It seems unlikely, but cricket has become a link between Italy and Australia. There is a coaching scheme that takes Italians to Tasmania regularly and increasing numbers of Italian-Australians seek to play cricket for clubs in Italy. Moreover, in 2002 Malcolm Speed, the Australian Chief Executive of the International Cricket Council, supported Italy's successful attempt to modify ICC rules after the Italian team had withdrawn from the ICC Trophy in Toronto over this issue.
The modification reflected a globalisation of an Anglo-Saxon sport because it accepted the Italian criterion of nationality for eligibility for a national team. Italian cricket has become a presence on the world scene. The diplomatic clout of the Presidency of its Cricket Federation is undeniable: its President (Bruno Bottai) is a former Secretary-General of the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs and its Vice-President, Umberto Vattani, is Ambassador to the European Community. Its weakness is the lack of a cricket tradition. Despite youth programs, it is extremely difficult to graft cricket on to a sporting culture whose traditional interests are mainly soccer, cycling and car racing.
But cricket in Italy has already come a long way from what some nostalgically refer to as its good old days such as 1984 when, for the first time, an Italian touring team challenged the might of England. The English press had a field day. It described English players ducking behind club bars as Italian opponents entered with cases, which might have carried sawn-off shotguns rather than cricket gear. It said the players' names, such as Gambino, Conti, Bonapace and De Amicis, sounded like the cast of The Godfather. It advised English players not to mention "The Don" lest it be taken as a reference to a mobster rather than to Bradman di Bowral. "Do the Italians toss up or just shoot it out?" asked the Daily Mail, drawing on its endless supply of stereotypes.
When a ball from the Italian team's opening bowler, Max da Costa, struck an upright English batsman on the shoulder, according to the Daily Mail a fieldsman on the square leg boundary shouted "Oweezadatta?" and his skipper offered the umpire the comprehensive explanation "He's Roman."
It was suggested the Italians might trundle up meatballs prised from their spaghetti. Instead, after each match the Italian skipper, Simone Gambino, who was something of a martinet, lined up the opposing team and presented salami, pasta and chocolates to its surprised members. A sponsor relative of Simone had provided a team van, which carried coffee and pasta advertisements but also salami, rigatoni and 6,400 Ferrer Rocher chocolates. After several tours and some victories, Italians are less liable to the Daily Mail's good, clean racist fun. ("Latin passions give the game new flavour" was the headline in "The Times" after the first Italian win which it described unblushingly as "Italy's finest hour".) As one of the aims of the tours is to increase interest in cricket in Italy, half-way through the 1984 tour a team member rang from London to the State broadcasting television sports program with the news that, "on its English tour, the Italian team is undefeated" which was broadcast to an audience of 10 million. But the caller had omitted that the Italians were playing not against a national team but club sides – and there had been four draws in four matches. It did not matter greatly because Italians often confuse cricket with croquet. My Roman team, Capannelle, participated in the European Clubs Cricket Festival in Durham in 1989. Financed by the European Community, it brought together teams from Germany, Spain, France, Italy and Denmark as well as the locals. The Germans were mainly Pakistanis but their captain was from Sydney, the French had an English ex-Oxford player as captain, the Danes were all Danes, fearsomely keen and competent. For the record I averaged 75: 46 not out, 19 not out and 9 run out, at which point I decided not to dilly-dally and retired from cricket to begin a tennis career.
The first mention of cricket in Italy was of a match played by Admiral Nelson's sailors in Naples in 1793. About the end of the 19th century, several cricket-and-soccer clubs were founded in north Italy: Genoa, what is now Juventus and Inter, but they quickly forgot cricket and got on with soccer. After World War II, cricket revived. An Englishman Frank Pogson married into the Doria Pamphili family, one of the best-known in Rome, and a cement pitch was laid in the grounds of their magnificent villa, which is larger than the Vatican. The Australian and British embassies fielded teams, as did the Venerable English College where priests are trained; the Beda College for those with late priestly vocations: the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation whose headquarters is in Rome; and the Allied War Graves Commission. Participation by the Commission was important because it tended the Villa Pamphili ground which is surrounded by handsome umbrella pines and looks across to St. Peter's dome with which it is level.
