READ: St Moritz hosts cricket’s legends on the roof of the world
Isabelle Duncan for The Journal of the Cricket Society, Spring 2018
The winter wonderland of St Moritz, home to the 1928 and 1948 Olympics, has done the double whammy as far as cricket is concerned when the inaugural professional T20 tournament ‘Ice Cricket’ found itself on the frozen lake of this glamorous resort in the Engadine valley. A more incongruous sight would be hard to find.
St Moritz has a colourful cricket history and the seeds were sown over a hundred years ago. Cricket became part of the Olympic Games in 1896 and this announcement propelled the British into action, tucked away in the Alps, to play a match in St Moritz between a Davos XI and a St Moritz XI on 20th February earlier that year. Cricket became a more regular presence on the ice in 1988 when a group of British cricket nuts challenged the students of the local international boarding school Lyceum Alpinum to a match in the bleak mid winter. ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen play cricket on the ice’ has a certain ring to it. An amateur competition has taken shape over the last few decades and is now a T20 festival comprising of four teams, played annually, called ‘Cricket on Ice’.
So, the baptism of professional ‘Ice Cricket’ 2018 was inspired by this pioneering and eccentric amateur spirit from the past and became the centrepiece for cricket in the northern hemisphere on the 8th and 9th February this year. Both competitions, amateur and professional, existed side by side on the lake for the first time but it was the gathering of cricket legends on the roof of the world that captured the imagination of cricket fans globally. A truly unique and alien experience for all concerned.
The line up of players really is breathtaking…
Team Royals:
- Shahid Afridi (captain)
- Shoaib Akhtar
- Abdul Razzaq
- Jacques Kallis
- Graeme Smith
- Daniel Vettori
- Nathan McCullum
- Grant Elliott
- Monty Panesar
- Owais Shah
- Matt Prior
Badrutt’s Palace Diamonds:
- Virender Sehwag (captain)
- Mohammed Kaif
- Zaheer Khan
- Agit Agarkar
- Ramesh Powar
- Michael Hussey
- Andrew Symonds
- Mahela Jayawardene
- Lasith Malinga
- Tillakaratne Dilshan
- James Foster
Teams bursting with recently retired megastars who were almost as bemused to find themselves in the Swiss Alps playing cricket on a frozen lake surrounded by towering mountains, as the Swiss were to see them there.
These stars played two T20 matches over two days on a completely unfamiliar surface. Staggeringly, a drop in pitch was used on the lake, a remarkable feat in engineering. A hole was cut into the ice, approximately half a meter deep, and a pitch consisting of two steel rungs with wooden slats on top and an astro surface was laid. This was a stroke of genius and allowed for a consistent bounce throughout the tournament. The alternative, used in the amateur competition, is a rubber mat rolled across the surface of the ice and hammered in with long nails. The main pitfall to this is the snow and ice refreezing over night and forming lumps and bumps under the surface. The bounce can then be dangerous and ludicrously inconsistent so a plastic ball is now used to avoid broken fingers. At an altitude of 1800m I have seen crushed digits and brittle bats crumble when a hard ball was originally used in the dilettante game. There had also been one or two near misses of old ladies bedecked in jewels and fur, skirting the boundary, oblivious to the activities out in the middle. A potential expensive litigious exercise to be avoided at all costs. The drop in pitch avoided all of these snares and an authentic leather ball could be used safely for the pros.
The Royals cruised to victory in both T20 battles winning by 6 wickets and 8 wickets respectively. Classic Sehwag made a good fist of it for the Diamonds on day one, opening with 62 off 31 deliveries, but it was Abdul Razzaq with his variation medium pacers who was the undoing of the rest with figures of 4/18. Owais Shah then bashed 74 off 34 for the Royals with the help of Jacques Kallis and made the total with 28 balls to spare. Players spent the first day acclimatising to the foreign conditions and soon learnt that the fielding side got the hard end of the bargain. With temperatures anywhere between -8c and -2c, bitter and fragile fingers would fumble catches and bowlers had trouble gripping the pink Spartan cricket ball. Players moved gingerly in the field having had a few sliding tumbles to put them off chasing the ball at full pelt. Batsmen fared much better, as Kallis summed up:
“Overall, it was a big success as far as I’m concerned. Batting is easier as after 3 or 4 balls you are nicely warmed up. But bowling and fielding is a bit difficult in these conditions.”
The second match was a higher scoring affair with the players more savvy to a competitive first innings score. This time it was Andrew Symonds 67*(42) and Mohammed Kaif 57(30) who freed their arms and posted a Diamond total of 205/5. Alas, for the Diamonds, it was Razzaq once more who hindered their progress with a destructive 3/48. Graeme Smith 58(36), Kallis 90*(37) and Shah 43*(21) then plundered the Diamond bowlers and made it home for the Royals with 20 balls remaining.
