Bat boy

Angus Bell’s adventures in cricket

It’s the second most popular sport in the world next to soccer, played in over a hundred countries, and the subject of Netherland, one of the most successful American novels last year. But after reading Batting On the Bosphorus: A Liquor-Fueled Cricket Tour Through Eastern Europe by Montrealer Angus Bell, I still don’t feel like I have a firm grasp on the rules of cricket. Then again, that could also be said about some of the teams Bell met along the way.

While cricket may be the thread uniting Bell’s road trip, what drives this weirdly entertaining story are the deeply eccentric lives he discovers on his travels. Outside of countries where it’s massively popular, like India, cricket is mostly played by diverse communities of ex-pats. This sense of civilization gone irreversibly surreal is what Joseph O’Neill pulled off last year in Netherland, an epic novel that hinged on the cricket community in New York City.

It’s no surprise to see O’Neill’s praise on the back cover of Bell’s book. Originally self-published as Slogging the Slavs, Bell’s travelogue became a cult hit a few years ago in the U.K. The Guardian’s only criticism was that it could use some editing. So this re-publication for a North American readership may be a somewhat improved version. Nevertheless, this is not a tale you’d want to reign in too much. Its digressions are often its strength.

The story begins and ends in Montreal where Bell, a Scottish ex-pat, still lives and currently plays and coaches the sport. What inspired him to leave? Well it all started at a psychic-expo in Old Montreal. There, a psychic told him he’d soon be leaving his job to live a life of travel directed by the ghost of a great uncle who died an infant death in Wales (and apparently is a great fan of cricket). A couple of weeks later, two words pop into Bell’s head, cricket and Ukraine. One inspired Google search leads to another, and soon enough Bell is reading an essay by a London economist looking at the connection between economic development and bat sports.

It seems the less time players in your national sport actually spend moving, the better it is for your economy. The essay is of course satire, but is anything ever really funny if there isn’t some truth to it? And even if cricket isn’t the answer to everything wrong in Eastern Europe, it’s a weirdly intuitive angle to look at its recent history.

Bell was already passionate about cricket and had travelled central Europe before with his brother, so he went with his instincts that this was a connection worth exploring.

In Estonia he meets Jason, the captain of what is officially the world’s worst professional cricket team. Half-English, half-French Jason has played cricket in 128 countries and certainly has some stories, like why he’s banned from playing in Brunei. He wrote an article in The Cricketer about a secret game that allegedly cost 2.5-million British pounds, and had 22 female scorers and a harem on the sidelines. (There, I’m probably now banned from playing, and maybe even scoring, cricket in Brunei.)

By the time Bell has made his way south to Serbia, where he finds himself conned into masquerading at a press conference as the ambassador for The European Cricket Council, he’s already gathered his own rich collection of anecdotes: a team of fingerless Tamil Tigers, another team of nearly all left-handed Slovak gardeners, an Austrian bomb plotter, and evidence that Eastern European cricket is being used as a vehicle to traffic illegal immigrants. In Serbia the team captain—a legendary M16 James Bond-level spy—has recently fled the country, and Bell is charged with coaching the national team.

By the time he leaves that country, it seems that Bell has contributed a great deal to giving cricket a permanent significance in Serbia. Who knows, maybe he’ll pull off the same thing here.

BATTING ON THE BOSPHORUS BY
ANGUS BELL, GREYSTONE, PB,
352 PP. $22