O n an overcast Saturday in November a tall, bow-legged Australian stood in the centre of a shabby concrete stadium in the Magdalena del Mar district of Lima waving his Peruvian identity card in one hand and a cricket bat in the other.
He was addressing a group of six-toyear-olds in highly accented Spanish. Harry Hildebrand, the long-time El Presidente of Cricket Peru , waxed lyrical as our small group of pioneers watched nervously from behind a goalpost on the AstroTurf football pitch. We were there on a mission to expand the gene pool of cricketers in Peru.
The signs were not particularly auspicious as the kids, fresh from football practice and still wearing their Messi and Ronaldo T-shirts, gazed uncomprehendingly at him. Cricket has been played in Peru since , with the founding in that year of the Lima Cricket and Football Club LCFC by a British community whose ranks had swelled during the "railroad and guano" era, when the newly independent country relied on British expertise and investment to modernise its transportation system and monetise the abundant supply of seabird excrement.
Despite its long pedigree, the sport never really caught on, driven as it was by expatriates whose main interest was weekend knockabouts rather than long-term development. I had arrived in Lima from the UK in , a heavily pregnant Trinidadian with a young daughter and no friends or acquaintances in Peru and no inkling that we were both to become consumed by the sport.
Always a fan, I grew up during the era of the blackwashes and the four-pronged pace attacks, when the teams led by Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards dominated the sport. I watched them from the Schoolboy Stand at the Queen's Park Oval and later, as a university student, from the 3Ws Stand in Barbados - at one point taking a job selling cricket programmes outside the Kensington Oval just long enough to gather the price of an entry ticket.
