Most bizarre and brilliant places to play cricket

I played at match inside a maximum security prison – I was a visitor!!

It was a social event organised by one of the wardens who played with our club at the time.

It was full on!! There were three guys in the prisoners side, who were in for murder!

There was a road surrounding the very small ground and beyond that a gravel stretch of about 30 metres, then “the wall”, with razor wire around the top. Every half hour or so patrols would drive around the road. The match was umpired and supervised by guards of course. Six or Seven balls were lost into “no-mans-land” beyond the road surrounding the ground. The first time, one of our guys just ran across the road, to retrieve the ball, much to the joy of the prisoners, who watched, knwlingly as the patrol car came screaming around to check out what had set of the alarm. After that each big hit was left where it finished, to be collected later you would pressume, but each time, replaced with a brand new ball! Quite a penalty for hitting a six, you have to face a new ball!

Funny, funny day (albeit a little scary) and the prisoners put on a great feed for us afterwards.

Amazing facilities really, but prison all the same…

The strangest game I’ve ever seen anything about was some sort of match on the sand between the Isle of White and the mainland in the short time the tide was out. The players arrived in boats. I forget the details, but there was something on TV about it a while back. Ben Fogle, of all people, took part.

Great post. It’s always fascinating to hear about cricket in far-flung lands. I’ve played on a number of unusual fields, having toured central and Eastern Europe last season, on a quest to boost my batting average.

The first match was against Estonia, on ice inside a former Soviet missile factory. I went on to play a team of left-handed gardeners in rural Slovakia – nearly all brothers. The village mayor used to drive them to games. On a remote Croatian island, I found a team of winemakers who play next to a minefield. Their wicket was a helicopter-landing pad, and their net was a fishing cage on the docks.

In Zrenjanin, northern Serbia, I helped form a national side who want to make it to the London 2012 Olympics – even though cricket isn’t an Olympic sport – and on the bridge over the Bosphorous in Istanbul, I smacked the Turkish cricket captain from Europe into Asia during rush hour.

Belarus had the most terrifying wicket of the tour. I played with Nepalese medical students on a disused car park in Gomel, near the Ukrainian and Russian borders. There were head-high weeds on the pitch, statues of Lenin nearby, and a murdered corpse was found in the pavilion the week before I arrived.

I’ve posted some photos and article links about the trip here: http://www.angusjjbell.com/30101.html

My friend and I once undertook a game on a table in an Italian restaurant when the surrounding conversations were boring us.

Using the available resources (knives, forks, napkins, cocktail sticks and olives) we managed to fashion bats, balls, stumps and a strip of wicket with a crease that regularly was knocked about more than the olive-stone ball.

Naturally, not all of the Laws were followed … and whether hitting the ball into the bowler’s top is a catch or a six is still contested to this day!

I’ve played on the ghats in varanasi before which was quite surreal as there were planty of burning bodies in the vicinity.

For reasons that are too complicated to go into here, I have to spend a lot of time in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where the Indian embassy (who else) have a team, which occasionally plays a scratch assortment of expat businessmen. I have ambitions to join in some day, but haven’t managed it so far. Mind you, the real cricketing frontier is not so far away from Central Asia any more, lying as it does on the Hindu Kush now that they’ve taken it up in Southern Afghanistan. If only the Uzbeks had been lucky enough to be colonised by the British rather than the Russians, they might be playing cricket now……