Elk Stopped Play

The most northerly and most remarkable of cricketing nations arrived on the scene in 2000, not, in the normal fashion, through the efforts of exiles, but owing to the extraordinary vision of a handful of Icelanders. The story of Icelandic cricket began at the University of Iceland a few years ago when some students caught a glimpse of the game on Sky News. “Everyone was dressed in white,” said one of them, Ragnar Kristinsson, “with pressed trousers, and we wanted to do the same.” But none of the TV channels in Iceland showed more than snatches of this mysterious game. However, in 1999, Kristinsson was on holiday in Cyprus during the great World Cup semi-final between Australia and South Africa, and was entranced again. The following Sunday he and a friend were in London and decided they had to be near Lord’s for the final. Outside, they met some Pakistanis, leaving in disgust as their team hurtled to defeat, who readily handed over their tickets. Kristinsson was now firmly hooked. He wrote to the European Cricket Council, who sent a set of starter equipment, and a couple of teams emerged: Kylfan (Icelandic for “the bat”) in Reykjavik and Ungmennafelagid Glaumur in Stykkisholmer (believed to be the world’s most northerly club, as well as the most unpronounceable). The teams mostly comprised native Icelanders, with coaching from some better-informed expats. Iceland’s entry into international cricket came in 2000, when Manchester barrister and aspirant Liberal Democrat politician, Jonathan Rule, decided this was the perfect venue for his stag night. He assembled a group of friends in a beautiful valley outside Reykjavik to take on the locals. With the help of the émigrés, the Icelanders scored 107 on a bumpy football pitch. The visitors (said to be swaying slightly at the crease after the previous evening’s entertainment) lurched to 94 in fading light, watched by rather more journalists and cameras than their cricket usually justifies. The headline “Iceland beats England at cricket” appeared in the following morning’s paper. Wisden 2001

While Iceland is certainly one of the most recent converts to cricket – and converted by television and locals rather than expats too – the games mentioned in this entry aren’t the first to have taken place there. Wisden 1944, for example, tells of two matches played in a Reykjavik football stadium between the RAF and the Royal Navy the previous year, both won by the airmen, by 36 and 24 runs respectively.

In fact it’s possible there was an unlikely but rather nice literary angle to this pair of wartime matches. Serving in the RAF in Iceland at that time was a man with a contender for the most English name ever bestowed over a font: Cecil Wigglesworth. He had played for the RAF at first-class level in a six-wicket victory over the Army at The Oval in 1927, and also featured in a drawn game at Lord’s against the Royal Navy two years later. In 1930 he even turned out for Straits Settlement against the Federated Malay States in Kuala Lumpur. The chances are that, given his decent cricketing pedigree and presence in Reykjavik on RAF duties at the time, Wigglesworth would have been in the side for the two games against the Navy. The literary connection here is that Wigglesworth is widely believed to have been the inspiration for Biggles. But there’s more. Also serving in the RAF in Iceland at that time was another man with a frankly splendid name, John Battersby Crompton Lamburn, the younger brother of Richmal Crompton and the boy on whom the Just William stories are based. This means that, quite deliciously, two of the most enduring characters in British literature may have been on the same cricket team trying to read the unpredictable bounce from a bumpy football field in Reykjavik in August 1943. I can’t say it definitely happened, but there’s a pretty good chance that these two men were on the field together: they certainly knew each other. The thought of Biggles calling Just William for a quick single is a pleasing one wherever it might have happened, let alone in the shadow of Icelandic volcanoes among wing-commanders and rear-admirals.

There are some that claim a form of cricket was being played in Iceland rather further back than that. The Icelandic Vikings used to play a game called knattleikr that some cricket historians claim is a medieval ancestor of cricket. At this historical distance it’s hard to give a detailed analysis of the game for comparison, but knattleikr appears in at least five of the Icelandic sagas. The cricket connection seems to be that a hard ball was hit with a stick and that the games could sometimes last for several days, but otherwise on the face of it knattleikr seems to have more in common with hockey or lacrosse than cricket.

One major proponent of the knattleikr theory was the Copenhagen-based co-author of The Story of Continental Cricket Peter S. Hargreaves, who contributed Danish cricket news to Wisden as well as submitting Cricket Round the World items for many years. His Wisden obituary in 2011 noted how “Wisden editors who were less convinced of Danish cricket’s vital global importance than he was, or who rendered Danish orthography incorrectly, were rewarded by long, closely typed letters of complaint.”

