Review

You had to be there

Emma John reviews Slogging the Slavs by Angus Bell

Emma John

Slogging the Slavs by Angus Bell Fat Controller Media, pb, 304pp, £9.99

Loading ...
Somewhere, probably in an obscure backstreet of London, there must be a club specifically for humorists who go off on quirky sporting quests. Perhaps that was where Arthur Smith made his bet with Tony Hawks that he couldn't play tennis against the entire Moldovan football team.

No doubt Chris England - who wrote the excellent cricketing journal Balham to Bollywood - regales fellow members at the bar with his latest excursion to find the heart of Japanese football. And in the reception area, Angus Bell, whose exploits have appeared regularly in The Wisden Cricketer, is filling out his membership form.

Slogging the Slavs is the true tale of his one-man cricket tour of Eastern Europe, motivated largely by his desire to find a team to score his first century against. Bell is certainly a daring sort, setting out in a dilapidated Skoda, with nothing but a handful of korunas and the assurances of a Canadian psychic.

Unfortunately, many of Bell's own experiences are disappointingly tame. It's true that in his hunt for the (much) lesser-spotted Slavic cricketer, he comes across some far more entertaining secondhand stories about the unusual ways the game has developed in the region.

Characters like Borut, the founding father of Slovenian cricket, take long distance trips into neighbouring countries to smuggle much-needed equipment across the border, or just to get a game (Eastern European local officials are not keen on cricket - apparently they're convinced it involves horses). But Bell's agglomeration of anecdotes remains just that; a verbatim medley of the tales he is told and many, you suspect, far taller than he is prepared to admit.

All credit to Bell's determination, which is evident when he visits Turkey for three hours and defies border police to hit an intercontinental six between Europe and Asia. But with so little real event or structure, Bell's focus falls, a little self-absorbedly, on his determination to become a published writer. Good luck to him, but as in most backpackers' travelogues, the crazy antics were probably funnier if you were there.