An ocean of cricket

by Laura Macintosh (Australia)

I didn't expect to find Fiji

It’s said that the ‘real Fiji’ stems from the three Rs; religion, Ratu (the chiefly system), and rugby. Yet here I found myself in the Pacific nation’s ‘home of cricket’, slapped in the face with raw authenticity. I was 300 kilometres from Suva, in a region that could only be reached by a weekly plane or monthly boat. The Lau archipelago is located closer to Tonga than to mainland Fiji, and although many Lauans have an idyllic blend of Melanesian and Polynesian heritage that would have many national rugby selectors licking their lips, ironically, the national sport of Fiji never really took off in the country’s outermost string of islands. Stepping onto the tarmac in Tubou, the largest village on the main island of southern Lau – Lakeba - I searched the crowd for someone who looked as out of place as I felt. Sporting a casual rat’s tail – a startlingly common hairstyle among the male population of the islands – and wearing an old NFL shirt with Eli Manning’s name emblazoned across the back, I immediately knew it was him. There was no English - just “bula” – hence I couldn’t get his name, so I called him ‘Manning’; a word that elicited a giggly smile every time. Thankfully it was someone of Manning’s towering stature sent to collect me, as we needed the biggest and strongest man on the island to help free the sliding door of the mini van borrowed to pick me up. After spending a good three minutes heaving the door with no success, Manning used his brute strength to reach through the open passenger window and unlock the door from the inside. With one final shove, we were in. An hour later I found myself as the guest of honour at an intra-club cricket match. Most players wore some form of traditional cricketing ‘whites’; a piece of old Cricket Fiji uniform, or clothing that was generally of a lighter colour scheme, but there was one that stood out from the rest. Manning. The Tubou ground was stunning. The locals referred to it as the ‘village ground’ and it wasn’t far from a traditional English counterpart – the grass was perfectly manicured and surrounded by a picket fence, with big sweeping trees down one end, to sit and watch the game under on a hot day. To complete the picture, set back a safe distance from potential stray balls, was the local church, in its rightful place; in the centre of the community. It was a large ground given the size of the island (the population of Tubou is 1,000, whilst the population of Lakeba in total is 3,000) but still falls short of the MCG in terms of boundary length. The pitch is of course synthetic (there is only one turf wicket in the Pacific - in Papua New Guinea) and is set slightly off-centre, to make just a bit of room for the rugby goals, fashioned clumsily from some tree branches down the end of the straight boundary. I watched an entertaining 15 overs of cricket. Those who weren’t at school or work or tied up with home duties came out and sat on the verandahs of the houses that bordered the ground, where they stayed for the remainder day. As each wicket fell, an elderly onlooker would yell out a presumably sage piece of advice to the incoming batsman. Stumps tumbled and shots were made, although just because the ball cleared the house two back from the ground didn’t necessarily mean it was a six – that came down to the quality of the shot; a concept that was seemingly just known and never debated. But what made the game was the fielding. Naïvely I thought the bowling side was a man short, only to discover that the guy casually standing in someone’s front yard was actually fielding at mid-off. There was one particularly athletic attempt to save a boundary when one player slid under a neighbour’s barbed wire fence whilst the other simultaneously leapt over it, but the attempt was in vain. As the umpire raised his arm horizontally to signal the four, it was Manning who slung the ball back to the bowler, and reset to go again.