketers, accompanied in this endeavour by beautiful ladies, who departed from Buenos Aires on Monday, November 13, 1893,” hyped the Argentinean newspaper La Nacion, breathlessly. The paper goes on to list the names of the pride of Argentine cricket, all of which are distinctly English, right down to the Times of Argentina correspondent travelling with them, Mr R. H. Morgan.

“The party’s attire and travelling implements were the subject of much hilarity and jokes,” continued La Nacion. “The extravagant headgear, the goggles to protect the eyes from dust, the baggage, truly Noah’s Arks in which toothbrushes were dancing among flannel trousers, books and cigarettes, the entire proverbial luggage of English travellers.”

They took the train as far as Mendoza at the foot of the Andes before transferring to mules and crossing the mountains into Chile. The hardship and ridicule seemed to be worth it, though – not only did the Argentina team win all three games against Chile, they also managed to win a football match, a tennis match and a billiards contest too. The three-day yomp back across the mountains would have been a distinctly happy one.

A crowd of about 200 looks on as an Afghan bowler sends down a delivery on the rolled dirt wicket to a Sri Lankan batsman, while the fielders – both Afghans and Sri Lankans – are ready to pounce. The scores are recorded studiously, for errors cannot be afforded in this vigorously contested limited-overs game. Behind the razor wire of the Christmas Island Detention Centre in the Indian Ocean, cricket provides a vital degree of normality for the lives of the detainees, who stay for around three months on this Australian territory while visa applications are processed. This game is not an isolated event: there are organised competitions contested by up to ten teams, usually of mixed nationalities. Neither is the sport confined to the detention centre. The staff take part in the occasional match against the Christmas Island Cricket and Sporting Club, whose eclectic civilian membership play up to six games a year. The club organises most of the sporting activity on this island of nearly 1,500 people, including Australian Rules, touch football, soccer and softball. But cricket remains the primary sport, and the Department of Immigration and SERCO (the security operators) work with the cricket club to ensure there are enough opportunities to play for those in detention. The multicultural nature of the population is reflected in the club’s membership: Australian, English, Malay, Chinese – and even an Inuit. The Sri Lankans, meanwhile, bring flair. One has an action like the country’s slingy Test bowler Lasith Malinga; another kisses the ball before each delivery. Last year the club, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, included matches against the staff of the detention centre, visiting Royal Australian Navy ships and teams from Cocos Island, 900km to the south-west. It also holds the Coconut Ashes, an annual clash between “chalkies” (teachers) and the locals. The community oval has its own peculiar features: it is mostly surrounded by jungle, which makes losing balls something of a hazard, while fog and low cloud can get in the way too, as games take place on top of “The Rock”, as the island is referred to, a full 300m above sea level. Tony Munro and Rhett Bowden, Wisden 2010

Cricket is not endemic in the High Andes. Indeed, it is so alien to local culture that Colombian customs reputedly impounded a priceless shipment of bats and balls from Venezuela some years ago as “dangerous, possibly subversive material”. Bogota is a challenge for the bowler. At 8,300ft above sea level, anyone trying to bowl medium-fast soon runs out of puff, and the ball will not swing much in the thin dry air. A spinner gets a little more help from our new Astroturf than from the old matting we had until 1994, and the batsman does not have an easy time. The field is kikuyu grass: the ball will not skim the surface, and must be hit dangerously high to reach the boundary. Cricket’s popularity in Colombia has ebbed and flowed depending on the numbers of expatriates. It was first regularly played by Shell employees in the mid-1950s. Since then English schoolmasters, Scottish accountants and Pakistani bankers have come and gone, and now oil – this time BP – provides most of the players. However, it is difficult to get teams together more than once or twice a month. We would very much welcome any touring side with the ambition to do something different. Anthony Letts, Wisden 1997

