Napoleon Bonaparte
© Getty Images

The Zaltzmeister

Win toss, invade first

More speculation on what some famous historical figures would have been like as cricketers. This time: a noted French warmonger

Andy Zaltzman

No. 2: Napoleon Bonaparte
(Corsica, France, St Helena Invitational XI)

Napoleon, the celebrity French emperor, soldier, social reformer and hat-wearer, could have been one of the finest captains on the international cricket circuit, thrilling fans with his attacking tactics, and entertaining the world's media with soundbite-laden press conferences. Unfortunately, he has been (a) French and (b) dead, for a very long time, and cricket is all the poorer for it.


A small, aggressive man and a natural leader, Bonaparte would have been a stocky, pugnacious opening batsman. Highly skilled, always looking to dominate, but prone to occasional rash flashes at balls that were not quite there for the shot - he would have been a cross between Gavaskar and Sehwag, but with more maps of Russia pinned to the dressing-room wall.

As a globally recognised A-list superstar with a distinctive look, Napoleon, the nine-time European Warmonger Of The Year, would have been in high demand as a cricketing brand. His T20 career would likely have involved "icon player" status at Paris' leading franchise (which would have morphed during his lifetime from Royal Challengers Paris to Royal Decapitators Paris, before losing touch with its core values and becoming Emperor's XI Paris).

An opinion-splitting figure, he escaped from exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba to make a spectacular comeback. However, the self-styled Geoffrey Boycott of the Early 19th Century could not maintain his second stab at greatness for long, unlike his Yorkshire hero Boycott, whose 1977 England return - albeit from a rather more voluntary exile than the Frenchman's - presaged four more fruitful years at the highest level.

Napoleon's comeback, however, fizzled out in a disappointing defeat in the crucial Waterloo Test of 1815. His once-brilliant aggression was bringing diminishing returns - the Sehwagian side of his cricketing character coming to the fore in his later career. He returned to Paris to discover that, in modern parlance, he had "lost the dressing room". He resigned, and played out his career in the low-key St Helena domestic league, complaining about the facilities and struggling for fitness.

It is likely that after his playing career he would have become a high-level cricket administrator who would have made N Srinivasan look like a part-time cleaning lady organising a village raffle

A supreme tactician and a notoriously aggressive leader, Napoleon would have swiftly risen to become captain. Can any England fan, hand on heart, claim that the current national team would not be better off if Napoleon Bonaparte replaced Alastair Cook as skipper? Absolutely not. On the flip side, Cook has never reinstated slavery in his nation's overseas colonies - something the Essex man's critics would do well to remember before they start banging the Bonaparte drum too loudly.

It should also be noted, however, that Napoleon once said: "One must change one's tactics every ten years if one wishes to maintain one's superiority." So would the French feistmeister really have conducted matters any differently to Cook during that fateful Mathews-Herath partnership at Headingley in June 2014?

Napoloeon was also prone to rash decisions on winning the toss, such as when he correctly called "heads" and controversially chose to invade first, in the Test match against Russia in 1812. A humiliating defeat followed, despite vociferous praise from Shane Warne in the commentary box ("It was the aggressive call, it was the right call - he was just unlucky with the harshness of the winter.").

Napoleon was, unquestionably, a man who liked to get his own way (as are so many in his line of work). He also once said: "The surest way to remain poor is to be an honest man." It is likely, therefore, that after his playing career he would have become a high-level cricket administrator who would have made his 21st-century spiritual descendant Mr Srinivasan look like a part-time cleaning lady organising a village raffle.

The recent revelation on a British TV documentary that Napoleon's "gentleman's appendage" was (a) still in existence despite its owner having died in 1821, (b) now in the possession of an American woman whose father bought the shrivelled trouserial relic at auction in 1977 and bequeathed it to her in one of the more curious examples of parental generosity, and (c) absolutely miniscule, at 1.5 inches long, suggests that the former French boss would probably have batted with an oversized and ostentatiously visible abdom- inal protector, in an effort to camouflage his masculine inadequacy from opponents, team-mates and TV audiences.

Andy Zaltzman is a stand-up comedian, a regular on BBC Radio 4, and a writer