Finnish cricket plays a straight bat

Cricket, for all its strange rules, equipment and uniforms, forms a growing sport in Finland. First official ground is being prepared for national and club cricket in Kerava, near Helsinki. “Even if many Finns don’t quite get cricket yet, our job is to get the ball rolling”, Andrew Armitage and Maija Scamans from Cricket Finland tell us. 

“Once you’ve seen Lord’s Cricket Ground in London, considered the best in the world, you realise we have a long way to go. The grass surface at Lord’s is as smooth as a pool table”, Andrew Armitage explains over a tour of the still bit patchy cricket ground in Kerava. “But in June this summer we should finally be good to go.”

Cricket is a growing sport in Finland, despite its reputation as a quaint sport.

Getting a real, proper grass pitch just for cricket purposes has been a long-running goal and priority for Cricket Finland. Once the ground is finished and most of the games of the three national leagues are played here, cricket can be seen in its natural environment. This, for its part, will help make the game more well-known and hopefully attract new enthusiasts to playing cricket.

“Before our own ground we didn’t really have the prerequisites for getting Finns excited about cricket”, Armitage, originally from Manchester, describes the situation. “It was as if I tried to sell ice hockey to the British without ice or a hockey arena.”

Growing in popularity

Cricket was brought to Finland little by little in the 1970s and 1980s by immigrants from cricketing countries such as England, India, Pakistan and the West Indies. Helsinki Cricket Club, the first of its kind, was formed in 1970s around the British Embassy in Helsinki, but for long cricket remained a small-scale sport. Armitage, who had played cricket all his life, moved to Finland in 1988. 

“I was happy otherwise but missed having cricket in my life. After two years, I was completely bored”, he admits. In early 1990s, Armitage and Scamans got themselves involved in founding the country’s second cricket club, Stadin Kriketti, to generate competition between the two clubs. Ball started to roll slowly but surely when interest towards the sport started to grow also outside the capital.

Cricket in its natural environment. Lord's Cricket Ground in London is considered the home of cricket.

All this coincided with the International Cricket Council’s new global strategy of trying to make cricket more well know outside the traditional Test countries. After a few years, Cricket Finland got its official status as a member organisation of ICC.

At the moment there are close to thirty clubs and hundreds of cricket devotees in Finland. Though it is still very much a sport played by the immigrants or Finns with an immigrant background, one of the main tasks Cricket Finland has set for itself is to raise interest among the natives. This is done, for example, by working together with PE teachers at schools and by trying to make Finnish sports journalists understand and write about cricket.

“Our resources are small but the feedback we’ve received has been nothing but positive”, Scamans, a PE teacher herself, tells us. “Once people are exposed to cricket they tend to like it – no one has said they’ll never try it again!”

Cucumber sandwiches & spotless white uniforms

How much does an average Finn know about cricket? Not an awful lot, apparently. Cricket is very often confused with croquet – and sometimes even with polo, as people have been curious to know where Armitage and Scamans keep their horses. “If people know something about cricket, they’ve probably seen it being played in English TV shows such as Emmerdale.”

According to Scamans, many Finns perceive cricket as a quaint sport with complicated rules – and for no reason, since the basic idea of cricket is in many ways simpler than that of pesäpallo, a traditional Finnish batting sport. Images of spotless white uniforms, endless rules, cucumber sandwiches and tea breaks are firmly rooted in many people’s minds. Clearly this is not the image Cricket Finland wants to promote.

Many Finns are taken by surprise to hear cricket is the second biggest sport in the world.

“The annoying thing really is not that people have this perception, but that there are sports journalists that wish to emphasise these perceptions by writing silly little stories about cricket”, Scamans says. “After all, we are talking about a sport that has the second biggest following in the world. Finns are always surprised to hear this.”

Cucumber sandwiches aside, both Armitage and Scamans agree that prerequisites are there to make cricket a bigger sport in Finland. “It sometimes feels the only thing holding people back is the fear of not understanding anything about the game”, Armitage says. “Come on – I didn’t understand anything about ice hockey the first time I saw it. The thing is to have someone next to you explaining the game.”

“In cricket, there are eleven players in a team – just like in football – and you bat in the centre, try to get as many points as you can, and in the end the team with more points wins. That’s it!”

Text: Tiina Heinilä, Embassy of Finland
Photos: Kristian Vakkuri, Helsinki Metropolitan Cricket Club, Tiina Heinilä

Article contains extracts from Tim Bird's "Finnish cricket plays a straight bat" for thisisFINLAND

More information:
Cricket Finland