Goma Stadium in the eastern Congo (formerly Zaire) is not the most obvious setting for a one-day international, however unofficial. In March 2004 it was the venue for a match between India and Pakistan, as intensely contested as if it were in Karachi or Kolkata. The players were members of the 12,000-strong peacekeeping mission, which is trying to end the long war in Congo. The outfield was black, due to lava from the eruption of Mount Nyriangongo in 2002. The boundary markers were old gun-boxes covered in gleaming white. The umpire’s job was less to worry about the lbw law (which was interpreted liberally) than to stop UN soldiers from non-cricketing countries walking behind the arm, or even on the wicket. In the words of one Swedish soldier: “The UN warned me about gorillas attacking us, but not cricket balls!” The match was a 20-over slog so that the soldiers could return to barracks in time to start the night patrols: genuine nightwatchmen. India won, having avoided any attacks by gorillas. A Pakistani outfielder, however, had to make a run for it as a herd of goats from the prison farm dashed across the outfield, followed by the prisoners and their guards. David Turner, Wisden 2005

Over the past three years I have had the pleasure of assisting with cricket development in the Cook Islands, and I now coach the national team, which is a magical experience: the players possess what you might call raw potential, but in terms of entertainment they are definitely first-class. A musical bunch, their powerful rendition of the national anthem can be quite moving. For a small nation with only 11,000 potential players the Cook Islands have performed remarkably well in recent times, climbing to No. 3 in the ICC’s East Asia Pacific rankings. The annual trials between the two main cricket islands of Rarotonga and Aitutaki form an important part of that development, by giving hopefuls the chance to stake their claim for national selection. Our most recent trials were held in Tautu on Aitutaki. The pitch there is one of seven concrete pits on the island which are sunk below the surface and covered with sand during the winter to allow rugby and soccer to be played over the top. In the summer the sand is cleared away to reveal a reasonable playing surface, although most of these pits have been down for 70 years. And so, with the Tautu strip showing its age, some overnight repairs were required. The locals got to work and placed cement in the various cracks, but their decision to use a flip-flop to screed the concrete rather than a trowel meant conditions looked like being a challenge for the batsmen. However, once the pitch was covered with a carpet that had previously rested in the aisle of the local church, the surface played well. During my last visit I played in a club game in Aitutaki, which – with eight club sides, many of them containing two men’s teams as well as women and junior XIs – is the local cricket stronghold. A lagoon, around 30m away, forms the boundary on one side, while the island’s main road runs within the other. I managed to take a couple of catches, one of them as I sprinted down the middle of the road while trying to keep one eye on the ball and the other on traffic. The local batsmen treated my off-spin with respect for a while, before despatching me into the lagoon. Fortunately a plastic-coated ball is used, so a short swim is normally enough for play to resume. An early leg-before decision ended my stay with the bat. Let’s just say that umpiring will be on the agenda for my next visit. Grant Bradburn, Wisden 2008

Running a cricket club can be a nightmare sometimes. Players crying off at the last minute after going down with a sudden and severe case of cock-and-bull story, sorting out match fees, organising lifts; it’s a pretty time-consuming business. Imagine how those problems multiply when you’re running a league, then a cricket association, then a national governing body. Then imagine doing that in the Cook Islands.

There’s less than 100 square miles of territory in the Cook Islands, situated in the southern Pacific Ocean north-east of New Zealand. One hundred square miles doesn’t sound much, but that’s divided among 15 islands. And those 15 islands are spread across 690,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean. There are fewer than 20,000 people living on the Cook Islands – nearly three-quarters of them on Rarotonga. Yet, despite the sheer geography of the place, cricket is thriving. Indeed, according to the Cook Islands Cricket Association, a quarter of the whole population plays some kind of cricket.

The game arrived on the islands at the turn of the 20th century when missionaries arrived bearing bats as well as bibles. Rarotonga Cricket Club was founded in 1910, and the game was popular with expats, but went into a gradual decline from the 1950s until there were only around half a dozen clubs left.

The new millennium brought new hope, however. ICC affiliation was achieved in 2000, and progress was speeded up by the appointment of a full-time administrator in 2009. As a result cricket is thriving again. The national team is making steady progress – especially in the Twenty20 format, for which the islanders seem to have a big-hitting aptitude – and participation reaches levels that belie the far-flung nature of the islands and put to shame nations whose infrastructure is far more geared to the game.