Yet for all these historical precedents, from the literary to the Norse, it’s pretty certain that the first game of what we know as cricket in Iceland actually involving Icelanders was between Reykjavik’s Kylfan club and Ungmennafelagid Glaumur from Stykkisholmer in 2000. Ungmennafelagid Glaumur – who claim to be the northernmost club in the world and whose name translates a little anticlimactically as Glaumur Youth Club – won the game, and when newspaper reports appeared in the following days it alerted expats in Iceland from England, India and Pakistan that there was some cricket happening up there in the North Atlantic. Additional clubs were formed, experienced players were able to help the Icelandic novices, and a healthy culture of cricket soon developed.

Probably the peak of Icelandic cricket to date came in 2003, when a team from a British bank who called themselves the Effigies briefly toured the country with Henry Blofeld in tow, flying there in an aeroplane piloted by Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden. On their whistle-stop tour the Effigies played a match under the midnight sun and another on a snow-covered glacier accessible only by snowmobile. Nothing in Icelandic cricket will ever, it seems, be remotely conventional.

In 2011 the tremendous Fellowship of Fairly Odd Places Cricket Club – a team of veterans from the Netherlands whose fixture list features matches that take place in, well, you know – arrived in Iceland. In the past FOFOP CC have played a match against the Vatican in Rome and played a game in two countries at once on a field that straddled the Dutch-Belgian border. On this occasion they had the honour of being the first team to be defeated by an Icelandic national side. They did have one consolation, though: bowler Robert Kottman’s hat-trick is believed to be the northernmost ever taken in the world.

In 2000, Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous country with more than 200 million inhabitants, had about ten indigenous cricketers. Now the figure is around 8,000, and in 2005 a national Under-15 team took part in the first East Asia Pacific tournament, beating Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and Japan. This growth had significant help from ICC, who helped upgrade the administration, train coaches and target primary schools for development. The most unusual event in the calendar is the Bajo Cricket 20s, held near the Komodo National Park in Flores. Through the energy of one Indonesian, Laurence Johani, the game has entered a whole new area. In the Bajo 20s players walk barefoot through the bush to play on a mud wicket carved out of a buffalo paddock. Foreign players can enjoy a raw and joyful form of cricket, go to watch Komodo dragons and dive on pristine biodiverse coral reefs. Alan Wilson, Wisden 2006

Over the past two years, cricket has begun thriving among migrant workers from the subcontinent and there are 12 local teams. A cricket ground has been built at the Azadi Stadium in Teheran with a capacity of 5,000. Teams from Sharjah and Baluchistan have visited. A national coach, Hossain Ali Salimian from Karachi University, has been appointed, and the Baseball Federation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which also covers cricket, is keen to affiliate to ICC. The British are not playing a role in this: the small diplomatic staff in Teheran did not contain any cricketers in 1994, and the city’s British community now comprises one resident businessman. Wisden 1995

Cricket in Iran has come a long way since this rather enigmatic Cricket Round the World entry. Indeed the situation in the country today is almost the opposite to that described above. Over the past two decades the focus of Iranian cricket has shifted away from migrant workers and Teheran almost entirely to Iranians at the other end of the country.

It’s fair to say of most of the countries featured in Cricket Round the World that the game thrives in the capital cities if it thrives at all and, certainly in recent years, the impetus has come mainly from migrant workers and students from the subcontinent. Iran turns that situation completely on its head.

It sounds strange to say that cricket is flourishing in a country of 78 million people that has only four dedicated cricket grounds, but cricket in Iran is not about facilities or numbers, it’s about spirit; about playing for the love of the game whenever and wherever you can.

In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find more dedicated and determined cricketers anywhere in the world than those from Nikshahr in the far south-east of the country. A thousand miles from Teheran, Nikshahr is in a mountainous part of Baluchistan roughly 100 miles from the Pakistani border. Cricket and mountains don’t usually make effective bedfellows, and in Baluchistan the terrain means that the players have to walk for two hours, often rising before dawn, to reach their nearest vaguely cricket-friendly location. This would be remarkable enough in itself if their destination was a well-kept grass outfield surrounding a pitch of even bounce, or even a matting wicket that produced the occasional snorter whizzing past the nose off a good length, but no, what greets the Nikshahr cricketers is a dusty, grey expanse strewn with rocks and rubble on which someone long ago laid a bumpy strip of concrete that does for a pitch. Temperatures can reach 45°C and, until a couple of years ago when an impressed businessman provided a shelter, there was no shade to be found. If that wasn’t hard enough, the cricketers also have to carry their own drinking water in coolers on their trek, meaning that it has to be fairly strictly rationed. Despite these hardships, not to mention the shabby state of their equipment, the cricketers of Nikshahr stay and play all day before packing up and making the return journey on foot as the sun sets behind the mountains.

