RUSSIA

In July, an English touring team, the Explorers, played what was reported to be the first formal match in Moscow since the Bolshevik Revolution. Their opponents were the MCC: the newly-formed Moscow Cricket Club. Owing to a misunderstanding, the pitch was originally laid out for a croquet match. Broom-handles had to be used in place of stumps: the man bringing some of the kit was stopped at Heathrow because he had forgotten to get a visa. Wisden 1994

It may have been the first match in Moscow since the Revolution but the Explorers’ game continued a fine Russian tradition of cricket ‘misunderstandings’. According to F.S. Ashley-Cooper’s wonderful 1927 book Cricket Highways and Byways, in Imperial times St Petersburg boasted two clubs – remarkable enough in such a cricket outpost but even more so when you consider how the first set of laws translated into Russian had the length of the pitch at 12ft and insisted that no fielder was allowed within 40ft of the batsman.

When I tracked down one of the Explorers, Mark Rice-Oxley, he confessed that “I can’t quite remember what happened,” but when pressed recalled that there was cake, tea and a string quartet at the tea interval, that the game was played just off Komsomolsky Prospekt on the southern side of Moscow “in the lee of one of the Stalin wedding-cake buildings”, that it was “the weekend the Central Bank arbitrarily declared a currency reform that would make old roubles worthless, so many of us were thinking of that rather than the cricket” – and most importantly that “I was out for one, but did get a hatful of wickets on a track more spiteful than Stalin in his heyday.”

The Moscow side – largely comprised of expats but with at least one Russian and one native of Belarus – scored a semi-respectable 112 but, mainly thanks to an impressive 45 from Richard Atkinson, the Explorers emerged from a tight game victorious.

The Explorers were continuing a noble touring tradition: as far back as 1865 a Handbook for Travellers in Russia, Poland and Finland was advising that “in summer the tourist can join the matches of the St Petersburg cricket club”. The sporting visitor could also, next to the cricket ground, “shoot blackcock, capercailzie, snipe and duck”, which are birds, presumably, rather than the names of the St Petersburg bowling attack.

At least three Russian Tsars had exposure to cricket: in 1814 “upon the glorious termination of the war in Belgium”, Alexander I joined George III and the magnificently named Prussian Marshal Gebhardt Leberecht von Blucher in watching Eton schoolboys playing at Frogmore on the outskirts of Windsor. Alexander’s son Nicholas I saw a cricket match when visiting the English naval dockyard at Chatham, apparently remarking, “I don’t wonder at the courage of you English, when you teach your children to play with cannon-balls.” Nicholas would go on to charge headlong into war with the Ottoman Empire in 1853, believing that he had British diplomatic support. He didn’t. In fact, Britain would side with the Ottomans in what became the Crimean War. Could his belief that as long as the hard-as-nails Brits had his back everything would be all right have stemmed at least in part from watching a bunch of jolly jack tars knocking a cricket ball around Chatham?

This Russian belief that cricketers were made of tough stuff surfaced again in 1875 when the crew of the British royal yacht Osborne played a match in the dockyard at St Petersburg. As Ashley-Cooper recounts, “a message arrived from the chef de police demanding an explanation of the presence of this ‘force of warriors’ in the midst of the Russian Woolwich.”

Finally, completing a hat-trick of Tsars, the ill-fated Nicholas II was apparently enough of a cricket fan to lay a pitch at his Peterhof palace. But this would be the last Russian cricket action until the Iron Curtain had clanged shut, reopened and the Explorers arrived in Moscow while the string quartet tuned up.

In 2008 Sir Tim Rice’s Heartaches team, featuring Allan Lamb, travelled to St Petersburg and played an “England” side made up of diplomats and expats in the Mayakovsky Garden in the sumptuous grounds of the State Russian Museum.

These days, however, Russian cricket is not just the preserve of the expat, the visiting sailor or even celebrity librettist: in 2012 Cricket Russia staged its first open cricket academy in Moscow, and 100 Russian children and 30 Russian adults turned out. The pitches were, presumably, more than 12ft long.

