French toss googly and claim cricket

By CATHERINE FIELD in PARIS

They gave the world croissants, cafes and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man. Now the French are saying they invented cricket.

The claim has caught England by the googlies. It is, after all, a tenet of Anglo-Saxon culture that cricket, like tennis, rugby, golf and football, originated in Britain in the misty dawn of time and was introduced to an admiring and appreciative planet through the gift of colonialism.

Wrong. According to Didier Marchois, a former president of the French Cricket Federation, that most quintessential of English games originated on the Froggies' side of the Channel as long ago as the 14th century.

Marchois says he has documents proving that during the Hundred Years War of 1337-1453, off-duty soldiers played 20-over matches near the medieval battlefields of Crecy and Agincourt.

The French not only lost those two battles, but also bragging rights to one of the world's favourite games.

"Cricket was born in the north of France and taken across the Channel by English soldiers who picked it up from us during truce periods in the Hundred Years War," says Marchois, with all the certainty of an umpire lifting a finger on a dead-cert lbw.

"[The documents] leave no room for doubt."

Also among the cache of documents is a letter to King Louis XI being asked to spare the life of a player, who had rather unsportingly killed an opponent during a cricket match in Calais in 1478.

And while we may all have grown up believing that only British kings were interested in the game, cricket was reputedly the favourite sport of the Sun King, Louis XIV, who took over the French throne in the 17th century.

But making any definite claim to the game is a sticky business.

The Oxford Library of Words seems to be on Monsieur Marchois' side. The word cricket has an uncertain origin but, the book notes, may come from the French word "criquet." However, it adds, "criquet" may itself be a corruption of the Flemish word "krick," meaning stick.

More recently, the French came within a whisker of becoming world champions at cricket. At the 1900 Olympics, the only Games in which cricket was played, France lost to England in the final.

New Zealander Graeme Wright, a former editor of Wisden, said Marchois' comments should not fall too harshly on English ears.

"If it is not an English invention then it does not matter so much if England lose," he said.

That must be a comfort to England as they battle for the Ashes across the Tasman.