October 2005

Vlad the recruiter

Angus Bell

Angus Bell finds a small Slovak village that toppled Poland on his European journey

I indicated off the Slovak D1 and pulled over my Skoda to pick up a hitchhiker. As the young man crept round to the passenger door, his face wore a look of fear. "I saw car with no driver!" his voice wobbled as he climbed in.

"Wh-where are you from?" "Scotland."

The young man's expression changed to a broad beam. "Ahhh! You here to play cricket! We all expecting you! You look for Vladimir, yes? He is my neighbour. I take you now!" Fortune would have it I'd just scooped up the 20-year-old chairman, marketing and media manager of Slovak cricket. Lubos had appeared on every Slovak breakfast TV show, in his whites. "The presenters' breasts made me nervous," he confessed as we passed wooden farmhouses, chickens and goats.

Here in Hajske, a village where (apparently) a count was once bitten to death by fleas, a sporting revolution has occurred. Cricket has overtaken football as the No.1 pastime.

Vladimir Chudacik, 34, a manager in a fertiliser factory, introduced cricket after carving some sticks from the wood, and encouraged a topless, 20-stone gypsy to stand in the football field while he bowled at him. "There were four of us. I taught them to bowl with a straight arm. The balls sailed 10 feet over and 10 feet wide. No one believed it was possible to hit the stumps, even without a batsman. Spectators were shouting at us, `Get off the field and go work in the garden!'"

In a tireless recruitment drive, Vladimir knocked on the doors of all 1,300 villagers. Within three years he had forged an international unit that was to topple Poland. Now at Hajske's May Cricket Day, 130 fans turn out, including three ambassadors.

With an average age of 20, Slovak cricket looks set to accelerate. "All our players are native; 70% are students and gardeners; 70% bat left-handed. I think this is because of ice hockey," Vladimir, a rare right-hander, said.

But the most startling statistic leaps from the teamsheet. Move over the Waugh brothers, team Slovakia has four members of the Juricek family, three more sets of brothers, and two cousins. "Their mothers are very proud," says Vladimir with a smile.

Breaking this trend, at one time in the past a foreigner played. "He wanted to restart a tournament after being bowled for zero," says Vladimir. "He tried to stage a team walkout in Vienna when an lbw appeal was turned down. He left 14 players to get home in two cars." Such actions proved incompatible with the Slovak spirit, and this troublemaker was dismissed without the chance to add to his zero. "This is the last sport with fair play," says Vladimir, "and I'm determined to keep it that way."

© The Wisden Cricketer

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