For several years the Australian team won the competition, largely because the puffy embassy players were aided by trainee priests keen to work off their excess energy, whereas the main opposition, the English Embassy, divided its forces between two teams. Among the Australians were Frank Carroll, who was to become archbishop of Canberra, Billy Snedden who was a Minister but not yet Opposition Leader, and Morris West. The day West played, fellow novelist John Cleary attended, so two Rolls-Royces were parked beside the ground. At that time, a side went each year to Corfu where a triangular cricket ground by the fort recalls its English heritage. Indeed the atmosphere remained Venetian-English even though the Colonels' regime was whipping Greece into shape. English cricket authorities had tried to keep the game alive by sending practice nets but word was that they had been used to haul in fish. Like a lost tribe performing imperfectly remembered rites, the Corfuscians had transposed some terms, appealing "Not out" and answering "How's that?" Passion substituted adequately, however, for practice among the Greeks in what were unofficial Eastern Mediterranean Tests.
Early in the 1970s the flannelled fools of Rome lost their superbly set ground because Villa Doria Pamphili became a public park. For some time cricket continued at the summer residence of the English College by Lake Albano. But it was too tiresome to drive to the hills behind Rome and the competition died out.
Enter Simone Gambino, a political science graduate and son of a well-known journalist. While studying in England as a teenager, Simone fell in love with cricket and had some coaching. He returned to Rome with the single-mindedness of Ayatollah Khomeni but with Wisden's as his Koran: if you want to know when and where Stan McCabe scored 187 in a Test against England, Simone has the answer. (He imbibed the English every-man-shall-do-his-duty ethic. Once he carried his stonewalling bat for a score barely into two figures in a six-a-side game. "Bravissimo" called one of his team-mates as Simone left the field. "Not great said Simone gravely, "but responsible.")
In reviving cricket, he found survivors from the Villa Doria Pamphili days and also attracted young Italians even though involving them in cricket seemed as futile as founding a ski club in Bahrain. The Italian Cricket Association was founded in 1980 with only 15 members but 12 years later had 1,000. Now it has a competition with teams from the pre-Alps to Sicily. But it is still a missionary enterprise. One of its proudest boast is that, in the 1988 European championship, it beat England thanks largely to an innings of 106 by Joe Scuderi, the South Australian Sheffield Shield player whose parents emigrated from Sicily.
To prevent non-Italians dominating, in 1987 it was decided that each team could field a maximum of four non-Italians. From 1983, only three foreigners were allowed because a rich club, Cesena, had imported match-winning first grade Sri Lankans. Only two foreigners are eligible for the national team but usually another half dozen team members were born in Commonwealth countries but have acquired Italian citizenship. It has had several naturalised Sri Lankans as captains. In 1992, the New Zealand captain Martin Crowe, on a five-month holiday in Italy with his Florentine wife, was paid $5,000 to coach the national team.
The games in the national competition, usually of 80 overs, are played on matting wickets. Finding suitable grounds has been a problem. My team attached itself to the Rome racecourse, the Capannelle. Initially games were played in a paddock as desolate and unserviced as anything back o' Bourke. Play was interrupted each time horses passed on the way to the starting post which led me to shout, during one innings, "Four balls and five horses." For Italian newspapers, cricket has an aristocratic English cachet as a sport which inculcates those foreign concepts, "fair play and self-control." It ties in with the snobbish idea of England as the land of Edwardian gentlemen, which persists despite Mick Jagger, and the exploits of soccer hooligans. Boisterous Botham did nothing to dent the Italians' pre-Jardine image of cricket.
For Italians a batsman is a battitore, a bowler a lanciatore while the task of the man crouched behind the stumps is to wicketkeepare. The Italian for "wicket" means "little wooden castle" and short leg is "laterale corto"– short side. Italians would probably subscribe to G.B. Shaw's "you don't have to be mad to play cricket but it helps." This hit home during John Paul II's first visit to Australia. Some Italians journalists accompanying the pope saw cricket for the first time on television in their Perth hotel rooms. I explained the game as best I could. The next day I went to the WACA ground to see Alan Border and Greg Matthews avoid a follow on. When I told the Italian journalists that while they trailed behind the Pope I had spent several hours at the Test match against England, they asked who had won. I said it was too early to tell and avoided saying that the players had taken afternoon tea. In the Seychelles, I told them it looked likely to be a tight finish; in Rome, I said with some satisfaction that Australia had achieved a draw. The Italians were bemused by a sporting contest lasting days without either side winning.
If Italians have seen cricket at all, usually it is only in films such as Chariots of Fire. While in the outfield of the Doria Pamphili ground, I overheard a strolling couple who chanced on our cricket match. After watching in silence the man said "they must be making a film."
*Desmond O'Grady is IDU's Italian editor and Rome correspondent of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
For several years he was a member of Italy's national cricket squad.
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