Despite hostile conditions, the only casualty was Shoaib Akhtar, the ‘Rawalpindi Express’, who pulled up with a groin strain and couldn’t complete his fourth over. Much to our delight he joined us in the commentary box and chatted with his fellow countryman and commentator Wasim Akram. I was lucky enough to land a gig as a TV commentator with others, including Wasim, ex England cricketer Jack Richards and Indian TV presenter Charu Sharma. We were beamed to a worldwide audience via Fox Sports, Sony, ESPN, Ten Sports and Sky Sports.
This whole circus was dreamt up by Vijay Singh who runs a sports agency based in Zurich. A passionate follower of the Indian cricket team, he clubbed together with fellow Indian Akhilesh Bahuguna, an experienced event producer, to put St Moritz Ice Cricket on the map. A key supporter of the event is the exclusive Badrutt’s Palace Hotel, where the players were housed in 5 star luxury and we all over indulged in the hospitality of their VIP tent on the ice and very swish black tie Gala dinner. St Moritz has the money, the TV lapped it up and the players have a strong desire to return so it looks likely that Ice Cricket will be back for more in 2019.
We must not forget our amateur friends playing their own humble competition on the other side of the lake in the 31st annual ‘Cricket on Ice’. I am a ringer for the Cholmeleians XI (old boys from Highgate School, London) and could only play for them in the final match once my commentary duties were over. And boy, what a game. Pitted against St Moritz CC, our boys from Highgate could only muster 107 runs and St Moritz replied with a smooth 94/1 after 16 overs. Calamity upon calamity, St Moritz collapsed to 104/7 in 20 overs and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. With that, the Cholmeleians took the cup for the second year running and had a riotous time in the Steffani Hotel at our black tie dinner that evening. The champagne climate had gone to our heads!
St Moritz CC had the ringer of all ringers with a former England test cricketer in its ranks. Under piercing blue skies and majestic white mountains came CJ Richards, formerly of Surrey and England, wearing the gloves for St Moritz CC. ‘Jack’ Richards now resides in Austria with his Dutch wife Birgitta and has an endearing Dutch lilt to his Cornish accent, having lived for many years in Holland. A fine cricketer with 133 golden runs to his name at the WACA for Mike Gatting’s victorious 1986/87 Ashes side. A splendid addition to our tournament.
Regulars Lyceum Alpinum, the local international school from down the road in Zuoz has boys and girls in its XI, and a virgin ‘Cricket on Ice’ team, The Old Paulines, made up the remaining teams required to fight on this white battlefield for the much coveted ‘Cricket on Ice’ Cup which, fittingly for St Moritz, resembles a champagne bucket.
Unseasonably warm weather has reigned over the last couple of years but the minimum thickness of 30cm of ice has mercifully kept us from sinking. All players have been accounted for despite disconcerting booms during play followed by large cracks forming on the pitch… The snow cat/piste basher, used to flatten our snowy outfield was the only serious casualty, disappearing into the lake the night before our competition. In true Swiss efficiency the machine was fished out the next day and the panic over.
There is much to distract a cricketer on this lake with White Turf, horse racing on ice, running alongside our games. For pure adrenalin rush, a handful of cricketers have been known to throw themselves down the Cresta Run, where riders perch themselves precariously, head first lying on their stomach, on a sled similar to the skeleton (an Olympic discipline). Founded in 1887, the St Moritz Tobogganing Club is an exclusive private club that houses the Cresta Run, three quarters of a mile of sheet ice with a 514 feet drop and riders travel at speeds of up to 87mph. There have been countless victims of ‘Shuttlecock Corner’, the most notorious of the ten corners. A certain David Gower fell foul of this bend in 1991 (his car fell foul to the lake) and became an automatic member of the Shuttlecock Club and is entitled to wear a Shuttlecock tie. Leicestershire CCC was not exactly overjoyed when Gower appeared at the beginning of the season wearing a neck brace! Misogynism rules at the Cresta as women were banned from riding in 1929 for reasons that are not clear. Rumour has it that some women achieved faster times than the men and dented too many egos.
Rolf Sachs, son of Guntur Sachs, has been made Patron of ‘Cricket on Ice’ and hosts a Cresta cricket match every summer against St Moritz CC at the Olympic Stadium on the Kulm Hotel’s golf course in front of his house. With all this history and tradition and strong links to the billionaires of St Moritz, the amateur ‘Cricket on Ice’ and professional ‘Ice Cricket’ tournaments look set to dazzle for many years to come.