One of the furthest flung of all the islands is the coral atoll Pukapuka, more than 700 miles from Rarotonga. There are barely 500 people living on three islets that huddle around a lagoon; barely a square mile of territory, yet Pukapuka is the most cricket-mad part of the Cooks. The game as we know it has only been introduced in the last decade: what the Pukapukans play, indeed, what they refer to as their national sport, is a version of cricket that reflects how the atoll is closer in location, spirit and culture to Samoa than Rarotonga.

The game is called kirikiti. It looks a great deal like cricket, but this game has a distinctly Pacific flavour. There are batsmen, there are bowlers, there are fielders. There are even wicketkeepers: one at each end. The stumps are chest-high and the bats have more in common with Samoan war clubs than lovingly crafted willow wands. The kirikiti bat is a metre or more long, and three-sided. It’s made from the wood of the kapok tree, and players develop a close relationship with it: most are painted in patterns of bright colour. The ball is made from hardened rubber, and the idea is for the batsman to hit it as far as he can. There is no limit to the amount of players on each side, nor is there any kind of restriction on age or gender: many games are effectively village against village – the whole village, man, woman and child. In the past, games have been known to go on for days, and there is a definite festival feel to the occasion: one local rule has it that if the home side fails to prepare enough food they immediately forfeit the match.

It’s a curious game, and it’s played in a curious place. Pukapuka was named the Dangerous Islands by a British naval captain who found his ship unable to land in the mid-18th century thanks to the reefs that surround the atoll. Legend has it that around 400 years ago a cyclone whipped up a freak wave that all but destroyed Pukapuka and left only a few survivors: 15 men and two women. The poor women were charged with starting the repopulation of the atoll, and there’s been a relaxed attitude to relationships ever since.

Pukapuka has always had a tremendous reputation for kirikiti – the name is not a coincidental soundalike, incidentally, it shows how the south Pacific took the game introduced to them by the missionaries over a century ago and adapted it – and many if not most of the great Cook Islands’ kirikiti players have been either from Pukapuka or descended from Pukapukans.

In the 1920s the American writer Robert Dean Frisbie settled on Pukapuka and wrote about his experiences. In his 1944 book The Island of Desire he summed up the place of kirikiti in the life of the atoll:

“Presently, in a little clearing, I came upon the 150 people of Leeward Village, playing or watching a studied game of cricket. Two or three men glanced at me in a vaguely preoccupied way, then jerked their heads around to watch the game. Happy-go-lucky old Tapipi, his eyes shifting between me and the players, explained hurriedly that for six hours they had been playing to decide which half of the village should gather coconuts tomorrow for the other half. I then realised that if the British Navy were target-practicing in the offing no one would leave the game. Like children that can play for two hours but cannot work for two minutes, these atoll people can play cricket all day to determine who shall work an hour tomorrow. I mentioned as much to Tapipi. He knitted his brow, pondered my words, and finally opined that it would be hard work gathering coconuts tomorrow, for the people would be stiff and tired from the cricket game.”

Cricket in Costa Rica, which had its heyday in the first half of the 20th century, is experiencing a modest revival, and a cricket association has been formed to seek Affiliate Membership of the ICC. The game took root in this part of Central America in the late 19th century after Jamaican workers were imported to help build the railway, replacing those of other nationalities who had succumbed to malaria. Many stayed to work in banana plantations or as cocoa planters and, between the two world wars, there were 45 teams in three leagues on the Caribbean coast. Eventually, the West Indian CC was founded by English expats in the capital San José, and in 1986 San José CC itself was revived. The rivalry between San José and Limón – the traditional coastal cricket centre – has continued sporadically. In recent years there have been testimonials for the 80th birthdays of two of Costa Rica’s cricket luminaries: Stanford Barton, vice-captain of the Limón team that twice toured Jamaica in the 1930s, and Lance Binns, who scored 30 for a Jamaican Schoolboys XI in 1935-36 against a Yorkshire touring team including Len Hutton. Binns still plays for San José. In August 2000 San José, comprising young masters at the British School and not-so-young resident expats, beat Limón by an innings and 64. T. R. Illingworth, Wisden 2001

