Slogging the Slavs - a tale of cricket in the Ukraine!
Student from Biggar hits out
DID you hear the one about the Scottish student from Biggar playing that most English of games, cricket, against a bunch of Ukranians?
It's no joke; in fact, it's an entirely true story which forms the first book by 24-year-old Angus Bell, 'Slogging The Slavs' being, perhaps, one of the most bizarre sporting sagas committed to paper since the last George Best biography.
Angus is, of course, his own man but to put his family background in context, he is the son of Arthur Bell, a stalwart of local business and politics, a pioneer of Clydesdale tourism promotion and that rarest of beings, a Tory Francophile.
Proof that Angus is a chip off an old cosmopolitan block comes in the very first chapter of the book where he's at a Canadian psychic exhibition with his Belgian-born chocolate factory heiress girlfriend when the first suggestion is made that his future lies in travel. But where?
His young life has run into a series of dead-end jobs in Canada; a meek return to the shelter of mummy and daddy back in Scotland is too humiliating to consider. Out of sheer, self-confessed mental sloppiness and daydreaming the seemingly totally unconnected words ''cricket'' and ''Ukraine'' pop into his head and, using that laziest of research methods, the Internet, he casually - and without much hope - tries to seek any link between the two.
Hey presto. It turns out that Odessa State Medical University in that former Soviet state has a cricket team!
Sixteen of 'em, in fact.
A bit more computer key-punching reveals that the Slavic world, from the Baltic to the Balkans, is fair hoaching with cricket teams!
This, says Young Bell to himself, I just gotta see for myself!
The book goes on to describe the somewhat mind-bending events which follow as he investigates this strange phenomenon, an 8000-mile trip through the Slavic states in a clapped out car in a quest that is as enormously entertaining as it is entirely pointless.
He uses his frankly skewed sense of humour and burning desire to seek out the completely ridiculous to tell of encounters with people as diverse as Croatian vineyard owners and Ukranian millionaires whose only thing in common is an illogical passion for the game of cricket.
He even ends up as Captain of the embryo Slovak international cricket team and playing on an icy wicket in the grounds of former missile factory.
Angus does reveal the answer to the central question at the heart of the book: how and why is cricket such an addiction in countries where you'd have thought they'd have never heard of the game, never mind become fanatics for it?
Simply put, when the old Soviet Union was trying the court favour in the Indian sub-continent in the '50s and '60s, their various technicians and 'advisors' sent there caught the cricket bug from the locals and returned home to infect their fellow countrymen and sons. Twenty, 30 years on, the game has grown to become a hugely popular sport but still almost in total 'isolation' from the rest of what we'd call the 'Cricket World'. Angus explained that he was a bit taken aback by Ukranian cricketers who expressed mild surprise on hearing from him that places like the West Indies and England also played 'their' sport!
Basically, 'Slogging The Slavs' is a daft idea for a book but, showing the true skill of a 'features' writer, Angus has chosen a totally irrelevant subject and turned it into a sometimes hilarious and always fascinating tale. This could mark the rebirth of the wandering Victorian gentleman travel writer who went places just for the hell of it and, if he lived to tell the tale, told it very well.
'Slogging The Slavs' is the first publication of Fat Controller Media, specially set up to promote young writing talent; even IF Angus's big brother Douglas wasn't managing director of this new venture, it would no doubt have found a publisher anyway.
('Slogging The Slavs' by Angus Bell, ISBN 0955433207, RRP 9.99, published by Fat Controller Media, 4th Floor, Sunco House, Carliol Square, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 6UF, www.fat-controller.com, tel 0191 230 5166.)
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Lanark
Saturday 04 February 2012
Today
Heavy sleet showers
Temperature: -1 C to 3 C
Wind Speed: 38 mph
Wind direction: South
Tomorrow
Light showers
Temperature: 2 C to 5 C
Wind Speed: 13 mph
Wind direction: South west
