Elk Stopped Play

Sandwiched between the beach and mountains, around three kilometres from downtown Dili, is a small dirt road where, once a month, cricket is played by a motley collection of expatriates, mainly Australian, and East Timorese. Play gets stopped by stray goats, pigs, children meandering across the “pitch” on the salt plain, and occasionally by people learning to drive. Sometimes the children chasing the ball take off with it – when a child stops the ball, it’s an automatic four. Kit was an issue (the bamboo stumps kept breaking) until we managed to acquire two large bags of cricket gear in return for 500kg of rice. Everyone was happy. Numbers vary and we have played six-a-side up to 21-a-side, especially during the period of reconstruction after post-independence violence, which brought an influx of Australians. In 2001 we played in the Bali Sixes, the organisers provocatively pitting us against the country’s former rulers Indonesia in our first game. We hope to return this year, seeking revenge. The team has four East Timorese regulars, who are athletic fielders and deadly in throwing down a set of stumps. But our games are highly social, and the few Portuguese and Americans who turn up are allowed to chuck. Jim Richards, Wisden 2004

Cricket in El Salvador can trace its roots back to an email from an Englishman about to end his stint teaching at the British School: “Have regional cricket contacts & barely used cricket set. Anyone interested?” Drawing inspiration both from this and from another cricketing expat who had once represented the Colombian national team, a resident Zimbabwean took up the baton, even if the hot Salvadorian summer caused one local schoolboy to faint – and prompted a rethink: Twenty20, which allows players to return home for some much-needed lunchtime shade, is now the dominant format. Conditions remain variable: flat land in this mountainous country is scarce, so the cricket played is on a borrowed football field, with the pitch mowed on Saturday mornings. Predictably the bounce is lively: helmets are a must for the younger players. Our three teams are slowly getting stronger as curious locals join in – some stay, some go – and interested players are guaranteed a game. The national side has always contained at least six Salvadorians, even if first efforts look more like baseball and bent-arm bowling is viewed initially as the cricketing equivalent of a dive in football: cheating, but worth a try. The Easter Cup tournament – largely funded by a Sri Lankan businessman – received good press coverage. Now we just need better facilities. Andrew Murgatroyd, Wisden 2008

Like most good ideas and institutions, the Estonian Cricket Club (Esti Kriketi Klubi) was born in a pub, in this case The Lost Continent in Tallinn. The first club email from the chairman, Kristian Garancis, said, “Practice will be on Sunday 1300hrs providing no snow.” That was 1998, and from there we developed. The first pitch was an outdoor basketball court, with one old bat and a tennis ball. We progressed to a very bumpy soccer pitch in a lovely setting surrounded by forest (and topless lady sunbathers), but under threat from scheduled soccer matches. Later that same year the club moved on to the Hippodroom, the trotting track, where the management have been excellent hosts – and most flexible, as we built an all-weather pitch in the middle of the racecourse. The European Cricket Council have been most helpful and provided two start-up cricket kits. EKK facilities are now excellent, with three bars and the best wicket in the region. There are 30 regular players from nine nations, including Estonia. We have played home fixtures against Helsinki, Riga and Stockholm, and have started a programme to develop cricket in Estonian schools. Touring sides are welcome: Tallinn is a wonderful old Hanseatic city and an excellent place to visit. Philip Marsdale, Wisden 2001

It’s fair to say that Estonian cricket has had a bit of a decade since this entry. Inspired by Estonian businessman Garancis, who’d seen the 1996 Boxing Day Test between Australia and the West Indies with friends in Melbourne and returned determined to bring the game to the Baltic – first stop, his favourite Indian restaurant in Tallinn – the game has flourished to a degree unthinkable during those pioneering forays on to a basketball court smacking a tennis ball about.