“Whither Costa Rican cricket but for the Second World War?” has not, in truth, ever been a hot topic of debate in the pubs, pavilions and press-boxes of the world, but when you look at the history of the game on the sliver of land joining North and Central America, it’s worth dwelling awhile on what might have been. Thanks mainly to its Jamaican population, Costa Rica in the 1930s was a beacon of cricket nestling between the Atlantic and the Pacific. George Headley was a major factor: a folk hero to Jamaicans everywhere, Headley and his West Indies team-mates visited Panama – where he was born while his father was helping to construct the Canal there – and Costa Rica when there was a gap of five weeks between the Third and Fourth Tests on England’s 1930 tour of the West Indies. Given that Headley had just scored a hundred in each innings at Georgetown to help West Indies to their first-ever Test victory, it’s no surprise that large crowds greeted the banana ship SS Ariguani when it docked in both nations with Headley waving cheerily from the deck. He must have been buoyed by the visit – or at least, the generous hospitality appeared to have no adverse after-effects – as he went on to make 223 in the Fourth Test at Sabina Park.

Headley returned in 1933 with Jamaica, who played a game there this time: 4,000 turned out to watch. Regular visits from Caribbean teams throughout the 1930s as well as Caribbean tours by Costa Rican sides helped to keep the momentum going, as well as exposing the local players to a high standard of cricket: the fact that there were 45 clubs in the Limón region alone suggested a bright future lay ahead. Test status was never likely, but there could at least have been a steady supply of good players for the West Indies team – until the war brought things juddering to a halt. Costa Rican cricket would never attain the same heights again.

When the war commenced, Lancelot Binns was working in Jamaica and playing there for one of the leading clubs. Arguably Costa Rica’s greatest-ever player, among Binns’s many outstanding performances were a knock of 111 against the King’s Light Infantry and taking eight for 18 against the British Garrison, including a hat-trick, both before his 18th birthday. Possibly his finest moment came at the age of 15 in February 1936, however, when he was selected for a Jamaican schools team to play the touring Yorkshire county side at Sabina Park. It would have been intimidating enough for any cricketer of the time to come up against a team including Len Hutton, Herbert Sutcliffe, Maurice Leyland and Bill Bowes, let alone a 15-year-old kid working on a banana plantation, but Binns opened the batting and made 30 before playing around a straight one from medium-pacer Tom Smailes. The Jamaicans, who were allowed 15 players, were bowled out for 194 in their first innings before they in turn bowled out the visitors for 222. At the close, Jamaica Schools were 61 for five, with Binns again falling to Smailes, this time for two.

An extraordinary character, Lance Binns kept playing cricket in Costa Rica right up to his death in 2005 at the age of 84, and today the Costa Rican League champions are awarded the Lance Binns Cup in his honour. He’d be delighted to see the progress being made too. Costa Rica became an ICC Affiliate Member in 2002, and the game is growing rapidly among young Costa Ricans: where in 2004 there were only 50 registered junior players, today there are more than 1,000, and that figure continues to rise. If the progress of Costa Rican cricket is any kind of barometer for the likelihood of global war, meanwhile, a look at the precedents suggests it might be time to head for the shelters.

Nepotism is an unlikely formula for the expansion of cricket, not least in a remote outpost in the Adriatic. But the efforts of Dorothy Burrows, an 84-year-old follower of the game on the island of Vis, may yet help the game flourish in Croatia. Burrows, a great-great-niece of the Royal Navy captain Sir William Hoste, succeeded in persuading 28 of Hoste’s descendants, some from as far away as Hong Kong, to travel to Vis to play against the cricket club that bears his name. A protégé of Admiral Horatio Nelson, Hoste established a garrison on Vis in 1809 during the Napoleonic Wars, and permitted his men to play cricket as a way of staving off boredom between skirmishes. “We have established a cricket club at this wretched place,” he wrote to his mother. “And when we do get anchored for a few hours, it passes away an hour very well.” Cricket did not really endure, but a revival towards the end of the 1990s fuelled by expatriate and second-generation Croatian–Australians has led to four cricket clubs springing up in Zagreb, Split and Vis. It took inclusion in the Croatian edition of Playboy to arouse cricket in Vis again. The club’s co-founder, Rob Dumancic, stumbled across an interview with a local winemaker, Oliver Roki, in which he expressed a vague hope of resuscitating Hoste’s sporting legacy. But his interest in the game was far from frivolous. “Apart from one expat and two guys from England, the rest of the team discovered the game seven years ago and had never played it before,” said Roki. “We have six or seven kids who can really play, but they have no one to play against.” Vis’s story stirred the interest of the most famous club of all, MCC, who sent a touring side to face the national team and developmental XIs on Vis’s Plisko Polje ground in August. A team boasting former first-class players Darren Bicknell and Rob Turner won all four matches, but they were not cakewalks. Lord’s even bought into the spirit of the occasion, appointing Norfolk captain Steve Livermore to skipper MCC (Sir William, born in Ingoldisthorpe, came from the same county). MCC arrived bearing a grant of $US2,500 for the Croatian Cricket Federation, which, along with a donation of $1,250 from the ICC, will be channelled into ECB Level Two coaching courses in the country. A reciprocal visit of the national side to England would seem the next step, but an improvement in results may be required first. Croatia lost all six matches in their ICC European Championship tournament in 2008, and surrendered Division Two status when Israel beat them in a play-off at Zagreb’s newly-constructed Budenec Oval ground in October. James Coyne, Wisden 2010

