Who did England beat at cricket to become the last Olympic champions? France – and they want a 2012 rematch

The reigning Olympic silver medallists at cricket will throw down the batting glove this week for a re-run of the match which they lost to England 109 years ago.

The first, and only, Olympic medals for cricket were won at the Paris Games of 1900. France was defeated by 158 runs in the two-day final in the Vincennes velodrome.

The French national cricket association, France Cricket, will formally announce tomorrow that it has challenged the old foe, England, to a return game in Lille just before the London Olympics in 2012.

Related articles

• Leading article: Anyone for criquet?
• Search the news archive for more stories

This would be the first "official" England-France match for more than a century in a sport that, according to recent research, may not have originated in Hampshire as stubborn Englishmen insist, but in Flanders or the Pas de Calais.

Cricket, banned as an "alien" sport in 1940 by the collaborationist Vichy government, is on the rise again in France. There are 10 clubs in the French cricket "super-ligue" which begins its 2009 season next week. Roughly one third of the players are French. The rest, like almost all the "France" team of 1900, are expats from England, the West Indies, Down Under or the Indian sub-continent.

Could Kevin Pietersen lose his guichet (wicket) to obstruction de jambe (lbw) without scoring a course (run) at the Lille Metropole stadium in the summer of 2012? Whether the England Cricket Board would send a full team remains open to question. The Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) indicated to French cricket officials yesterday that it would be happy to take part. "It would be a one-day game," said Maxime Parent, spokesman for France Cricket. "I don't think that the French public is quite ready yet for a Test match stretching over five days. Perhaps, one day, who knows?

"Cricket is advancing quickly in France but it needs a match like this to capture the imagination of the public. France v England is always a big event in France, whatever the sport."

France, as we know to our frequent cost, took the British-invented rugby balls and footballs in the late 19th century and ran with them. What happened to cricket? It is not as if the French have an alternative summer team sport other than, perhaps, pétanque or road-race cycling. The French weather is arguably better suited to cricket than the English weather.

Recent historical research has found references to a game which sounds suspiciously like cricket in northern France (and what is now Belgium) in the Middle Ages. A letter to the French king, dated 1478, speaks of a riot after a cricket game at Liettres, near St Omer in the Pas de Calais. Even the word cricket is thought to come from the old French word criquet meaning a stile or wooden gate.

Horace Walpole mentions cricket being played in Paris in 1766. Two decades later, the MCC laid down the rules of cricket as we know them today. In the summer of 1789, it planned its first foreign tour – to France. Unfortunately, on 14 July that year, the French turned to another pastime – revolution – and the tour had to be cancelled.

"I think that is the sad story of cricket in France," M. Parent said. "If that MCC tour had gone ahead, cricket might have taken root, as football and rugby did later."

In the past decade cricket in France has, if not exactly boomed, at least thrived. There are now more than 30 clubs and 950 registered players. The France national team is ranked 35th in the world and regularly defeats Germany in the European second division. There are four France youth teams and a France women's team. The captain of the France team is Waseem Bhatti. The vice captain is Arun Ayyavooraju, 23, who signed to play professionally in Guernsey this summer.

The more exotic cricketing terms – silly mid-on, googly – have been deemed "untranslatable" and are also used in French. The basic lexicon of the game has been "Frenchified".

How far can cricket go in France? The president of France Cricket is Tony Banton, a naturalised Frenchman born in Sheffield. "The only form of the game that could thrive here is Twenty-20," he said. "If that were to become an Olympic sport, we would receive French government funding. And then who knows?"