We'll take our next humiliation out on the French

When Marie Antoinette said 'let them eat cake', did this refer to Jonners and his 'Test Match Special' chums?

As England's cricketers prepare for another onslaught of batting or bowling by the manifestly superior Australians in tomorrow's Test in Adelaide – the second in an Ashes series that already seems beyond our brave boys – there is at least some news to give English cricket-lovers a glimmer of a smile, namely that the French have claimed that it was they, not we, who invented the game.

This outrageous assertion has been made by Didier Marchois, the former president of the French Cricket Federation. But before examining his words, you should be aware that the French Cricket Federation refers not to what the English generally mean by French cricket – which is throwing a tennis ball, if at all possible on a shingly beach in a gale-force wind, at your Auntie Betty's blotchy legs – but to cricket in France. It is, to give it its full and grand title: La Fédération Française de Baseball, Softball et Cricket.

M. Marchois reckons to have unearthed documents that prove that cricket was being played in northern France as early as the 13th century. "It was taken across the channel by English soldiers who picked it up from us during truce periods in the Hundred Years War," he insists. I have duly searched my medieval history books but can find only one reference that might be something to do with cricket. A dastardly fellow called Charles of Navarre was, apparently, "as ruthless in defence as he was in attack". Whether it is coincidence or not, much the same can be said of the current Australian captain Steve Waugh. Or Steve "Hundred Years" Waugh, as he will perhaps be nicknamed if his team's period of dominance over international cricket continues for very much longer.

There is, in fairness, at least one bona fide connection between cricket and the French, and we don't have to go back quite as far as M. Marchois would take us. In 1849 a sea captain from Bordeaux became a naturalised Australian citizen, and had two sons called Richard and Louis, the former of whom had two sons, Jack and Lou, the latter of whom also had two sons, one of whom is Richie Benaud, peerless television commentator and captain of Australia from 1958 to 1963.

Otherwise, and pace M. Marchois, the links are surely tenuous. In fact I am reminded of someone I know, a former Fijian ambassador to the United Kingdom, who was once selected to play in a golf match between a team representing England and a team representing Scotland.

The ambassador, a huge man who earlier in his career had been a mighty second-row forward for the Fijian rugby team, turned out for the Scots, which caused some indignation among the English. They asked how he qualified for Scotland, and he replied that he had a small amount of Scottish blood in him on the basis that his great-great grandfather had once eaten the Reverend Hamish McDougall, a Victorian missionary.

French antecedents in the origins of cricket are claimed, I suspect, with a similar degree of tongue in cheek. But all credit to the impertinent M. Marchois for trying. He says he has another document showing that King Louis XI was asked to spare the life of a player who had rather unsportingly killed an opponent during a match in Calais in 1478. He also claims that the first recorded modern match is to be found in the archives of the Paris Cricket Club, dating back to 1864. And best of all, he suggests that cricket was the favourite sport of the Sun King, Louis XIV.

Did Louis just watch or did he also play, in which case some decisive light might at last be thrown on the yellowing parchment now in the Louvre, which has excited historians for generations and seems to refer to Louis enjoying Annette? For years this was thought to allude to some extra-marital friskiness with a serving girl, but it seems clear now that it refers to the King and his courtiers enjoying a net, perhaps in one of the conveniently wide corridors at Versailles, with Richelieu at first slip. Moreover, when a later royal personage, Marie Antoinette. said "let them eat cake", might this have been an early reference to Brian Johnston and his chums in the Test Match Special box?

OK, probably not. But what is not fantasy is that cricket is becoming surprisingly popular in France; there are around 1,000 players at some 40 clubs, and not all of them are English or Asian expatriates. Indeed, a French teenager recently applied to join the Lord's ground staff, and the captain of the national team is a chap from Guadeloupe called Guy Brumant, who by all accounts is a particularly fine off-spinner. The former Essex wicket-keeper David East, who used to coach the French team, reckoned that they were on a par with a mid-table Essex League side. So let's look on the bright side; as England contemplate another humbling at the hands of the Aussies, at least there's still the French to beat.

b.viner@independent.co.uk