Howzat? <i>Nicht aus</i>

On one of my first days in Kuala Lumpur, I met a man who said he was an umpire at the Under-19 World Cup. His name was Paul Baldwin and he said he was from Germany. An umpire from Germany? Paul Baldwin certainly wasn’t a German name. I had to wait nearly a week and made a trip to Penang to find out more.

Paul’s father was in the British Royal Air Force and he was posted in Germany so Paul moved there when he was 17. He didn’t play cricket for about five to six years because he says he just wasn’t interested.

“One day I saw a game of cricket at the air force base,” Paul says. “I then started playing and ended up being captain of the side.”

Paul took his first steps towards becoming an umpire during casual club games in Germany. Someone from the batting side would often stand in as the umpire. So one day when Paul was officiating, the opposition appealed for lbw when the batsman was miles outside his crease. Paul concurred. Paul's team-mates were livid and said he couldn’t umpire again until he took an umpiring course.

And he did take a course. “In 2000, I went to England and did an umpiring course – the Association of Cricket Umpires and Scorers part 2 exam – after a week of studying,” Paul says. “The test was for two-and-a-half hours on stuff like rolling, mowing and watering - when it’s allowed, when it’s not, how long you can do it for, who has to supervise it. I literally scraped through that.

“I went back two years after that and took an oral exam with three senior members from the Umpires and Scorers’ association and they fired questions at me for an hour and a half.”

Paul then went back to Germany and played his last season with Krefeld Cricket Club, a local German team, in 2000. He gave up playing in 2001 because that year Germany went to the ICC Trophy in Canada and the policy at the time was for each participating country to nominate an umpire. There was no one else in Germany so Paul was almost an automatic choice. One of the first people he met in Canada was Darrell Hair. And so his umpiring career began.

Paul explained the game’s structure in Germany. “We have what is called the German Cricket Board,” Paul says. “There are six regions in Germany and we have regional authorities that run cricket within those areas. So for example, in my region, Nordrhein-Westfalen, which is to the west of the country and includes places such as Dortmund, Dusseldorf and Cologne, there are about 13-14 teams registered to play this season. So if you multiply that by six we’ve got about 70-80 teams that play every weekend.”

So are the players predominantly German? Paul says that a sizeable number of Germans are interested though there are several second-generation Asians on the circuit as well. In Bavaria, cricket has spread to a few schools because of teachers who have holidayed in England and brought the game back to Germany and introduced it in their schools. That’s were a substantial portion of Germany’s Under-17 and Under-19 talent comes from.

How hard is it to teach cricket to someone who hasn’t a clue about the game? “We have brochures in English and German explaining what cricket is, what it’s about and how you can get involved,” Paul says. “And there are people who go about distributing it whenever we play.

“There are small groups of Germans who will come and watch. On one ground in Bonn on the banks of the Rhine, within five minutes of the game starting people will stop, watch, and then try to imitate the bowler because they can’t work out how he releases the ball without bending the arm. It’s funny to watch.”

Cricket in Germany is sold to newcomers as a social game and an opportunity for friends and family to get together and spend the day. “It is getting together at the interval, having a great meal with friends and family. We are trying to spread the message that there is more to it than just winning.”

And at the end of the day, the numbers in Germany are growing gradually.