It isn’t just the elk, either. Also bringing proceedings to a halt in this wonderful anthology are camels (Bahrain), cows and donkeys (Botswana), unexploded landmines (Rwanda, silly mid-on), people learning to drive (East Timor), punch-ups (Bermuda), low cloud (Christmas Island, 300 metres above sea-level), mortars (Iraq, though not during the game held by coalition forces in the ballroom-sized anteroom of Saddam’s abandoned North Palace) and weddings (the ground on Ascension Island has a church inside its boundary). For the record, the elk (Finland) was twice the size of a horse.
Even when play is possible, life can still be tricky. In the Cook Islands, the locals’ decision ‘to use a flip-flop to screed the concrete rather than a trowel meant conditions looked like being a challenge for the batsmen’. Players in Brunei arrive to find that soccer goals have been sited at short midwicket, while in the Falkland Islands ‘those bowling into the wind regularly struggle to reach the opposite end’.
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