NICK FRIEND AT THE OVAL: Few encapsulate the herculean efforts of volunteers looking to grow the game worldwide quite like Florin, a 40-year-old sporting nomad who found cricket by accident and has clung on ever since
There is a man strolling down the aisles of The Oval. His face is eerily familiar. As Surrey take on Sussex in the background, this one individual stands out.
Decked out in a white cricket shirt, replete with the emblem of his club, a pair of shorts, a tourist’s rucksack and heavy strapping on a knee injury, he is conspicuous among a south London audience of families and boozy work-types.
He is here alone; that much is obvious. He looks both at home and puzzled – a lover of cricket, but clearly looking for something.
As it happens, he is seeking out a charging socket for his phone. And as it happens, this backpacker is Pavel Florin, the Romanian whose bowling action dealt him cult status as a social media sensation during July’s European Cricket League.
As clips emerged of this unknown, broad-shouldered club cricketer awkwardly shuffling to the crease, the internet did what it so often does. It swept away the context, leaving the subject of the video without either defence or explanation.
First, he was derided. Yet, those who dared mock were quickly shut down. Ridicule turned to respect. Respect, indeed, for a Transylvanian nightclub bouncer attempting to grow the game of cricket in his country. Respect for a 40-year-old playing through the recovery of a broken ankle. Respect for a man playing the sport purely out of a love for the game.
Respect, also, for an amateur competition wonderfully put together – with a multinational broadcast deal, no less, with a focus on highlighting the sheer breadth of cricketing talent and zeal beyond the mainstream. It accomplished this tenfold.
Florin’s flight only arrived in London in the hours before this game begun, but he is here to take in the stars – Rashid Khan, two Currans, Aaron Finch and Imran Tahir among others. He knows their names. After all, “this is my sport,” he tells me with a beaming smile.
“It’s about the adrenaline,” he goes on. “It’s that adrenaline when you are in the field, it’s the adrenaline you get when you’ve got the bat in your hand, it’s the adrenaline you get when you’re bowling. You don’t know if your bowling is going to go well or not go well; you don’t know whether you’re going to take a wicket or not take a wicket.
“It’s about that feeling of adrenaline when the ball is coming in the air and you have to catch it. This is it. It’s that adrenaline – you want more and more of it.”
It's just a run, but it's my first run, for me it's like century#cricket #ecl #romania #thingspaveldoes #ilovecricket pic.twitter.com/rE3yodBgmV
— Pavel Florin (@PavelFlorin13) August 7, 2019
He is the child in the candy shop; he is awash with glee. This is his first time watching cricket here, but it is all he hoped it would be, all eight years on from his first introduction to the game.
“I’m a sportsman. I like every sport. This was something I wanted to try. I had an opportunity and I tried it.
“I met some Indians, they let me bat, they told me I was a very good player, a future national team captain. It was a lie but I liked this lie, so I continued this sport because it is different. I play many sports, but I remained in cricket because this sport is for me. This is the sport for me.”
As we chat – we find a quieter area of this Oval sellout, Florin cannot help but apologise for his English. There is, of course, no need. He speaks with far more fluency than he himself believes and, needless to say, his English is better than my Romanian. He laughs at this reminder.
What is more, enthusiasm is a universal language. When he speaks of the goosebumps given to him by the game, his excitement is palpable. He never stands still, but rocks from side to side as he looks around this magnificent amphitheatre.
He has told aspects of his story inordinately in the last fortnight – how he came to be a cricketer, his “not beautiful” bowling, his love for the game. By his own admission, he has been bored by some of it. “Everyone asks the same questions,” he laments.
“It’s weird and it’s not,” he says of his newfound fame. “It’s a good feeling but it’s hard work – very hard work. I’ve lost four kilos – but not good kilos – just by answering the phone and responding and responding and responding. So many people have called me and wanted to meet me and I don’t have time. I’m staying up day and night!”
