South Seas war club cricketers take a beating from football

The bat is more like a war club, the ball the size of a lemon and the players wear anything but white.

Kilikiti, a form of cricket played on the islands of Polynesia, is one of the strangest sporting legacies of the British Empire. But in Tuvalu, a scattered archipelago which under British rule was half of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, the game is losing out to football.

"Young people do not want to play kilikiti any more," said Apelu Meneua, 44, a boat captain, as he prepared to occupy the crease on Funafuti, Tuvalu's main atoll. "It is not like the old times when chiefs were captains and the whole village would take part."

Kilikiti - the word is a Polynesian corruption of "cricket" - features teams of up to 50, including women. It evolved from the efforts of the London Missionary Society to "civilise" the natives of the South Seas in the 19th century, when missionaries strove to substitute competitive sport for tribal warfare.

It is also played in Tokelau, a dependency of New Zealand, and Samoa, a former British dependency. Batsmen stand in front of a single stump and wield a fearsome-looking three-sided wooden bat.

The unusual shape of the bat means that the ball is liable to fly off in random directions, scattering pigs, dogs and children and frequently ending up lost in long grass or a grove of coconut palms.

"I think English cricket must be very easy because the ball is big and there are three stumps," said Apisaloma Ene, 38, a fisherman.

Colourful T-shirts and lava lavas - wrap-around skirts - replace whites. Supporters sing and dance and taunt the competition.

"If the batsmen is fat, he can appoint a fitter man to run for him," said Mr Meneua, as a ball flew over his head and into a thicket of banana trees. "Games last an hour or two; we do not play for days like the English."

The wooden balls, carved from the wood of the native tiare tree, are so small that they are hard to see at times.

"It is easy to get hit in the face," said Ofulino Ekueta, 25, a nurse at Tuvalu's only hospital. "There can be a lot of injuries."

If the ball lands in the nearby lagoon it counts as a six but the batsmen must retrieve it himself, an unpleasant task when the lagoon is ringed with pig pens and full of effluent.

Polynesian pop music blared from a ramshackle bar at a recent match. While a modest crowd watched two village teams slug it out, nearby games of football attracted many more participants.

"Cricket is boring," said Manoa Lito, 19, a student. "Football is much faster and more interesting." Hundreds of other young islanders, dribbling along the tarmac, appeared to agree with him.