Elk Stopped Play

Western expats have come and gone over the 16 years since the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan became independent. But, with the capital Almaty now established as the boom town of Central Asia, there is a settled Indian and Pakistani community, and about 15 regular players. This is a place of extreme temperature, ranging from 40°C in summer to –40°C in winter. But summer days can be favourable for cricket, and the game began regularly in 1995 with makeshift equipment made from boxes and broom handles. Now the ACC (Almaty Cricket Club) has real wickets, a couple of brand-new bats, a supply of tape-balls and official permission to play at weekends on the tarmac playground at School No. 130. It is inevitably a little makeshift: no runs behind the wicket (the school is there), bowling only to one end, two runs awarded if the ball goes into the bushes inside the boundary; and no lbws – too many arguments. But there is a strong community spirit behind the whole project, with benefits to the school: the grass is being mown, and six wooden benches have been placed nearby where old people can sit. Mostly, however, the locals just peer out, bemused, from the Soviet-era apartment blocks overlooking the ground. Roger Holland, Wisden 2007

Cricket in the Republic of Kiribati – 33 fragmented and isolated South Pacific atolls that used to be called the Gilbert Islands – dates back to the arrival of the British in 1892. The game has now dwindled to two or three matches a year, between an Australian XI and the Rest of the World, on a ground of white coral sand with no shade from the burning sun, other than the odd passing frigate bird. The eccentricities of early cricket here were recorded in Arthur Grimble’s A Pattern of Islands. The most dramatic event of recent years came when the Kiribati XI flew to play an away fixture against the Republic of Tuvalu, formerly the Ellice Islands. Batting second, Kiribati were down to the last pair and needed six to win off the last ball. Darkness was falling fast and pressure mounting in more ways than one – the plane for the return journey had to take off from a narrow strip of land, between the sea and the lagoon, with no landing lights. The batsman on strike was a strapping player called Tapatulu, a man of fearsome strength renowned locally for having once been lost at sea in a canoe for three months. It was a good-length ball. Tapatulu took a step outside leg stump and, with the well-used “Len Hutton” team bat, despatched the ball over cow corner for six. David de Silva, Wisden 1997

The name Kiribati is derived from the local pronunciation of the islands’ former name of the Gilbert Islands, in turn taken from Captain Thomas Gilbert of the Charlotte who, on returning from the first-ever voyage transporting convicts from Britain to Australia, sailed through them on the way home in 1788. The first British settlers arrived in 1837, and the islands formally became a British protectorate along with the nearby Ellice Islands in 1892.

Thirteen years later Arthur Grimble arrived as a cadet administrative officer working for the British Foreign Office and stayed for six years, recording his experiences in his terrific memoir A Pattern of Islands, published in 1952. In it he details the early history of cricket on the Gilberts in a humorous prose so dry the pages almost become brittle in your hands. Grimble was a decent cricketer himself – he captained both the Chigwell School and Magdalene College teams – and his knowledge of and love for both the game and the islands shines through his prose.

“The beginnings of cricket in the Pacific were not invariably attended by the spirit of brotherhood that this noble sport was once believed to inspire,” he wrote. “A match there was an affair of hundreds, not elevens; no tally of sides was kept, no amiable warnings of visits were issued; one village simply arose on a day and set forth to give battle to another. ‘Battle’ is the key word. The marching crowd paraded around the village of its chosen enemies with taunts and brandished bats until these emerged to accept the challenge . . . Those earliest Samoan matches lasted for weeks at a time and often ended in considerable slaughter. It was excellent for courage but poor for the moral scoreboard.”

Similar scenes can be found to this day, I believe, in some of the more competitive Yorkshire leagues.

From this passage alone it’s easy to see where Tapatulu’s power hitting and cool-as-a-cucumber big-match temperament derived, as exhibited in the match with Tuvalu mentioned above. When you come from a cricketing culture of cracked skulls and mass brawls, hitting a six from the last ball while your transport home revs its engines isn’t half as much of a challenge as it might sound.