He chuckles as he recounts the reaction back home in Romania, where cricket – for all his own efforts as president of Cluj Cricket Club – holds little court. One newspaper ran an article with a headline claiming that “Pavel had won something.”
Among many others, Shane Warne and Jofra Archer both tweeted their support for Florin against those sweeping in to pour scorn on a tournament, whose varying standards were dwarfed by its sense of goodwill. The world was introduced to continental Europe’s cricketing scene – France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany among the nations represented. How can that be viewed as anything but immensely positive?
“I have to say thank you to the big players,” Florin says of Warne’s backing. “But it’s normal. We play the same sport. I try to do the same sport. I have the same difficulties. The big players have said: ‘He’s ours. He’s a cricketer.’”
I am so proud of my team #ECL #Cluj @Clujcricket pic.twitter.com/dp3y6D2G6j
— Pavel Florin (@PavelFlorin13) August 1, 2019
Of the Twittersphere’s reaction to the original clips, Florin bears no grudge towards those manning the Fox Cricket account that first joked at his expense.
If he clings onto any negativity, it is that he feels the episode took attention away from the phenomenal work of the ECL, its organisers and its other teams.
“I have no bad feeling, but I saw the comments and I saw the negative comments,” he says. “In my mind, I had broken the work of the people in my team and of the ECL because theirs is a great work to even do this.
“When you go to the ECL and see all the cameras and all the people, it is like going into the sky for us. Everybody is seeing it on TV – all your friends and relatives. It’s big. We are not professionals; we all work. We are regular guys.”
Florin had driven through his homeland, picking up his teammates en route to the tournament – it was a 10-hour drive. It would be wrong to suggest that cricket is on the rise in Romania; rather, Florin is its focal point, a driving force in every sense.
He runs the national champion club in Cluj, while he is one of few local participants – three Romanians play regularly, he believes. He has only been playing the sport for eight years and only then in his spare time.
Since then, it has become Florin’s primary pastime – even if he is already a national champion in both futsal and American football.
Yet, as the internet took hold of his unorthodox, self-taught bowling action – he has never been coached, he was decontextualised as is the digital world’s increasing wont.
“My good part is not bowling,” he explains, defending himself. “My good part is fielding and my good part is batting. Not bowling. I didn’t show the world what I was capable of. It was a very sad part for me. My bowling – everyone has seen it.
“People have said that it is not good, that it is not proper. I say, okay, maybe I bowled 18 balls in the ECL. I bowled many wides – three or four. But nobody hit me for a six. Nobody.
“My bowling is strange. It is not regular. I bowl slow because if I bowl faster, everybody hits me. I’m not stupid.
“Everybody says that I drop grenades, but it’s my style. I don’t want to change. Everybody says: ‘Come and I will teach you bowling.’ Why teach me? This is my style. Maybe with being accurate I have a problem, but I improve.
“If I go faster, my run rate is 10, 11, 12. If I go slower, my run rate is seven or eight. And I take wickets – not at the ECL, but in our championship I take wickets.”
#ECL19 Group Photo with the obligatory Pavel Florin love in. pic.twitter.com/GIYqBOTTO0
— European Cricket League (@EuropeanCricket) August 1, 2019
At the time of the competition, it emerged that Florin had been playing through the recovery of a fractured leg. It further increased the warmth of the cricketing world to this unusual inspiration.
Yet, for Florin, his injuries should count for nothing. He shakes his head vociferously as the broken ankle is mentioned, as if a dent on his pride. He suffered the blow in training for the tournament when a teammate stepped on his foot, while he is carefully nursing a knee tendon issue as he seeks to avoid expensive surgery.
“I don’t like speaking about this,” he says with the requisite steel of someone in his profession. “I am a man. I am a bouncer. I’m not crying. I can’t do all that I want to, but it’s not something [to cry about].”
He has the body of a bouncer; he carries tree-trunks for arms, while his bulging shirt covers the frame of an athlete.
