Elk Stopped Play

The annual match between the Governor’s XI and the Forces resulted in a thrilling one-run win for the Governor’s XI, reducing the Forces’ lead in the series to 4–3. The contest is played on the world’s southernmost cricket field, Mount Pleasant Oval, for a handsome trophy, mounted on rock, representing a penguin’s beak emerging from an egg. The Oval can hold the entire population of the Falkland Islands: 4,000. The matting wicket traditionally favours bowlers, but only when they have the wind behind them. Those bowling into the wind regularly struggle to reach the opposite end. Richard Heller, Wisden 1999

Success for the national side at the ECC Representative Festival in Zagreb in 2002 – they beat Croatia and Slovenia – was a welcome reward for Finnish Cricket Association officials who had worked hard to give cricket healthy roots. Helsinki CC was formed in 1974 but cricket was slow to establish itself. It expanded in the mid-1990s, and the creation of the FCA, together with help from the European Cricket Council, has increased participation so that around one-fifth of the country’s 350 cricketers are Finnish citizens. Helsinki CC won the eight-team league from the champions SKK, while the newly formed Espoo CC ended an encouraging third. Another new side, the Finnish Naval Academy CC, joined MTS as the second team not made up of expats. Meanwhile, women’s friendlies were played between SKK of Helsinki, Tampere CC and Guttsta of Sweden. A “Spirit of Cricket” weekend was held in May, and in July, more than 20 teams from Finland, Britain, Estonia and Finland battled for the SKK Cricket Sixes. The elements continue to make cricket in Finland a singular experience: a while back, play was stopped when an elk galloped out of the woods, and early in the 2002 season bowlers ran over snow on their run-ups. Andy Armitage, Wisden 2004

When Andrew Armitage relocated to Finland in 1988 he feared that his cricket career, hitherto played out on club grounds around Manchester, was among the collateral damage of emigration: of all the nations in the world fewer seemed likely to be a hotbed of the summer game than Finland. A quarter of a century on, however, Armitage finds himself the president of the Finnish Cricket Association, overseeing a sport growing rapidly in popularity among both expats and Finns. And it’s largely thanks to a chance encounter in a park.

“One day a little while after I’d arrived in Finland I stumbled across a group of people knocking around in one of the central parks of Helsinki and couldn’t believe my eyes,” he recalls. “These guys turned out to be members of the only cricket club in the country at the time, Helsinki CC, who played their cricket either abroad or with teams from the embassies. Seeing them, I was suitably inspired to do something about making cricket a reality in Finland.”

The word spread among expats, and ad hoc games would take place until, in the mid-1990s, participation reached a level that meant new clubs were formed. Armitage helped to found the Stadin Kriketti Kerho, the City Cricket Club, and was instrumental in the 1999 foundation of the Finnish Cricket Association. A year later, as Finland earned ICC Affiliate status, he became president, a post he has held ever since.

For all the sterling work he’s done for Finnish cricket over the years however, the most awe-inspiring thing about Andrew Armitage is, for me, the fact he was on the field for the only recorded instance in cricket history of “elk stopped play”. When a giant, snorting half-ton antlered male thundered across the field during a Finnish league fixture, Andrew Armitage was there.

“I was fielding in the covers in an SKK game at the central park ground of Ruskeasuo,” he recalls. “It’s a ground with horse stables around half the boundary and open park and forest around the rest, but only a stone’s throw away from Helsinki’s main street.”

Not exactly the kind of cricket location that would have you thinking, “Hmm, better keep half an eye out for elk,” even in Finland. But sure enough, after some brief rustling from the undergrowth, out of the trees and onto the field burst a full-grown, honking elk.

“As you can imagine, having only previously seen pictures of elks on warning signs at the sides of roads, to come face to face with a male elk about twice the size of a horse while chasing down a cover-drive was something of a shock,” says Armitage, with a cricketer’s gift for understatement. “The elk did not appear to be really interested in cricket: it did an about-turn and headed off back into the forest.”

The players, however, remained stoic in the face of such mammalian cricketing drama. Well, possibly. “Play was not stopped for longer than an extended toilet break,” says Armitage.

Notwithstanding cameos from agitated alces alces, Finnish cricket continues to go from strength to strength, with the progress charted in that Wisden 2004 entry gaining momentum with each passing year. The FCA now has 23 member clubs from Helsinki in the south to Oulu, 500km to the north and nudging the Arctic Circle, and the game is even taking root beyond the expat community.

“Finns are generally a sport-crazy people interested in giving everything a try,” says Armitage, “and we have found that after overcoming the initial reservations associated with playing a sport in white clothes that has far too many rules and can end in a draw after five days, they tend to take to the game fairly easily. School sports have traditionally been strong in Finland, so the majority of children do tend to have reasonable hand–eye co-ordination and can hit the ball well. Bowling, however, is a more difficult proposition, though we have for many years co-operated with the elite performance training centre ‘Kuortane’, where many of Finland’s javelin heroes have honed their skills, in the hope that we can convert a few of them to 90mph fast bowlers . . .”

The momentum should be maintained with the construction of Finland’s first purpose-built cricket venue: the National Cricket Ground in the town of Kerava in the far south of the country.

“This will, we feel, be both the base block for building the game in future as well as the catalyst behind driving forward the indigenous population’s awareness of cricket,” says Armitage. “Promotion of the Kerava NCG to the local Finnish corporate community will open new doors for Cricket Finland to generate much-needed extra funding, enabling us to drive better-quality coaching forward in delivering a more widespread participation programme in schools.”