As dedication among amateur cricketers goes, it certainly beats managing to put off lunch with the in-laws in order to make a club game. It’s no wonder that Iqbal Sikander, the Asian Cricket Council’s development officer for Iran, seems permanently wide-eyed as he travels around the country. “There’s nothing there except an incredible passion for cricket,” he gushed in 2011. “There are children without shoes, without proper equipment, and they’re still playing.”

Two things in particular stand out about Iranian cricket. The first is that there are almost two entirely separate geographical cricket cultures. The first is centred on Teheran and is almost wholly comprised of expats. Iranian cricket was born in the capital when it arrived with British oil workers in the 1920s. The nationalisation of the Iranian oil industry in 1951 – leading to embargoes and blockades by the suddenly ousted Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and, two years later, a coup instigated by the British and Americans – meant those cricketers left the country (in a bit of a hurry, presumably) and the game effectively died. However, immigrants from Pakistan and India arrived and, from the 1980s onwards, the game was played regularly in the capital. In Teheran today the game is almost exclusively an expat activity.

It’s away from the capital, though, that the real magic happens. Most of Iran’s indigenous cricketers are from the south-east of the country, and the regions of Chabahar and Baluchistan in particular. Despite the absence of facilities and a shortage of usable equipment, cricket is increasingly popular in the region and the Iranian Cricket Association – who broke from its former parent the baseball federation and successfully attained ICC Affiliate status in 2003 – is making concerted efforts to provide coaching and gear, particularly in schools. In 2013 the ICA also announced an initiative in schools in the Kurdish region in the west of the country. While the Iranian national team is yet to set the world alight, the ICA is a young federation with limited resources ministering to a massive country but, with a growing passion for the game and gifted people like Iqbal Sikander involved in bringing the game into Iranian schools, we should see the benefits filtering up to the national side within a generation or two.

Where Iranian cricket is perhaps most remarkable is in the women’s game. As the 2012 Wisden reported, there are women’s teams active in eight of Iran’s 31 provinces, a ratio that is far more impressive when you consider that most of those are the large provinces of the south-east. In Kerman, close to the border with Iraq, there are more women cricketers than men.

Iran is also unique in that it has more qualified women umpires than men. The 2012 Almanack highlighted Narges Lafooti who, in 2010 at the age of just 31, became the first Iranian woman to travel unaccompanied to an overseas sporting event when she officiated at the 2010 Under-19 Women’s Championship in Singapore. Lafooti, who also travels the country hosting umpiring courses, is such a highly regarded umpire that often she officiates at the bowler’s end for every over. On her first umpire training course in 2003 she was the only woman among 20 men and had no on-field experience at the time, yet still came top of the class with 99%. A gifted sportswoman – she has also captained and coached the Iranian women’s rugby team as well as playing cricket and baseball to a high level – she is something of an Iranian sporting pioneer.

Why is cricket so popular among the women of Iran? It’s not as simple as a basic love of hitting a ball with a bat, alas; the reasons lie in Iranian culture itself. Cricket is deemed appropriate as it’s a game the players can play while still observing the strict dress codes for women. Lafooti is on record as being “tired” of answering questions about the women’s dress code, and says the players are happy with what they wear, even going so far as to say the questions are “not polite”. She’s hardly going to say anything else in the circumstances but, as long as women like Narges Lafooti and her cricket cohorts are making names for themselves against the odds, it wouldn’t matter if they took the field in potato sacks.

