Mortar fire, weddings, camels, the French revolution: all kind of things get in the way of cricket

It isn’t just the elk, either. Also bringing proceedings to a halt in this wonderful anthology are camels (Bahrain), cows and donkeys (Botswana), unexploded landmines (Rwanda, silly mid-on), people learning to drive (East Timor), punch-ups (Bermuda), low cloud (Christmas Island, 300 metres above sea-level), mortars (Iraq, though not during the game held by coalition forces in the ballroom-sized anteroom of Saddam’s abandoned North Palace) and weddings (the ground on Ascension Island has a church inside its boundary). For the record, the elk (Finland) was twice the size of a horse.

Even when play is possible, life can still be tricky. In the Cook Islands, the locals’ decision ‘to use a flip-flop to screed the concrete rather than a trowel meant conditions looked like being a challenge for the batsmen’. Players in Brunei arrive to find that soccer goals have been sited at short midwicket, while in the Falkland Islands ‘those bowling into the wind regularly struggle to reach the opposite end’. The sheer variety of cricket across the planet is astonishing. One Sri Lankan bowler kisses the ball before every delivery, a stockbrokers’ XI touring Chile take the field with a gin and tonic in each hand, while in Kosovo a team of Gurkhas includes Rifleman Chandrakumar Limbu-by-Prasad Chamarty, ‘whose name troubled the scorers almost as much as his runs did’.

Wisden’s ‘Cricket Round the World’ section only started in 1993, though as its correspondents are such a learned bunch, historical references inevitably creep in. In 1886, for instance, a fielder on St Helena died chasing the ball over a cliff. The Russian Tsar Nicholas I, on witnessing a cricket match at Chatham, remarked: ‘I don’t wonder at the courage of you English, when you teach your children to play with cannon-balls.’