Is this the funniest X handle by a cricket association anywhere in the world?

The Icelandic Cricket Association's X handle has 99.4K followers, many of them of Indian origin. (Image source X/@IcelandCricket)

One of the funniest, quirkiest and yet most passionate cricket handles on X—formerly Twitter—is @icelandcricket, run by the Icelandic Cricket Association (ICA). Yes, Iceland, that little Nordic country made of volcanic rock with a population of less than 380,000—about 2 percent of the number of people living in the city of Mumbai. Iceland currently has only 132 cricket players, all of whom work at day jobs, but do they love the game!

The tweets reveal a bunch of cheerful people who don’t take themselves too seriously. Any cricket fan who has retained even a faint memory of a sense of humour should enjoy their thoughts.

So what would be the composition of our squad if we were taking part in the Cricket World Cup?

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Four spinners, a keeper, eight medium pacers, and two batters.

Why only two batters?

We've only got two players who can bat.

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— Iceland Cricket (@icelandcricket) September 28, 2023

However, the cricket association’s website does claim that it was Iceland where cricket was invented. As evidence, it provides a story from Egil’s Saga, an Icelandic epic featuring the fearsome Viking warrior Egil Skallagrímsson. In the year 911, the seven-year-old Egil, it is written, participated in a game involving a ball and a bat. The saga recounts that the players were divided up into teams, which, the ICA points out, “is exactly how cricket is played in Iceland today”.

Unfortunately, it did not end well, since compared with the Viking temperament, the young hot-headed Virat Kohli would have looked like the Buddha reborn. In probably the first recorded instance of sledging, Egil got into a dispute with a 10-year-old member of the rival team and brained him with an axe. In the pitched battle that followed between the teams’ supporters, seven were killed.

Here, the ICA hastens to add: “That is not exactly how cricket is played in Iceland today.”

They say it takes 10,000 hours to master something. Well, we started playing cricket here in 911 CE, so that's almost 10 million hours and we've got a long way to go.

— Iceland Cricket (@icelandcricket) September 27, 2023

However, the game, if at all it was an early version of cricket, seems to have been forgotten in the land for hundreds of years. It was only in the early 21st century that the game was revived again.

Today the ICA boasts of five clubs, several limited-over tournaments and a national team. It has the world’s northernmost cricket field, in Hafnarfjörður, at a latitude of 64.07°N, two degrees below the Arctic Circle, which was inaugurated by the country’s prime minister. The national team has played seven matches till now, but won only one, in 2018, against Switzerland.

Says @icelandcricket: “Our current international record is very poor, which puts us in the perfect position to criticize other poor teams during the upcoming World Cup.”

Of course Iceland is far away from getting even an associate membership of the International Cricket Council (ICC) but that hasn’t curbed anyone’s enthusiasm.

Some of the ICA’s recent tweets:

“If you're a batter and struggling for form, remember you are on a planet rotating at 1,574 km/h. It's a miracle you can even stand up, let alone occasionally lay bat on ball.”

“We know how to bowl the googly, zooter, flipper, carrom ball, arm ball, doosra, top spinner, and slider. None of us can actually bowl them. It's understanding the theory that counts.”

In a cheeky reference to the domination of the ICC by the Big Three—Australia, England and India, a tweet read: “It is time to embrace the two-tier system. We favour a World Cup where teams beginning with A, E and I get 3 points per win & everyone else attains 2. Let's get all the boards to sign it off. PS, we begin with I too, so this will help us when we enter World Cup qualification.”

In the recently concluded Asia Cup, India played Pakistan twice, once in the first round and then at the Super Four stage. The first match was rained out after India had begun batting and in the second one, played over two days due to rains, India drubbed Pakistan. The ICA’s tweet on the result went fairly viral: “Pakistan may have lost to India by 228 runs, but the consolation is surely that it took them three attempts and a flight to Sri Lanka to do it.”

In the final, after India bowled Sri Lanka out for a mere 50, @icelandcricket made a mathematically indisputable claim: “We are not saying we would have done better than Sri Lanka today, but worst case we'd only have made 50 fewer runs.”

But the handle is not all about laughs. It rightly called the decision to allot the India-Pakistan Super Four match an extra day in case it rained “inconsistent” and “unfair”.  Over the last few months, it has run a number of detailed opinion polls to select an all-time greatest World Cup XI. Each of the polls got thousands of responses, including one from Sir Geoffrey Boycott, who, when asked for his XI, wrote back, rather ungrammatically: “Joe Root Kane Williamson Steve Smith Virat Kohli proper technical players but would not be able to hit a lot of sixes with 2lb 4oz bats. But these 4 could get runs anywhere.”

It asked followers to name who they thought was the greatest batter who has never played any World Cup match since the tournament began in 1975, and mused that it could be V.V.S. Laxman.

The handle now has nearly 100,000 followers from around the world, a significant chunk of whom seems to be Indian or of Indian origin. In fact, 100,000 is a number that the ICA has been pushing for in recent times. In late August, it tweeted: “We are now only 2.5k followers away from reaching the mythical, Bradmanesque landmark of 99.94k. Cricket in the circumpolar north has never received so much attention in its entire and inglorious history.” 99.94 is the test batting average of Don Bradman, a number that is unlikely to be ever matched even if the Jedi or the Avengers take an interest in the game.

But on 20 September, @icelandcricket griped: “Our biggest challenge in reaching 100k followers is the bird-brained owner of this former platform known as Twitter. Every time we get a little surge of popularity, @elonmusk announces becrazed (sic) ideas like making everyone pay, meaning people leave. We will win, regardless.”

This column is my tiny contribution to helping this lovely country with its 132 part-time players achieve that magic figure. With a unique blend of pluck, self-deprecation and love for the game, @icelandcricket is charming in a way that is quite rare today in the sporting world.