The Australian “Digger” in desert army fatigues takes strike with his red plastic bat, his rifle and pistol a handy arm’s length away (making intimidation of batsmen a risky enterprise). When a dust storm blows up, the “pang” of the tennis ball hitting the empty ration drum which serves as stumps is his only way of knowing his fate, or even if a ball has been bowled, let alone picking what his British or American coalition comrades have bowled. That’s if he’s not running for cover to make way for an incoming chopper to land on the pitch, the American general’s helipad. The threat of inconsistent bounce on the hessian cover is negated by the batsman’s love of the big hit, necessary because the ball decelerates very quickly on the dusty outfield. This is especially true of the Americans who make up the numbers if we are short for Australia v England. They are also the subject of accusations of chucking. Normal standards are further watered down at the indoor matches held in the cavernous 30-room North Palace in Baghdad, untouched by looters and occupied by troops of the Royal Australian Navy. Under the gaze of busts of Saddam Hussein in heroic poses, games are played in the ballroom-sized anteroom. A ball landing on the first landing of the massive marble staircase is a four, on the second level a six. Our bowlers take aim at the stumps, a garish reproduction 17th-century French reclining lounger placed end-on, making wicketkeepers redundant. Players are given stern pre-match warnings against hitting the throne in the foyer for reasons of cultural sensitivity. At the time of writing, the Baghdad Ashes are to be inaugurated, comprising a 50-calibre bullet case containing the ashes of a broken leg from an equally tasteless reproduction 15th-century chair, used as the wicket for our first game. When the security situation improves, it is hoped we will play on the old cricket pitch, a remnant from the British days. Lt. Michael Marley (Royal Australian Navy)

Latest from Iraq: The Baghdad Ashes were abandoned due to dangerous conditions – not from any hazards of war but simply because temperatures were too high and the surface not up to it. The venue was in the grounds of the Palace of Abu Guyarb, now a helipad, and the largest area we could find guaranteed free from mines or unexploded ordnance. The wicket was made up of some wooden doors from a nearby bombed-out building, which provided interesting bounce. And in the absence of protective gear other than combat helmets, it was decided to play for fun rather than putting national honour at stake. Worst of all there was a total alcohol ban in force. Colin Manson, Wisden 2004

Regardless of how close it is, the reaction is always the same when an explosion reverberates during our regular Friday games at the newly constituted Baghdad Cricket Ground, a converted playground at the back of an old school that is now the British Embassy. There is initial fear, panic and a dash for the nearest hard cover, the interior of the embassy building itself. The scorebook normally reads “Mortar Stopped Play”, although the loudest explosion came from a car bomb at a nearby checkpoint. Conveniently, it just so happens that the corridor where we shelter leads to the appropriately named Mortar Inn, the perfect location for a soothing post-match or post-mortar drink. The only time anyone has ever played on was in a different sport – touch rugby – when our commercial officer ran through to score a try after the rest of us had legged it back inside. A Foreign Office CC colleague had the foresight to bring a beach cricket set to Baghdad. The plastic bat is used against a tennis ball specially adapted by Pakistani construction workers who wrapped it tightly in builders’ tape to give it extra weight and reduce the bounce; the playground gives some lift just short of a length, occasionally necessitating body armour. The security situation is such that all play is confined to the BCG – there is no way we could play outside the International Zone (too much of a target) – even if we could find a pitch. And the ground the Americans use for football and touch rugby has a pipe running across it. The BCG is enclosed by a 12ft fence, itself surrounded by an outer wall topped by razor wire. For obvious reasons, what would normally be a six out of the ground is deemed out, although there was conjecture about interpretation of that rule when one of my beautifully flighted off-breaks was despatched on to the roof of the canteen, and ricocheted back to safety off the satellite dish. Other local rules vary, depending on numbers, but are loosely based on indoor cricket: so batsmen can be caught off the wire fence, batsmen bat for a set number of overs losing runs each time they’re out, and everyone bowls. The quirkiest obstacle on the field is a ripped and battered pool table by the cover-point boundary. It is used by off-duty Gurkha guards – even during matches. Spectators’ facilities include (in addition to the Mortar Inn) two picnic tables, with a small palm tree for shade. We call the table area the Edward Chaplin Stand after the current Ambassador. Keith Scott, Wisden 2005

