When the English cricket team toured Nazi Germany – and got smashed

Why have the Germans never been any good at cricket? This entertaining account of the MCC’s 1937 tour to the Fatherland gives some clues. Any country po-faced enough to have a ‘Society for the Encouragement of Playing Ball’ will struggle from the start. Certainly the Germans back then seemed to understand neither cricket’s equipment (‘why so much luggage?’ asked one reporter of the tourists) nor its terminology — later, during the war, letters home from British PoWs about games at their camp were censored because ‘OMWR&A’ was thought to be code. It actually stood for ‘overs, maidens, wickets, runs and average’.

At the darker end of this book’s territory, Dan Waddell provides good evidence that the Germans sent their best ever cricketer to his death in Auschwitz (he’d made the mistake of being Jewish). Team spirit was also a problem: one player responded to a fielder dropping a catch off his bowling by marching over and felling him with a right hook.