Did France invent cricket?

As the First Ashes Test begins at Edgbaston it is fitting to recall England’s oldest cricket adversary: France. The Marylebone Cricket Club’s (MCC) first ever international tour was scheduled for France in the summer of 1789. Owing to local difficulties the tour did not go ahead. The match was eventually rescheduled for the bicentennial of the French Revolution with France beating the MCC by seven wickets.

In the space of a fortnight, we have witnessed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak meeting with president Biden in Washington to announce ambitiously that Britain would lead on setting up international norms on Artificial Intelligence (AI). This was followed a few days later by president Emmanuel Macron announcing at the Paris Tech Exhibition that France and the EU would be setting AI norms. One could almost imagine for the opening of the First Test the French president announcing that France invented cricket. But in that, at least, he would have a credible claim.

The clue is in the name. There is mention in a French fifteenth century manuscript of a bat and ball game called ‘criquet’. The term is an old French word meaning ‘post’ or ‘wicket’. Although, from personal experience playing for a French cricket team in Perpignan some years ago, the wicket was always referred to as the ‘guichet’. And today no French dictionary has any other definition than that of the acridian insect. And this is where any putative claim to France inventing the game is on a…sticky wicket. For in reality early accounts most likely refer to the game of crocquet, involving bat, ball and hoop.

‘Pas du tout!’, might retort Emmanuel. Is it not the case that none other than the son of the first ever and one of the longest serving British prime ministers, Sir Robert Walpole, claims to have witnessed cricket being played in Paris in 1766? However, Macron, the great grandson of the Bristol-born Tommie, would have to admit that the first documented evidence of the French at play is the 1864 London Evening Standard’s account of the match in the Bois de Boulogne, in which the Paris Cricket Club was pitted against the Nottingham Amateurs. Within a year, the Paris Cricket Club had published a book detailing the rules of the game.

Not one to back down easily, Macron would doubtless point to France remaining to this day silver medal Olympic cricket champions. A fact that loses some of its poignancy on learning that this was the 1900 Olympics, the only Olympics at which cricket has been played, and that the French team went down to a 158-run defeat by England at the Vélodrome de Vincennes to secure gold. Would it be ungentlemanly to add that the French team was largely composed of British expats in Paris?

The Second World War was a blow to cricket in France. I know little of how Marshal Pétain viewed the game of cricket, but his Anglophobia would not have spared the English game. We do know of his distaste for Rugby League on account of its professional status. The Marshal confiscated French Rugby League’s considerable funds and handed them to the more deserving amateur-status French Rugby Union federation which, despite post-war legal action, has still not recovered the funds.

Post war many French inter-war cricket clubs collapsed. It was not until the 1980s, supported by the British middle classes newfound enthusiasm for France, that French cricket clubs were rejuvenated, aided further by an influx of immigrants from the Indian sub-continent. ‘France Cricket’ was established in 1987 with membership of the International Cricket Council (ICC). The 1989 win against the MCC encouraged English county sides to tour France, and in 1996 France herself toured Austria.

But the highlight of French cricket in recent years was 1997. France played in the European Nations Cup in Switzerland. And here perhaps is something that Emmanuel Macron might wish to dwell on. In the final play-off, France was pitted against Germany. The match was so exciting that Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanach records it as one of its 100 best matches of the twentieth century, as David Bordes ran the winning leg bye with a fractured skull to scoop victory from Germany by one run. The metaphor of the lone wounded batsman grasping victory from the Teuton would appeal to France’s president.

But back to Anglo-French rivalry. As for centuries, Franco-British competition endures, whether it be the City of London versus Paris, or respective claims to AI dominance. And for the next four years, Macron is key to it. For a man whose self-image is subtlety, intelligence, dexterity, courage, elegance, wouldn’t Anglo-French relations be made easier if someone just taught him cricket.