Cricket, or Le Criquet, has been played in France for longer than many folks realise. In 1789 the MCC abandoned a cricket match in Paris owing to the Revolution! A surviving manuscript from 1478 records a game of Criquet being played at Liettres, Pas de Calais. Horace Walpole mentions in his diary of 1766 of having watched a ‘grande game of cricket in Paris,’ and an 18th century print shows a criquet match in progress at St Omer. The oldest surviving Criquet Club is Standard Athletic of Courberoie founded in 1893. Today there are more than 50 active clubs playing regular fixtures throughout France and against visiting teams from abroad every summer.

Set in the fabled Loire Valley is the delightfully picturesque ground of the Saumur Criquet Club, who have as their Honorary President Mick Jagger, yes he of the Stones who has a chateau there & is an avid cricket enthusiast.

Old eyes often look back through enchanting mists of distance. At eleven years of age for the first time in my young life I paid one shilling pushed hard with my stomach against the iron turnstile and entered Trent Bridge Cricket Ground, where for years I was to live through many happy days with arguably the greenest grass in England.

Nottinghamshire were playing Hampshire and the first batsman I saw was Roy Marshall. Hampshire were beginning an innings when I sat on a hard wooden seat clutching my scorecard and bag of egg & tomato sandwiches my mother had prepared. Marshall straight drove a ball to the far distant boundary and I can still see now the swing of his bat, the great follow- through finishing high and held there as he contemplated the grandeur of the stroke. Shortly after the rains came but this brief glimpse of cricket thrilled and fired my imagination and I went home craving more. I had experienced the grace of art. Whether it be in a Wagnarian half-light with the clouds banking black above the members pavilion at Trent Bridge … or a delicate summer haze spread across the playing field with the clean white façade of the Chateau de Saumur as a backdrop cricket can be the finest of all games, either to watch or play …I truly believe that played at it’s best, at any level, in relation to other games cricket is as chess compared to snakes & ladders.