He is deeply proud of his country and of his home. “It’s a very beautiful place,” he says of Transylvania – known to many just as a fictional vampire haven.
“It’s an amazing place. It’s like Switzerland – we have very beautiful mountains. It’s gold for tourists but not many people know about this.” There can be few parts of the world where cricket has a less likely abode – the deepest, darkest depths of Eastern Europe, Dracula’s workplace.
Occasionally, we are interrupted by the breaking out of a roar as Ollie Pope and Jordan Clark continue to rebuild Surrey’s innings. It is a reminder of this contrast – Florin’s glorious amateurism reverberating against a high-octane Blast clash.
For him, though, this is a distant pipedream; he wants more from Romanian cricket. He is determined to achieve it. This trip – it is costing him more than his monthly salary – is a fact-finding expedition.
“My role here in England is to learn,” he explains. “I have come to see a match and then tomorrow I go to see some small clubs and learn how the management and training work. This is what I need.
“We need to show Romania what cricket is. If you go to Romania and ask the Romanians what cricket is, they will tell you it’s that game with the horses and the stick. Polo. Nobody knows and nobody cares. The players who play in Romania are strangers – Indians, Pakistanis.
Florin was in attendance as Imran Tahir spun Surrey to T20 Blast victory against Sussex
“My colleagues say: ‘Pavel, why are you going [to play cricket]? We can do some boxing.’ They like to fight,” he jokes.
“Sometimes when I go around with my bat back home, people think I’m going for a fight because this bat is like a baseball bat.
“I live in Transylvania. I don’t have a field there. I must go 500kms to the field where I play and do my training. I train in my hometown but not in a proper field.
“The authorities don’t give us money to play cricket. I have to pay everything. I’m the president of the club, but me and the players pay everything – transport, accommodation, meals.
“We don’t have sponsorship in this country because nobody cares about cricket. They don’t give money because it’s not a popular sport.”
Naturally, Florin has plans to correct this. He hopes that the popularity brought by his – and Cluj’s – appearance in the ECL might sway potential partners back on home soil. In the absence of government persuasion, private sponsorship is the target.
“Maybe I can find some doors opening,” he suggests hopefully. He has plans for a women’s team, children’s sides and he mentions going into schools to introduce the game there.
“I am not a rich man,” he stresses. Financially – maybe not, though he possesses a gluttonous hunger.
Agree 100% ! Cricket is a beautiful game. Well done and congrats to everyone who made this happen. I would love to check this tournament out next year & help out, if you need a helping hand then hit me up ! Congrats again 👍 https://t.co/vgjMwJ5S0A
— Shane Warne (@ShaneWarne) July 30, 2019
“I earn about 400 euros per month. I have come here and spent 700 just coming here. If somebody comes to me and says they want to join the team, they have to share in it – it’s expensive.
“I have had so many people call me and messages asking: ‘Can I join your team? Can I join your club?’ But nobody knows that if you are joining my team, you are going to have to pay.”
In a sense, there are few better characters to whom this Twitter infamy could have happened.
Few encapsulate the herculean efforts of volunteers worldwide looking to grow the game like Pavel Florin, a 40-year-old sporting nomad who found cricket by accident and has clung on ever since.
As we head back towards our seats and in search of his charging phone, the crowd roars once more. “It’s amazing to see this,” Florin says unprompted with a smile, stopping to take it in. “It is amazing to see that everybody knows about cricket here. Everybody cheers the players. It is a great feeling.”
It really is the little things.
A futsal-playing Romanian bouncer jetting himself off to the UK in search of cricket. The aim? To grow the sport back home. What a tale.
Ultimately, it returns to the perspective of the initial footage and to the true raison d’etre of the European Cricket League. It gave men like Florin a pinnacle, a ceiling through which to burst.
For him, however, the job is not done.
“I don’t know where I will find this money, but for sure I will find it somewhere,” he says of his desire to build a ground in his town.
“It is my dream. And if it is my dream, I will put anything into this.”
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