Like most of the Cricket Round the World correspondents of today, Grimble described some of the more idiosyncratic local challenges he faced while engaged in promoting cricket on the islands and described them brilliantly. The grass on the outfield, for example, was far from ideal, being dry, coarse and clumped in tussocks and tufts, inevitably influencing the style of cricket.

“The consequence was we all became deliberate moon-shooters and cow-shooters,” he recalled. “It was deeply immoral cricket and, for that very reason, highly amusing. Nevertheless, I preferred the stone age, when a batsman could score along the ground and even a wicked fluke off the edge of the bat could roll as sweetly (for me) to the boundary as the most accomplished leg-glance.”

Coaching also threw up challenges. After one session he noticed one of the locals was a little tight-lipped when he canvassed him about scheduling the next practice.

“I explained that there was no enforcement, but put it to him that the game was a good game: didn’t he think so too? ‘Sir,’ he said again, ‘we do not wish to deceive you. It seems to us a very exhausting game. It makes our hearts die inside us.’”

Again there’s a global resonance here, for who among us hasn’t had a similar reaction from a partner on asking whether he or she fancies coming to watch us play for the sixth summer weekend in succession?

My favourite part of Grimble’s book is also one of my favourite passages of writing of any kind on the subject of cricket, even if he is talking about the Pacific kirikiti version of the game. It also sums up the appeal and success of the Cricket Round the World section itself: those universal aspects of the game – the ubiquitous truths that lie way beyond the laws and the scorebook – that are the key to the game taking hold even in the most unlikely of surroundings.

“But I like best of all the dictum of an old man of the Sun clan,” wrote Grimble, “who once said to me, ‘We old men take joy in watching the kirikiti of our grandsons, because it is a fighting between factions which makes the fighters love each other’ . . . I doubt if anyone of more sophisticated culture has ever summed up the spiritual value of cricket in more telling words than his. ‘Spiritual’ may sound over-sentimental to a modern generation, but I stand by it, as everyone else will who has witnessed the moral teaching-force of the game in malarial jungle, or sandy desolation, or the uttermost islands of the sea.”

It may be surprising to learn that cricket was played in Kosovo, a country which declared its independence as recently as February 2008, by previous generations – or at least something resembling cricket. The pastime of guxha (pronounced “goojah”) was a traditional game now largely replaced among young Kosovars’ affections by football. But Dritan, a Kosovar living in Brighton, realised there was something familiar about the game being played down the road from his home at the County Ground in Hove. “I remember my father playing guxha, and I have since seen cricket being played here, and there are similarities between the skills and the way of scoring,” he said. Inevitably, the more conventional version of the game arrived with the influx of armed forces during the conflict in Kosovo in the late 1990s, and expats of virtually every Test nation played in the UNMIK (United Nations Mission In Kosovo) gym in Pristina using a taped-up tennis ball and a home-made bat. Encouraged perhaps by the presence of Major-General Garry Robison, who was on peacekeeping duties in the country and is the current chairman of combined services cricket, the ICC also ventured into Kosovo, staging a “Spirit of Cricket” weekend in February 2002 at the national stadium in Pristina – which was said to have been used to detain 10,000 Albanians during the height of the conflict. As well as introducing the game to Serbian and Albanian children as a means of breaking down barriers between the communities, there was a 15-over match between The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, the forces champions at the time, and the Indian personnel of UNMIK. More recently, a team of Gurkhas based in Pristina travelled to Skopje to take part in a three-team Twenty20 tournament along with a KFOR (Kosovo Force) side in June 2007. The Gurkhas began by putting on an excellent display of military prowess with the “presentation of the kukri”, although they lost one of their star players, who managed to slash his own arm with a kukri (knife) during the pre-match ritual. It mattered little, as the Gurkhas claimed victory thanks to the performance of Rifleman Chandrakumar Limbu-by-Prasad Chamarty, whose name troubled the scorers almost as much as his runs did. Timothy Abraham, Wisden 2010