A short-notice deployment in Iraq is always a challenge, but every deployment presents cricketing opportunities, and this time was no exception. Having served twice before in Iraq and been lucky enough to be involved in the “Ashes in the Desert”, I was delighted to be asked to play in the final match prior to the drawdown of the Australian military contingent. And so it was, on April 25, 2008, the 93rd anniversary of the Anzacs’ landing at Gallipoli, that a team representing Australia faced a team representing England in Talill, Dhi Qar Province. The day started with a sunrise drumhead service to commemorate the fallen from the Dardanelles and other conflicts, before the boundary rope was laid out and the scorebox erected. The arrival of the Australian armoured vehicles to provide grandstands, and – with tarpaulins thrown up between them – shade for the spectators, completed the scene around the dusty oval to one side of the military base. Since everyone was in running distance of their body armour and helmet (in case of indirect fire-attack) this was never going to be a normal game of cricket. The scenery was otherworldly too. If Newlands has Table Mountain and The Oval its gasometer, Talill can boast the nearby Ziggurat of Ur – part of a Sumerian temple complex dating back more than 4,000 years. Its form was clearly visible from the middle, as were the machine guns and 30mm cannons of the grandstands; the roar of helicopters was never far away. The match was hard-fought but ultimately one-sided, as a superb all-round display from the Australians combined with temperatures in excess of 50°C to leave the English wilting. Andrew Banks, Wisden 2009

The year began splendidly when Israel received the ICC’s coveted “Spirit of Cricket” award in honour of its project involving children from the Bedouin towns of Beersheba, the so-called “Capital of the Negev” (the desert in the south of the country), and Hura. The project is the product of the tireless work done by George Sheader, the youth development officer in the south, and involves using cricket to bring together people from different backgrounds. The senior side performed reasonably well in the European Division Two competition in Guernsey, but not even excellent wins over Gibraltar and Germany could make up for the careless three-run defeat in the first game against Norway after Israel needed 14 with five wickets in hand. Despite that, Eshkol Solomon compiled the competition’s highest score, 120 against Gibraltar, and Josh Evans, a promising 17-year-old, took nine wickets in 42 overs of tidy leg-spin. Raanana – boasting six players under 21 – won their first national league title in 20 years under the leadership of former national captain Steven Shein, while the T20 Cup was won by Sri Lanka Jerusalem who, along with Sri Lanka Tel Aviv, were promoted to the A Division. Improvements were made to the fields in Eilat, Diomona and Beersheba, and a modern lecture room with sophisticated camera equipment was installed in the Beersheba clubhouse with the help of the European Cricket Council. Youth cricket is flourishing under the direction of Herschel Gutman, with numbers trebling and women’s cricket taking off. Action cricket, played indoors on basketball courts with games lasting 90 minutes, has been introduced on Thursday and Saturday nights: 13 teams take part and the competition has been hailed in the local press. On December 12, a group of 35 Palestinian scholars, aged between eight and 12, from the West Bank villages of Samoa and Yaata travelled to Beersheba to meet fellow students from Yerucham and Dimona. For four hours, the boys and girls – who had never met before – played cricket together, and will continue to meet once a month in a project put together by the Israel Cricket Association. Al Quds and the Peres Centre for Peace. The project is being financed by an anonymous donor from England. Stanley Perlman, Wisden 2011

“When holding a cricket bat, I feel I hold the whole world.”

Sixteen-year-old Shehadeh Salamin was one of the Palestinians involved in the initiative to bring Israeli and Palestinian children together through the enjoyment of cricket. As quotes go, it’s a cracker on several levels: expressing in a dozen words not only what the scheme is about but also the potential cricket has for uniting the divided and acting as a vehicle for hopes and dreams.

Cricket4Peace is a fantastic initiative. Launched only in 2010, the idea is that around 80 boys and girls, Palestinian and Jewish, from four different places are brought together to play cricket. Shehadeh, shouting his global cricketing message from the village of al-Samoa, where he lives in the West Bank, was one of those kids. He’d always dreamed of being a famous Palestinian footballer, but once cricket arrived in al-Samoa there was only one sport for him. “The game rapidly became our flagship sport, with most kids preferring cricket over football,” he said. But, for all their enthusiasm, Shehadeh and his friends found it hard to get better at the game when they were just playing among themselves. They needed to spread their wings to improve.

When Cricket4Peace suggested they get together with some Israeli kids to play, Shehadeh was worried. “I must admit, I had concerns,” he said. “However, when we reached Beersheba, the Israeli coach, George, greeted us with kindness and his warm words broke the barrier of fear in me. I thought to myself, I like to play cricket just like Israeli children. It would be fun to play together.”

Sharon Gudker hails from the other side of the divide. She was there when the bus from al-Samoa turned up and its passengers disembarked and, like Shehadeh, she was apprehensive.