The picturesque, tree-fringed ground at Kerava is in an important location for Finns: Sibelius wrote most of the magnificent national symphonic poem Finlandia in the town. Cricket may never earn a similar place at the forefront of Finnish identity, but with its own ground, increased participation and the dedication of people like Andrew Armitage, the future of Finnish cricket may be hinted at in Sibelius’s early name for Finlandia: Suomi Herää – Finland awakens.

France retained the Nations Cup at Zuoz, Switzerland, in astonishing circumstances. They beat Germany by one run in a pulsating 50-over final. The unwitting hero was France’s last man, David Bordes, who was hit on the forehead, and staggered through for a single at the end of the French innings before collapsing with a fractured skull. With two balls left, Germany, chasing 267, were 260 for nine: a top-edge fumbled by third man plopped over the rope for six. The Germans completed the two runs they needed for victory while the last ball was still skying to mid-on, where Valentin Brumant eventually caught it. So the Bordes head-bye proved a match-winner. He had to spend the next two weeks in hospital, and was ill for some time, but, happily, was able to resume playing indoor cricket before Christmas. Bordes normally bats with a helmet but did not bother this time because he had only the one ball to face. In a group game against Switzerland, Germany scored 467 for one in their 50 overs, including an unbroken stand of 349 between Shamaz Khan, a Pakistani-born naturalised German, and Abdul Bhatti. Shamaz scored 200 not out and Bhatti 179 not out. Simon Hewitt and Brian Fell, Wisden 1998

MCC marked London 2012 by crossing the Channel in June for an Olympic commemoration fixture. It was conceived as a rematch of sorts of the 1900 Paris Olympics, when Devon County Wanderers, representing Great Britain, beat the Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques (France) by 158 runs in a two-innings game (see Wisden 2012, page 108). This time, a Twenty20 game was played at the charming Château de Thoiry, west of Paris. To a soundtrack of roaring lions and other exotic wildlife from the zoo in the grounds, MCC won by 34 runs. That was a far cry from the last time they were in town: in 1989, to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution, they slipped to a seven-wicket defeat against a France team led by an Irishman, Jack Short, and containing just one Frenchman. It was a hollow victory – cricket hasn’t progressed much since, and remains largely the preserve of expats. But that may change. The France Cricket Association has invested heavily in Kwik Cricket, introducing the game into 150 schools in September. The aim is to reach 300 to 500 schools – and 40,000 children – within three years. Around 150 teachers have been trained up in the basics of the game; that figure is expected to reach 800. A full-time project co-ordinator has been hired, along with five regional development officers. The FCA have also forged an Anglo-French relationship with Kent: 18-year-old leg-spinner Zika Ali has spent time at the Academy in Canterbury, and received a leg-spin masterclass from board patron Richie Benaud at Thoiry. If the kids come through, then in 15 years perhaps MCC will be able to play a team of thoroughbred Frenchmen. Barney Spender, Wisden 2013

It’s a vista as English as buttered crumpets: the white-clad figures on the green, the smattering of spectators in deckchairs, the whirling of the bowler’s arms, the swish of the bat, the thwack of ball into the wicket-keeper’s gloves and the mass appeal from the fielders of, erm, “Eh alors!”

For this is not a village green nestling among the Sussex Downs or Yorkshire Dales but a scene that is found in an increasing number of towns and villages across that most unlikely of cricketing strongholds: France.

With 1,200 registered players, more than 60 clubs with their own grounds, and government plans to introduce cricket to those 500 schools across France in the next few years, these are exciting times for French cricketers. Yet France has always had an extraordinary cricketing legacy; one dating back to the dawn of the game itself.

A 15th-century document turned up recently detailing a riot that took place over a game of “criquet” at St Omer in the Pas de Calais in 1478. It’s led to speculation that the most English of games may actually have originated in France which, in terms of felling an iron horse of national pride, would be a little like unearthing de Gaulle’s birth certificate and finding he was born in Tooting.

France’s defeat in the 1900 Olympics also means that to this day they hold the only Olympic silver medal ever awarded for cricket: the Paris Games were the only Olympics ever to feature the sport, and only France and a team billed as England actually turned up (the French team mainly comprised players from the Standard Athletic Club, formed ten years earlier by English labourers working on the construction of the Eiffel Tower, while the Devon side just happened to be in town on tour). Neither team knew they’d contested an Olympic final until after the event: they’d just thought the brouhaha surrounding the game was because it was a part of the Paris Exposition.

Like most Anglo-French encounters, cricket matches involving the two nations have always, it seems, had an aspect of the unusual. When the MCC was in its infancy the first overseas tour was to be a jaunt across the Channel. Unfortunately, it being 1789, the tour became an unsung and forgotten victim of the French Revolution. The players arrived in France, only to have to beat a pretty hasty retreat when they realised what was going on. Two hundred years later MCC finally fulfilled their revolution-stopped-play fixture by taking on a French national team. Any knitting descendants of Madame Desfarge who happened to be on the boundary would have seen France beat the most famous cricket club in the world, captained by former Surrey skipper Roger Knight, by six wickets, with an Irishman, Jack Short, making a match-winning 73 not out.

In terms of excitement the game against Germany in which David Bordes’ painful head-bye proved decisive will take some beating. It was such an extraordinary game that it made Wisden’s own list of the 100 most memorable games of the 20th century, but Bordes didn’t simply disappear into the wispy caverns of cricket history: these days he coaches the French national side and is the Technical Advisor to France Cricket.

Given the rapid development of the game in France, there could well be more thrilling games to come, although hopefully involving fewer cracked skulls. Either way, the story of cricket in France is one that translates as well as the French phrase for a wicket maiden – vierge couronnée, literally a “crowned virgin”.