Before Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 there was plenty of cricket in Cuba. Thanks largely to the efforts of Leona Ford, a revival is under way with 19 adult teams including six made up of overseas students. There are also 55 age-group teams. So far, however, there has been no organised inter-club competition; the fact that cricket is only recognised as a recreation and not a sport limits the amount of support it obtains from INDER, the Cuban sports ministry. However, there are hopes of a Cuban national championship in 2005. The best-organised province is the Isle of Youth (Isla de la Juventud) where an INDER employee, Daniel Garcia, has obtained funding from the provincial government to set up a ground with a pitch based on sand and scoria (solidified lava). Garcia has brought in teams from the local prison (cricket is considered good for self-discipline, I was told), the fire station and a dog club. Apparently the dog club was holding a trial when Daniel and a friend started to play with a kanga cricket set. The dog lovers were smitten and the rest is history. Gerry Beaton, Wisden 2005

Leona Ford is one of the most remarkable people in world cricket. A retired English professor, she has been the instigator of and driving force behind the resurgence of Cuban cricket over the last decade or so, reviving a sport that had all but died and turning it into a thriving concern. No one person anywhere in the world can have had such an overwhelming and dramatic effect on the development of cricket in their country.

She inherited her passion for cricket from her father, one of the Cuban game’s pioneers. Leonard Ford arrived in Cuba from his native Barbados in 1928 to work at the Guantanamo Naval Base. There was quite an influx of Bajan migrant workers to Cuba at the time, many of them seeking employment on the sugar plantations on the east of the island, and many of them cricketers. But Leonard would stand out. An accomplished cricketer back home, he soon became a notable player in his adoptive country; his notability increasing when he founded the Guantanamo Cricket Club within a year of arriving in the country. A passionate promoter of the game, Leonard Ford was at the forefront of every development in cricket in Cuba including, in 1954, playing for the first-ever Cuban national side when they took on a team from Jamaica.

The Cuban Revolution that finally succeeded in 1959 and brought Castro to power saw all sporting institutions nationalised, including cricket clubs. The game of cricket wasn’t exactly high on Castro’s agenda and – with no official support or sanction – the game all but died with breathtaking speed. One annual match on Emancipation Day in Baragua limped on, but a once-thriving sport that featured a roster of clubs right across Cuba seemed to have been confined to pre-revolutionary history.

Years later, following the death of her father, Leonora Ford began undertaking research into her family history and soon noticed something. Throughout her childhood cricket had been practically another member of the family. The walls of their Guantanamo home were covered with photographs of cricketers and there were always meetings of cricket administrators taking place in the house, which was situated just an underarm lob from the Guantanamo cricket ground itself. Weekends were spent either playing or watching the game. But when Leonora began exploring the national archives, she realised there was barely a word written about cricket. Not only had the game died out, there was very little to suggest it had actually existed in the first place.

She decided to write a book on the history of Cuban cricket so there would be a tangible record of it even if the game itself was a mere memory. In addition she resolved to at least attempt a Cuban cricket revival, even if it just meant getting a few kids playing in the street.