“I watched them getting off the bus and they all looked so different to us,” she recalled. “I was very nervous; even a bit scared to shake their hands.”

There was also an English team there for the combined Israeli and Palestinian kids to play against. “I wasn’t picked to play against the English, but it was a very strange feeling cheering the Palestinian kids each time they scored a run or took a wicket,” said Sharon. “It was as if it didn’t matter that they were Palestinians because we were all playing together on the same team.”

The combined team won by one run and the celebrations were predictably euphoric.

A similar project teaches cricket to Bedouin children, overseen by Israel Cricket Association president and long-serving Wisden contributor Stanley Perlman, and run by the British charity Cricket for Change. They’ve taught hundreds of children from Beersheba alone, and have brought in Bedouin children from the Negev desert to teach the game to them as well as encouraging them all to mingle – scenes that would have been beyond the wildest dreams of the most idealistic cricket fan a few years ago, let alone back in the days when cricket was introduced to Israel.

Cricket was a fairly popular sport before 1948, with regular matches in Jerusalem, Haifa and the Tel-Hashoma army camp but, when the British left after the creation of the Israeli state, the game went into a decline. It didn’t vanish altogether, however, and the first recorded all-Israeli match took place in 1954 when a team from Tel Aviv took on a Beersheba side that contained a father and his seven sons. At least the scorers could have a decent stab at the bowler’s name whenever a new man marked out his run.

The game was struggling to survive in the early- and mid-1960s, but by the end of the decade the influx of Jewish immigrants from cricket-playing countries meant the sport was hauled back from the brink. A league began in 1966, and the Israeli Cricket Association was founded two years later. There was a further boost to cricket in the country when visiting teams began showing up with some pretty illustrious players. Ken Barrington arrived in 1968 with Bournemouth CC, who became the first overseas team to tour Israel. The tour took place not long after the Six Day War but, despite wading into a very recent trauma, Barrington made a hundred and was such a hit with the locals that he was elected the first president of the Israeli Cricket Supporters’ Association. Three years later Harrow CC turned up with Basil D’Oliveira in tow.

The national team made steady progress, albeit sometimes in the face of political protests. They competed in their first ICC Trophy tournament just before the World Cup in Birmingham in 1979 (the same year in which Sri Lanka refused to play them for political reasons), but it took until 1990 for Israel to register its first win in that competition (from which the leading sides progress to the World Cup proper), a one-wicket thriller against Argentina in the Netherlands.

In 1997, buoyed by progress in the Middle East peace talks, Malaysia allowed Israel to compete in the ICC Trophy in Kuala Lumpur. This was quite something, as Malaysia had never recognised Israel as a sovereign state and had even banned its citizens from fraternising with Israelis. Despite the more relaxed regulations and atmosphere, when Israel played Gibraltar in their first match a group of around 500 demonstrators charged into the ground, on to the pitch and set about smashing advertising hoardings and lighting bonfires on the outfield. The only thing was, having suspected that something like this was in the offing, the authorities had switched the Israel game to another venue, leaving the protestors confronted by nothing more than the bewildered-looking cricketers of Canada and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, across town, Israel and Gibraltar played out their game in front of a handful of spectators and a hundred bored riot police lounging in the sunshine.

The nature of the game of cricket means that the leap from rioting Malaysians to joyful Israeli and Palestinian children celebrating a thrilling win on the cricket field isn’t such a large one. Discord and protest will follow Israel wherever it goes but, as long as there are initiatives like those recognised above by the ICC, then cricket will continue to have a positive influence. It might not change the world – or even solve the Middle East conflict – but as long as kids like Shehadeh can feel like they have the world in their hands when wielding 2lb 8oz of English willow, then there’s surely optimism for the future.

In contrast with 1992, 1993 was the happiest year in the brief history of Italian cricket and fittingly marked the bicentenary of the first recorded game in the peninsula. The celebrations included a tour by MCC, who won all their games except the two-day match against the national side, when they struggled to earn a draw. Cesena retained the championship and also triumphed in the European Club Championship on their home ground, the Ippodromo del Sevio. Having beaten the Greek champions Phaeax and the Austrian champions Vienna, the home team then beat the holders, Château de Thoiry, by eight wickets thanks to a century by Sunandra Pearis. Italy’s ambition in 1994 is to become the first ICC Affiliate to be upgraded to Associate Membership. Simone Gambino, Wisden 1994

