Married to a Frenchman, I was unable to spend the day of the
Cricket World Cup final as I would have liked – i.e., eyes glued to telly, beer
glued to hand. Instead, I was required to participate in a 6 hour lunch and
consume my share of 7 bottles of French wine with another French expat and his
wife. Yep, a hard gig, I know.
I strongly suspected that our French hosts would not be
interested in the match, ‘le criquet’ being unintelligible to the French. For
instance, my French in-laws, currently visiting us in Melbourne, have not been able to make head or tail of it.
‘So when someone hits the wicket, the wicket keeper goes
away?’ asked my mother-in-law the other night.
‘Ahhh … not as such,’ I said.
‘And why does everyone shout a lot and go crazy when someone
hits the ball into the audience?’ she wondered.
Explaining cricket to the in-laws was probably going to be a
task beyond my meagre powers, I realised. My husband Maxime did profess to have
a mild interest in the World Cup, however. He sort of learnt cricket by osmosis
– through having previously been forced to listen to the Ashes on ABC Grandstand
radio as we drove all around Tasmania. By the end of that trip, he was
practically channelling Jim Maxwell. And now, Maxime’s view was that the World
Cup as an international contest was important … and even if France never got close to ever being in one, a Frenchman could still have a giggle at England
getting spanked by Bangladesh. This is why Maxime readily agreed to keep me
appraised of the Aussies’ progress in the World Cup final during the meal at
our friends’ house via a surreptitiously-held-under–the-table phone.
So it was that just after we and our hosts had sat down to
the entrée of chicken terrine and fennel salad, Maxime announced, ‘They got
McCullum [the NZ captain]. In the first over!’
Our friends looked up in surprise (and I looked up in delight).
Normally at this stage in a lunch, Maxime would say ‘mmmmm’ or maybe ‘the
Riesling is excellent.’
‘Do you understand cricket?’ our host Olivier asked Maxime, somewhat
suspiciously (wondering if he was a closet Anglophile I imagine).
‘Yes. It wasn’t hard to pick up,’ Maxime said, sounding every
inch the insufferably smug frog. (What was nice is that he was being
insufferable and smug to other frogs for once. As opposed to me.)
‘Do you understand
cricket?’ I asked Olivier.
‘Not at all,’ said Olivier proudly. He’d trumped Maxime by
playing the ‘it’s-all-Anglo-Saxon-gobbledigook-so-cultured-French-don’t-care’
card.
But I had an ace up my sleeve waiting for that: ‘Well,’ I
said, ’maybe you should be interested
in cricket. It turns out that cricket might be French!’
People raised their eyebrows gratifyingly high. So I elaborated: I’d been recently dumbfounded to read in the French version of Wikipedia that
the French may have invented cricket. According to the article, the oldest
reference to cricket is in a letter of 1478 to the king, no less, about a match
of ‘criquet’ in Liettres in the north of France. So cricket must have been bloody
important to the French at some stage if they were whinging to the king about
not getting their LBW decision (now there’s a third umpire for you!). The
English actually planned their first-ever match outside England against France,
but they picked a dud year for it. The 1789 tour was a bit of a fizzer. And after
1789, the French got a little side-tracked and replaced cricket with the sport
of knocking people’s blocks off with a large blade instead of the traditional
ball.
‘Typical English,’ said Olivier with a roll of his eyes as I finished my story. ‘We French have all the good ideas. The Anglo-Saxons just
steal them.’ (Right, so NOW he thinks cricket is a good idea, since it might be
French.)
I laughed. ‘Anyway, in the Revolution, it seems you lost the habit of playing cricket
as well as a lot of heads.’ Then after a bit of reflection I said, ‘Although
half the South African team seem to be French.’
‘A lot of Huguenots went to South Africa,’ explained Maxime.
Huguenots were protestants escaping persecution in catholic France in the 17th
and 18th centuries.
‘Right. So now you have Jacques Kallis and Faf du Plessis and de Villiers,’
I said. ‘And Philander seems appropriately French too somehow. But what sort of
name is ‘Faf’ anyway? Is it French?’
I subsequently read it’s short for Francois, but Maxime said,
‘It means Fascist in French slang.’
‘Good Lord!’ I said, laughing.
Ah well, it could be worse. Faf
could have been French slang for dick. An astonishing number of words do seem
to be slang for dick in French. I sometimes complain that I can’t get a
sentence out without Maxime doubling over with laughter, telling me I’ve just
said I’d like a piece of dick or something. And unfortunately, when it comes to
cricket, there is also the slips cordon, giving Maxime the opportunity to shout things like ‘he was
caught in womens’ underwear!’
After much hilarity at the expense of the poor old South
Africans, we settled back for main course - Alsatian baker’s stew with beef and
potatoes - and knocked over a St. Emillion Bordeaux and an Aloxe-Corton Burgundy. By this
stage, the Kiwis were in as much trouble as our digestive systems. It was all
going nicely until Boult came in to bat.
Maxime pondered a bit and then said, ‘Bout means dick in French.’
Let’s just say I will not be taking Maxime to the cricket with
me any time soon. Or New Zealand.