In 1998 Ford presented a paper about Cuba’s cricket legacy and her desire to revive it to the West Indian Welfare Association at their annual general meeting. Her passion and enthusiasm won over the room, but her words interested one man in particular. Sir Howard Cooke, the governor of Jamaica, was a cricket man. Not only that, he’d also played for that first Jamaican side that had toured Cuba, and hence he’d met and played against Leonora’s father. It was a tremendous coincidence; the catalyst to launch Cuba back into the cricketing sphere. Cooke had some cricket equipment sent over and enlisted the help of a friend of his, Courtney Walsh, to promote the game in Cuba. The Cuban Cricket Commission was formed with Leonora at its head. A sports journalist from Trinidad organised some coaching. And when the Cuban sports ministry officially recognised the sport in 2001 the outlook was rosy.

The recognition came with a caveat, however: while cricket was approved, it was approved merely as a recreational activity rather than an officially sanctioned sport, which meant no funding. Cuban cricket would have to look elsewhere for financial support to power the comeback. Yet, thanks to generous donations and a tie-up with UK Sport, within four years of Leonora’s speech to WIWA there were more than 1,000 Cuban children receiving cricket coaching and eight senior teams had begun playing regularly. Perhaps most fittingly cricket returned to Guantanamo in 2001, when a Guantanamo team took on a Havana side at a small football stadium. Guantanamo won by four wickets. If Leona needed confirmation that she was honouring her father’s legacy, that was it.

Affiliation to the ICC followed in 2002, and in 2006 – when Castro instigated a policy of looking towards the Caribbean to halt the progress of the cultural Americanisation of Cuban youth – he decided he approved of cricket after all. There is a story that Castro even tried cricket once, on a state visit to Barbados. Seeing a match taking place as he drove past, he stopped the car, asked what was going on, and marched on to the field and demanded to have a go with the bat. With baseball being the most popular sport in the country it was no surprise that Castro held the bat like he was at Yankee Stadium. Once at the wicket he insisted that his host bowl at him and hence it was that two teams of Bajan cricketers saw play suspended in order that the president of Barbados might bowl at Fidel Castro who, reports said, had a whale of a time.

In 2007 came a chance to shine on the international stage when the Cuban national side was invited to participate in the 2008 Stanford Series, one of the Twenty20 tournaments organised by the soon-to-be-disgraced American billionaire Allen Stanford. However, America’s policy of non-recognition when it comes to Cuba also prohibits American citizens fraternising with Cubans without permission. Hence, shortly before the tournament, Cuba’s invitation had to be withdrawn.

Despite this, the progress of cricket in Cuba under the guidance of Leonora Ford remains constant, encouraging and indefatigably Cuban.

In 1895 a young journalist named Winston Churchill visited Cuba. He noted how Britain had briefly taken control of the island towards the end of the 18th century and grew all misty-eyed at the missed opportunity for a “free and prosperous” British colony that “sent its ponies to Hurlingham and its cricketers to Lord’s”.

Instead, who knows, with the astounding potential of the game in Cuba and the unquenchable drive of its patron, maybe one day we’ll see England sending its cricketers to Ford’s instead.

Cricket in the Czech Republic enjoyed another year of progress, even if most Czechs remained oblivious of its attractions. Prague CC, formed in 1997, were joined by Olomouc, and there is a chance of a third club, at Ostrava. Several cities, including Prague and Olomouc, offer coaching in some schools, and around some 600 Czech children have now played cricket. Adults, meanwhile, can sign up for twice-weekly summer net sessions in the capital, and an indoor league may follow in 2003. Prague CC enjoyed a busy season, reaching the final of the Golden Duck tournament in Lodi, Italy, and doing well – four wins, three losses and a draw – in various friendlies against Munich International, Cricketers Anonymous, Berlin, and the Dutch side Haarlem Wolves in a two-day game. Prague welcomed teams from Olomouc and Bratislava, another new club over the border in Slovakia, and won both. Two young Czechs who discovered cricket in 2002 went on to notable achievements. Lukas Fencl, a convert from softball, adjusted so well that he scored the first century by a Czech cricketer, while Magda Pokludova, who went to Bath on a student exchange, was representing Somerset in the Women’s County Championship by August. The next challenge is to find a Czech-speaking full-time development officer. Tony Brennan, Wisden 2003