By 2004 an Estonian Cricket Board had been formed, and three years later there was enough interest to form a league of four teams playing in a round-robin format. The expansion of the budget-airline boom into the Baltics around the same time brought so many touring teams from Britain that the Estonians found themselves fulfilling up to 60 fixtures a season. All that practice soon paid off: in 2008 a fledgling national team travelled to a European Twenty20 tournament in north Wales and came back as winners. Such was the interest back home that the team were greeted at the airport by a crew from Estonian national television.

This rapid improvement raised approving eyebrows at the ICC, and Estonia was granted Affiliate status. The funding this engendered allowed the game to be encouraged at junior levels through an impressive schools’ development programme. Cricket had become much less an activity for expats looking for a taste of home and more a game that Estonians took to on their own terms.

In 2012 Estonia hosted Division Three of the Euro Twenty20 tournament. With the Tallinn crowd boosted by the unlikely attendance of Shane Warne and Elizabeth Hurley, Estonia emerged as victors and progressed to the Division Two tournament in Corfu. While they couldn’t repeat their success at the higher level, wins over Malta and Luxembourg demonstrated that they could certainly hold their own.

Estonian cricket is one of the world game’s current success stories, to the extent that these days they don’t have to tempt potential visiting teams merely with the promise of a stroll around “a wonderful old Hanseatic city”, or even “topless lady sunbathers”.

Well, OK, maybe topless lady sunbathers.

Cricket used to be played regularly in Addis Ababa at the General Wingate School, with British and Indian teachers. A 1967 guidebook advised cricket lovers simply to turn up at the school on Saturday mornings if they wanted a game. However, these teachers left during the rule of General Mengistu, and we are left with only a few scratch games involving staff, students and parents from the Sandford English Community School. They are played on the football field, which is composed of volcanic rock with a covering of soil and grass. The pitch is marked out by string, then the groundsman cuts it with his sickle, and the clippings are taken away in a sack to feed his donkey. The bigger rocks are pulled out by hand, but it is still imperative to use a soft ball. Few Ethiopians play, although we can always find some students to join in, and there is talent among the batsmen. We also had a wonderful fast bowler here, a young man from Sierra Leone called Sahr Komba, but he has now gone to an American university and plays basketball. Stephen Spawls, Wisden 1997

Other than Bert Oldfield’s visit to Ethiopia in the 1960s (see introduction), Ethiopia is a barren nation when it comes to cricket. Matches were played regularly at the Wingate School, even after Mengistu came to power in 1974, but otherwise the nation’s cricket heritage is minimal. Haile Selassie attended part of the India v Pakistan Test while visiting Bombay in 1952 – so he at least had something to talk to Bert Oldfield about when he rolled up more than a decade later – and Ethiopia did have one fairly decent cricketer in John Asfaw, who played for Rugby School against Marlborough at Lord’s in 1959, but . . . well, that’s about it.

There is one tiny Ethiopian cricket outpost, however. The town of Shashamane, 150 miles south of the capital Addis Ababa, is home to a community of around 200 Rastafarians. In the 1960s Haile Selassie invited Rastas to come “home” to Ethiopia, assigning them 500 acres of land in Shashamane, and an eager clutch made the journey. But what they discovered when they arrived was far from the Promised Land: resented by much of the local populace, they found work and income hard to come by.

Even today the community is small and practically stateless: not eligible for citizenship and still regarded as unwelcome outsiders by the Ethiopian population who had previously occupied the area, the Rastafarian community has a twilight status, neither one thing nor the other. They spend their days working as handymen and artists or selling souvenirs to tourists, and playing cricket. Despite having only basic equipment donated by the British Embassy, the cricketers of Shashamane practise twice a week and in 2012 played their first proper game, losing to the Embassy by 35 runs in Addis Ababa. They are hoping for a return match and to arrange fixtures against some of the other embassies in Addis.

As for the 6ft 4ins erstwhile quickie Shahr Komba, it seems he was never tempted back to the cricket field. In 2011 he was playing basketball in England, for the Hemel Hempstead Storm.