Since the start of Vladimir Putin’s cold-blooded invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the stories and images being broadcast from the country are horrifying. War is gutting Ukrainians’ lives, but the ambitious and quirky place where I have lived and worked is still there. Many people are surprised, for example, to learn that Ukraine has several cricket teams.
The father of cricket in Ukraine is a man named Hardeep Singh, who brought the game to the city of Kharkiv in 1993. After first arranging hit-arounds in local parks, where he and other expats from India could stave off homesickness, Singh went on to create a cricket league with several teams. If in the 1990s his most important task was bailing his players out of police cells before matches, by the 2010s he was making plans to build an international-standard ground. The land he ended up buying used to belong to a rugby union team.
Instead of preparing to host international cricket in Kyiv and Kharkiv, those cities were being hit by Russian bombs
Cricket really took off in the country when Ukrainians got involved. In a rural town outside Kyiv, an Australian church pastor of Ukrainian descent, Wayne Zschech, taught the game to the members of his congregation. Practicing in a barn, Zschech’s friend Yuri Zahurskiy became a big-hitting batter and an off-spin bowler. Zschech also leased his own cricket ground from the baffled town mayor, and then put together a team of native Ukrainians. The team that he captained, Kaharlyk CC, secured Ukrainian cricket’s biggest victories, and its players have taken its most famous wickets and catches.
Meanwhile, Kyiv had a busy cricket scene thanks to another Indian expat, Thamarai Pandian. Like Hardeep Singh in Kharkiv, Pandian had spent half his life in Ukraine. His tournaments may have been held in a decrepit football stadium, but that didn’t stop an array of minor celebrities from turning up to watch them. Spectators over the years included a Ukrainian prime minister’s daughter, several Test cricketers, and a billionaire from Donetsk, who ended up scoring a few runs himself. Kyiv Cricket Club was founded by Pandian and the then British ambassador to Ukraine, Roland Smith. Its main rival was a team from the British Chamber of Commerce.
In recent years, cricket had been on the curriculum at several of Kyiv’s private schools. The principal at one of them, a South African named Kobus Olivier, had once coached international players, but turned his hand to teaching Ukrainian children. Equipment was provided by Shyam Bhatia, a steel industry mogul whose charity Cricket for Care has also helped the game get off the ground in Japan and Indonesia.
By 2022, Ukraine’s application to join the International Cricket Council (ICC) as an associate member had been all but accepted. The country was poised to become the world’s newest national team. But come that February, instead of preparing to host international cricket in Kyiv and Kharkiv, those cities were being hit by Russian bombs. That was when Ukraine’s cricketers really showed their mettle.
While Russian soldiers were carrying out massacres in the commuter town of Bucha, one of the volunteers evacuating people was Yuri Zahurskiy, the all-rounder from Kaharlyk CC. Zahurskiy repeatedly drove into the besieged town in an ordinary Toyota car, and took dozens of children to safety. On one occasion he came within centimetres of being shot to death. Back in Kaharlyk his captain Wayne Zschech converted his church – his team’s old pavilion – into a refugee centre for families escaping the war zones.
More dramatic still was the fate of the team’s young wicketkeeper, Oleksandr Romanenko. I spoke with Romanenko as he was fighting on the front lines in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. He told me stories from the war zones in Bakhmut, and from the counteroffensive in Russia’s Belgorod. But cricket was still on his mind. One message from him read: ‘As strange as it sounds, what I want to be doing most of all right now is playing cricket. But I have a sniper’s rifle in my hands right now instead of a bat, and a grenade instead of a ball.’
Elsewhere in Donbas, it was a cricketer who evacuated hundreds of foreign students from university dorms in Kharkiv. Faisal Kassim was once one of India’s most promising schoolboy bowlers, and since training as a doctor in Odesa and Kharkiv he would have opened the bowling for Ukraine’s national team. When Russian tanks arrived outside his dorm in central Kharkiv, Kassim kept the students safe inside the building’s basement for a week, before organising an escape route out of the country for all of them.
Cricket has played a part in helping some Ukrainian children and their mothers settle into new lives in other countries. This has happened not only in Britain, but also, incredibly, in Croatia. In a park in Zagreb in the summer of 2022 a young woman from central Ukraine called Anna Murochkina organised evening cricket sessions for refugee children. While the kids got some exercise, their mothers got together on the boundary. These sessions became a form of trauma therapy for everyone.
When the Russian invasion is finally extinguished, Ukrainians will be free to enjoy their lives once more. Hopefully this will include playing cricket again. The lower rungs of international cricket, and the ICC as a whole, would be a better place with Romanenko, Murochkina, Kassim and others in it. As one of the players, known by the nickname ‘Zack’, put it to me: ‘The work, the effort, the time we spent on developing cricket in Ukraine is not something that can be ignored because of a freaking war.’