Poles Never Play Cricket in Summer

When Angus Bell was a sprite growing up in the hills of rural Scotland, he had few friends with whom he could play the game he loved, the game that eventually obsessed him: cricket. He played when and where he could, followed the international game at a distance and dreamed of glory, assuming the fantasized identities of the Rocket Richards and Wayne Gretzkys of the sport.

During his early twenties, Bell carried his obsession to Montreal, where he bowled and batted on a makeshift pitch in the shadow of a chocolate factory owned by his girlfriend’s father.

By chance one night, he googled onto the fact that cricket was being played by a dedicated few in the grim and unlikely precincts of the old Soviet Union. At about the same time, a psychic advised him that a lot of travelling and the writing of a book lay in his future—and that from that point forward the ghost of a dead relative would be inspiring him to quirky and inexplicable endeavours.

“The decision was made in a flash,” he tells us as his story begins. “My mission, as the psychic had foretold and the ghost of my great uncle Ivor was making clear at that moment, was to travel around the former Soviet bloc playing cricket. I would uncover the story of the Slavic game and put it in a book.”

Which he does with flying colours—setting out during the spring of 2006 in his aging Škoda on an obsessive, often hare-brained tour of, among other countries, Romania, Slovenia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Bulgaria—to find the cricket buddies and games, and the sense perhaps of belonging, that he had so sorely missed as a kid.

Sometimes Bell finds what and whom he is looking for, arriving as he does in strange villages and cities, occasionally in the middle of the night, locating the local players and clubs, getting the players’ stories, pounding back alcohol with men as fixated on the game as he. He sleeps off hangovers in the local youth hostels or sports academies, samples regional culture and cuisine, and insinuates himself into cricket games played in cow pastures or on ice, in some cases with Coke-bottle wickets and tennis balls wadded in duct tape.

The narrative is strewn with characters the likes of which one might expect to find in the films of the Coen brothers or Federico Fellini: one-armed fielders, one-eyed referees, fierce-hearted mercenaries. In Vilnius, Lithuania, Bell plays on a squad that includes “an American kidnapped by Nepalese Maoist rebels, an Aussie who hadn’t played cricket since being hit by a train” and a couple of spangled New Zealand girls, whose only awareness of the sport is that their ex-boyfriends had played back in Melbourne. In one village, people who have never even seen the game are brought out of the stands to build up the roster of one team or the other.

In some places, alas, Bell does not play at all. Having driven hundreds of miles to reach Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland—having battled corrupt border guards, slept in bug-ridden flop houses, eluded thieves and police informers to get there—he is told by the woman with whom he had planned his visit for 18 months that the game he had been promised will not be taking place because the main organizer is in England and, besides, the Poles never play cricket in summer.

Indeed, almost everywhere Bell goes he receives at least a dollop of “very bad news.” In Kiev, Ukraine, the match he had scheduled months earlier has been cancelled because the local South Asian players have decided they would prefer to watch a rare televised game between India and Sri Lanka.

This is not to suggest that the mix-ups and disappointments are a drawback to the book. Quite the opposite. Bell has a gift for comic storytelling that thrives on inanity and dysfunction. “Getting through Belarusian Customs,” he tells us, “was like sitting every A-level exam, changing a driver’s licence address, renewing road tax, registering with a new doctor, opening a British bank account, and applying for a sex change all in one. And this had to be done in Russian.” And then re-done in English after a four-hour wait.

Happily, the trip also includes moments of memorable satisfaction, even triumph—often forged out of equally memorable chaos and frustration. In Serbia, where until recently the local version of the game was played with a stick and a ball of rolled socks, Bell is asked quite seriously, when he brings out the bats, What is a bat? “And yet,” he says, “over the next fifteen minutes something quite remarkable happened. Twelve men who that morning wouldn’t have known what cricket was if they were standing in the middle of a Lord’s World Cup Final … learned how to bowl, where to stand, and how to defend their stumps. After five tryouts they were swinging the ball away on a length.”

On occasions such as this, Bell presents as a kind of Johnny Appleseed of the game he loves, sowing interest and skills, passing out rule sheets and kit, urging local recruits to set up cricket grounds. One of the most charming scenes in the book describes Bell’s visit to a school in Mežica, Slovenia, in the company of a fellow cricketer. “We were completely unprepared,” admits Bell. “The many beers consumed at the restaurant the night before had left our mouths dry and sticky. I said, ‘Does anyone know what cricket is?’ More than half the kids raised their arms. But none of them knew of anywhere, other than Mežica, where cricket was played.”

This is a book about obsession—about passion for a game and for the rigours and pleasures of footloose travel among unknown people on unfamiliar terrain. On a deeper level, it is the story of a young man’s determination to reconstitute the lost dreams, the frustrated ambitions, of his childhood.

It is also of course a scandalous and carefree travelogue on the countryside, cities and towns of the old Soviet Bloc—from the shores of the Baltic to the mountains of Bosnia and, night after night, to the bottom of the bottle.

It is an accumulation of the found stories of the cricketers Bell meets along the way—as well as the strippers and psychopaths and entrepreneurs. It is stories of intrigue, politics and dissipation—and occasionally of tenderness and joy. And in these stories, Bell seems able to locate at least a version of his own story, the mirrored features of his private map and topography.

It is unfortunate in the end that he does not go a little deeper into that topography, with its obvious shadows and recesses, preferring for the most part to present himself in cartoon mode, moving at a slapstick pace through the lives and dramas of others.

Which is perhaps exactly what he intended.

The good news on that front is that he is a talented and thoughtful observer of the world around him and a welcome newcomer to comic literature—and he will be back, at which point we will undoubtedly know more.

Meanwhile, his book inspires a freewheeling fascination with Eastern Europe; with old cities and new economies and, for one reader at least, a desire to know more about cricket … and perhaps even pick up a bat and put on a set of pads and get out in front of a wicket.