The Italian police eye us suspiciously, these Englishmen in cricket whites and blue herringbone jackets. The rest of the tourists are queuing at the side of the piazza. We are closer to the middle. The ball is in my hand and my teammate Tom is padded up in front of the plastic stumps. The others form a slip cordon on the cobbles, echoing the baroque curve of the colonnade. Behind them looms the facade of St Peter’s, where we are due for our own early-morning Mass in the crypt. But first I must bowl a ball as the carabinieri close in.
George Bernard Shaw wrote that “the English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity”. As a lapsed Catholic, cricket is as close as I get to religion these days: but both involve dressing up on the sabbath, performing age-old rituals and solemnly consuming wafers or sandwiches. Last year cricket and religion came together spectacularly when the Vatican sent their team, St Peter’s CC, over for the Light of Faith tour. I captain the Authors XI, and we played a game against the priests on the beautiful pitch at Ascott House in Buckinghamshire.
Afterwards a return fixture in Rome was proposed. Caritas, the Catholic charity campaigning to end world hunger, invited us to an audience with Pope Francis, where we joined thousands of the faithful in St Peter’s Square. Most had travelled much farther than us and we all waited patiently, admiring the basilica in the sunlight and the eye-catching uniforms of the Swiss Guards.
Priests read from Genesis in five languages, before the Pope gave his homily in Italian. The crowds stood on their chairs to catch a glimpse of him, and behind me an excitable nun screamed his name. She cut such an unusual figure that I couldn’t help wonder if she really was a nun, and not a straggler from some hen party. Afterwards, we even presented the Pope with his own Authors team-cap and he asked that we pray for him.
Our first game was against Capannelle CC, the champions of Italy, at their ground off the Appian Way. The night before we were invited to drinks at their clubhouse, where the captain greeted us in front of a trophy cabinet that took up an entire wall. (The Authors’ trophies sit on top of a bookcase in my flat – and most of them were awarded for defeats.) Ominously, the rest of the Capannelle team was attending “il fielding practice”. We have never had fielding practice as a team. So it should not be entirely surprising that we lost to a well-drilled side, a couple of whom played for the Italian national team. But the setting was a special one. We could see the Alban Hills, where Alba Longa, the ancestral home of the Romans, once stood, and where the Pope has his summer residence. Afterwards, we went straight from pitch to palazzo, for the first of several incredible receptions.
A touring amateur side’s best chance of victory tends to come in the first match. After that, most players fall victim to a combination of hospitality, muscle strains and exhaustion. There were also other distractions of being in Rome. Elite cricketers might have spent time in their rooms with their Xboxes. But we had our own personal historian – our team-mate Tom Holland – who took us on a tour of the Capitol and Forum.
We saw where the conquered Gaul chieftain Vercingetorix was strangled after Caesar’s triumph, where the Vestal Virgins lived and where a guard dog was crucified each year after its predecessors had failed to alert the Romans of an attack – instead geese had raised the alarm. Suddenly our aching limbs didn’t hurt quite as much as we strolled around the spectacular ruins, away from the selfie-stick vendors and men in centurion costumes.
That afternoon we turned up to the Pontifical College for lunch with our opposition. A roomful of seminarians rose to greet us. Many had come from the Indian subcontinent to study in Rome, before a return to their home countries as priests. They were half our age and played with a vigour that we could not match.
Earlier that day we had been mistaken for the England team as we crossed a cobbled piazza in our blue jackets and cricket whites. But the resemblance was a fleeting one. St Peter’s CC hit the ball harder and farther, bowled faster and the wheels of our chariot soon came off. We struggled to reach half the Vatican’s total. Our opposition headed cheerfully back for Vespers, with Rome unsacked.
St Peter’s CC was set up in the belief that sport can unite communities. In our Mass, Father Eamonn O’Higgins, the Vatican’s team manager, spoke to us about how we could all gain something from this experience in Rome. That we certainly did. We may not have won, but cricket like this is not about victory. Sometimes a defeat can be strangely enjoyable. After all, there’s no shame in losing to the future of the Catholic Church. And judging from a few days with these Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan seminarians, that future is bright.
British Airways flies several times a day from Heathrow to Rome. Fares start from £38 each way, including taxes and charges. For further information or to book, visit britishairways.com