RWANDA

They say sport and politics don’t mix, but Rwanda’s increasingly strong, not to say unlikely, ties with cricket sit comfortably with the efforts of the country’s president, Paul Kagame, to sever links with its former colonial masters in France and Belgium and cosy up to the Commonwealth. Kagame, who learned the game while a refugee in neighbouring Uganda, still blames the French for the massacre of around one million Tutsis in 1994, and is only too happy to see young men in this Francophone nation speaking English on the field of play. It is poignant that the country’s only cricket ground, the Kicukiro Oval, lies next to the École Technique, where almost 3,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by members of the Hutu tribe that year. “When we first started playing, we found piles of bones on the boundary over there,” Julius Mbaraga, the captain of the Right Guards, Rwanda’s first cricket club, told The Times. The newspaper claimed one game at the ramshackle venue was interrupted after an unexploded landmine was found at silly mid-on. Cricket was first introduced to the country in 2000 by returning Tutsi boys who had learned the game in exile. The locals’ enthusiasm – Rwanda has five teams – persuaded the British charity Cricket Without Boundaries to organise a six-day clinic for coaches in November, while the Conservative Party have donated six bags of kit and equipment. Wisden 2008

Cricket Round the World has brought us many stories of the game taking hold in unlikely places, but few tales are as poignant as that of the game in Rwanda. This is no story of jolly expats encouraging locals to join in their curious game; rather this is an organic, indigenous growth of a sport; a growth born out of tragedy and exile.

There was no cricket culture to speak of in Rwanda before the 1994 genocide when the Hutus set out to obliterate the Tutsis. Those who escaped the slaughter by fleeing into Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda experienced cricket for the first time and, when it was safe for them to return, the game came home with them.

Traumatised by one of the most vicious and bloody eruptions of ethnic hatred in history, not to mention being one of the world’s poorest nations, Rwanda, blighted, blood-soaked Rwanda, was about as far removed from the gentle well-to-do culture of cricket as it was possible to be. Yet the game has not only taken hold in the country since the genocide: it has flourished. The Rwanda Cricket Association was formed in 1999, ICC Affiliate status was granted the following year, and in 2002 the game forged in foreign refugee camps found a semi-permanent home at one of the most notorious locations in the country.

In 1994 the École Technique Officielle in the Kigali suburb of Kicugiro was Rwanda’s only technical college. It also became a safe haven for some of those threatened by the mass killings, defended by UN peacekeeping troops from Belgium. However, when ten UN peacekeepers were killed elsewhere in the capital the Belgians moved out, leaving the 5,000 or so Tutsis gathered at the college entirely at the mercy of the Hutus. Mercy was, however, in short supply. Estimates of the numbers killed in the ensuing slaughter vary; 2,500 appears to be the most conservative figure accepted as roughly accurate as the college became one of the most notorious killing grounds of the entire genocide.

Eight years later the college became the home of Rwandan cricket. The serene, gentle rhythms of the game were a long way from the horrors of 1994, yet for a sport that began as part of a healing process among the displaced and dispossessed to be played on such a notorious piece of ground became almost a symbol the nation’s nascent emergence from its collective trauma.

Today cricket development continues apace. Under the auspices of the Rwandan Cricket Stadium Foundation work is underway on a permanent, purpose-built home for Rwandan cricket in the capital Kigali. Thanks to the tireless fund-raising and coaching work of Englishman Oli Broom, who headed the foundation (and whose ability and willingness to go the extra mile knows no bounds: in 2013 he ran up a mountain to raise money for corrective dental work for a Rwandan cricketer who’d had his teeth knocked out by a ball that lifted off a length) the new ground is planned to be ready in time for the 20th anniversary of the 1994 massacre.

With a new ground, an estimated 60 per cent of the population aged under 20 and climatic conditions making cricket possible almost all year round, the game in Rwanda has a brighter future than almost anywhere in the world.

Few countries would take being described as “the next Afghanistan” as any kind of compliment, but in terms of cricket developing at an extraordinary rate of progress having emerged from incomprehensible horrors it’s a compliment that suits Rwanda perfectly.