On an overcast Saturday in November 2014 a tall, bow-legged Australian stood in the centre of a shabby concrete stadium in the Magdalena del Mar district of Lima waving his Peruvian identity card in one hand and a cricket bat in the other. He was addressing a group of six-to-16-year-olds in highly accented Spanish.Look, I know you Peruvians love your football, but you havent been very successful at it, so why not give it a rest and try the second most popular sport in the world?Harry Hildebrand, the long-time El Presidente of Cricket Peru, waxed lyrical as our small group of pioneers watched nervously from behind a goalpost on the AstroTurf football pitch. We were there on a mission to expand the gene pool of cricketers in Peru. The signs were not particularly auspicious as the kids, fresh from football practice and still wearing their Messi and Ronaldo T-shirts, gazed uncomprehendingly at him.Cricket has been played in Peru since 1859, with the founding in that year of the Lima Cricket and Football Club (LCFC) by a British community whose ranks had swelled during the railroad and guano era, when the newly independent country relied on British expertise and investment to modernise its transportation system and monetise the abundant supply of seabird excrement. Despite its long pedigree, the sport never really caught on, driven as it was by expatriates whose main interest was weekend knockabouts rather than long-term development.I had arrived in Lima from the UK in 2009, a heavily pregnant Trinidadian with a young daughter and no friends or acquaintances in Peru and no inkling that we were both to become consumed by the sport. Always a fan, I grew up during the era of the blackwashes and the four-pronged pace attacks, when the teams led by Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards dominated the sport. I watched them from the Schoolboy Stand at the Queens Park Oval and later, as a university student, from the 3Ws Stand in Barbados - at one point taking a job selling cricket programmes outside the Kensington Oval just long enough to gather the price of an entry ticket.But my daughter Jade was born in the Dominican Republic and had never lived in the cricket-playing Caribbean. About to plunge her into an alien, non-cricketing culture, I decided that our last outing before leaving London would be to take her to see her first game: a World T20 group match between Australia and West Indies at The Oval. Perched high in the priciest seats I could afford, and draped in the maroon flag, she watched Dwayne Bravo, Chris Gayle and our boys beat Australia by seven wickets, and a nine-year-old cricket fan was born.To commemorate the occasion we purchased official souvenir T-shirts, which came in handy some months later when I was approached by a goateed Brit at a pantomime audition in a church hall in Lima. You like cricket? he asked, gingerly pointing at the T-shirt that stretched over my ballooning belly. The ensuing conversation led to my initiation into the bizarre mélange that is cricket in Peru.I lied my way into the position of official scorer. On being offered the job I said that of course I knew how to score and then googled it furiously.There are five cricket clubs in Lima. The originals, LCFC, are the proud possessors of the only real cricket ground and are relentless identifiers of newly arrived talent. The Kiteflyers, a football-cum-cricket group, occasionally struggle to put together a team for early Sunday matches following late-night excesses off the pitch, and tend to get fined regularly for wearing non-regulation surfing shorts dur