French cricket, to an Englishman, means a game played with a cricket bat and a tennis ball, where you stand vertically, using your bat to hit the ball and protect your legs, which double up as your stumps. When trying to hit the ball you may not move your legs. A hit equals a run. If you miss, and it then misses your legs, you aren’t allowed to change the position of your legs on the ground, so if you miss and it goes behind you, you have to twist around rather than just turn around, which makes it much harder. If you hit, you can then turn around and face where it’s coming from, which is from where it lands, so good fielders can get very close, and then defeat you. A catch is, well, a catch. If it hits your legs you’re out and it’s someone else’s turn. I think. It’s decades since I’ve played this ancient English game.
But now comes this:
It’s the quintessential English sport, often dismissed as a pastime for eccentrics with its origins dating back centuries, but now cricket is being taken up by one of the most unlikely nations of all: France.
Children across the country are slowly taking up the sport thanks to a government pilot project aiming to introduce the sport to around 200 schools over the next eight years.
Amazing. And it’s a Franch government project. Proof if ever you needed it that governments are packs of traitors.
Zut alors!
Les sacre blancs?
I’d forgotten all about French cricket. Thanks for the reminder.
So it’s not bad enough that there is “real” cricket, now we learn that there is a French variety? Which apparently (and incredibly) is even more incomprehensible than the real version?
And I thought I was depressed before . . . .
Well there is Real Tennis and then there is the ordinary kind. There is Real Toast, and the French kind.
A game of such mental complexity in its rules and tactics should really be a natural for a Nation like the French who consider themselves Intellectuals. But I guess it is the quintessential Englishness of it that has had them sneering all these years.
Still they used to be quite good at Football (snicker) and are very good at Rugby, but then a Welshman taught them how to play that. That’s why they have such flair when they feel like it.
Good luck to them I say!
Incidentally, I heard about a guy in LA a few years ago, turning around Youth street gangs by teaching them Cricket, and having a great deal of success.
You think you’ve got trouble? Here in Oz, we have TWO Prime ministers/ministrices! There has been so much phoniness about the campaigning, so much scripting, that Julia Gillard has promised to be the Real Julia. Our trouble, of course, is working out which Julia said that!
It’s just not cricket!
Another way to interest French men in cricket is to bandy about some of the weird terms used in real Cricket, like ‘bowling a maiden over’. you could also boast about how you need balls to play cricket, that sort of thing…
Still they used to be quite good at Football (snicker)
I don’t think the English have been good at football lately, either….
Did I say they have Ted? See my critique of our shambolic World Cup performance on an earlier thread.
But we did at least invent it (like 99% of all games in this world). The best the French have come up with on their own is Boules.