Having lent his name to a well-known piece of cricketing slang – not to mention his wide and varied travels – it’s fitting that Horatio Nelson should appear in these pages, albeit through an allusion rather than a direct citation. Arguably the most appropriate game of the tour to mark the bicentenary of Italian cricket took place a week earlier, when the tourists beat the United Nations Cricket Club at Carney Park in Naples, for it was in Naples that the first recorded cricket was played in Italy, when men from the crew of Nelson’s frigate HMS Agamemnon went ashore with bat and ball. Some sources claim that Nelson himself organised the game; certainly he would have at least granted the shore leave for it even if he wasn’t actually picking the sides and collecting the match fees. Captain Nelson, as he was then, would have been in good spirits at the time, and possibly well-disposed towards the idea of his crew indulging in a bit of healthy sporting endeavour: the Agamemnon was his first command in five frustrating land-lubbing years, and during the few days he was moored at Naples he met Emma Hamilton for the first time, the wife of the British ambassador to the Court of Naples who would famously become his mistress.

We don’t know for certain if Nelson was a cricket fan – a plaque at Mitcham Cricket Club suggests that he watched the game there while living nearby at Merton in a bizarre ménage à trois with the Hamiltons – but at this stage in his life he still had the eye, the arm and presumably the third part of his anatomy that makes the score 111 a ‘Nelson’.

Cricket in Italy has been booming in recent years thanks to the arrival of immigrants from the Test nations, particularly India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The Italian national league boasts 33 teams divided into three divisions, and on summer afternoons green spaces in towns and cities across the nation are filled with young Asian men playing games of cricket. The Italian national side, which more than holds its own among the leading European teams, has always featured a number of players of Asian origin; players like Sri Lankan-born Gayashan Munasinghe, who first played for the Italian team at the age of 21 in 2008 not long after arriving in Rome from Colombo with his father, a policeman in Sri Lanka but a pastry chef in the Eternal City.

“I struggled to fit in when I arrived,” he said in 2008, “but I am now proud to represent Italy.”

High-profile Italian politicians – including Silvio Berlusconi when he was prime minister – have spoken out against immigration despite Italy’s declining population, but the proliferation of impromptu yet highly sophisticated matches involving young Asian men across Italy suggests that the cricket-playing migrant is there to stay. Not only that, he can play a pretty decent off-drive too.

If Berlusconi ever saw one of these keenly contested pick-up games when being ferried between courthouse, parliament and bunga bunga party, and if he had any inkling what they were, he might have reflected how AC Milan – the football club he owns that has won the European Cup and Champions League seven times – actually started out in 1899 as the Milan Football and Cricket Club, formed by a small group of British expat industrialists looking to recreate a sporting taste of home. Six years earlier the Genoa Cricket and Athletic Club had become Italy’s first cricket club, and today they too are another successful football club.

Neither has had a cricket section for many years. The game in Italy had been declining steadily since the Second World War when, in the 1960s, diplomats and embassy staff from traditional cricket nations began to revive it. While it would have been easy to just play among themselves, these modern pioneers made sure there was a quota of Italians in each team for each game. The fruits of this policy can be seen today, with most club teams having mainly Italian names on their teamsheets. In the 2006 Wisden Simone Gambino noted that when Pianoro won the Italian Cup the previous season there were eight Italians in their side.

A number of cricketers fought in Italy during the Second World War, including Hedley Verity, arguably the greatest spin bowler England ever produced, who was seriously wounded in Sicily and who died and is buried at Caserta. Ted Dexter was born and raised in Milan, where his father was a successful insurance broker. When he travelled between home and boarding school in England Dexter would make the journey on the Orient Express.

Another cricket legend with Italian connections is Donald Bradman. It was discovered recently that The Don had an Italian great-grandfather, and a pretty colourful one at that. Emmanuel Danero was born in Genoa in 1807, 86 years before Italy’s first cricket club would be founded there. A sailor by profession, Danero emigrated to Australia in 1826 to run hotels in Sydney. Married three times, Danero fathered an astonishing 25 children, one of whom, an illegitimate daughter, was Bradman’s grandmother.

Bradman’s Italian connection doesn’t end there either: when the British Army needed a code phrase to signal the start of the assault on Monte Cassino, they used, “Bradman will be batting tomorrow.” It wasn’t “England expects . . .” by any means, but the man who had apparently introduced cricket to Italy would probably have approved.