For a group of Ukrainian teenagers on a cricket tour in England, the sound of bat on ball has provided welcome change from the sounds of war
Cricket in Ukraine may not seem like a natural fit but the sport has provided a group of children with a distraction from Russian attacks Credit: Geoff Pugh for The Telegraph
Tim Wigmore Depurty Cricket Correspondent, at Rugby School
30 October 2025
Vladyslava Novikova, one of the group of Ukrainian teenagers to make the extraordinary journey from Kyiv to Rugby School for a cricket tour, does not hesitate when asked whether she prefers batting or bowling.
“Batting,” she says. “I like how it feels. It’s loud and, if you’re angry or if you’re sad, you can just hit and your emotions go away. It makes me relax, actually, because we have a lot of stress and you need something to feel better.”
Ostensibly, Novikova is a regular 18-year-old: she is bubbly, has blue streaks in her hair and is a veterinary student at university. But since the morning of February 24, 2022, her life has been defined by the horrors of war.
“I grew up in one day,” she says. Novikova long ago lost count of the number of friends and family – including an uncle – who have died during the war. “I feel sad, I feel angry because if no Russia, the people can live, they can stay close to me.
“You’re not scared anymore. You just hear what happened, and you’re tired of all this. I have so many people who lost someone special in the war, who lost a house, who lost everything.”
Novikova’s house is among the millions damaged by Russian barbarism. After a drone attack, a bedroom ceiling in her house collapsed. “We were lucky that the windows in the other rooms were open – otherwise the debris wouldn’t have flown outside. The doors fell down with the ceiling – the impact tore out the door and the frame.
“My mum was at home. She was terrified, it was so loud. She immediately realised it was a strike. She ran outside, saw the smoke, went to the next street, and saw what had happened to the neighbouring house.” That house had been destroyed altogether.
“I was in another part of the city, attending classes, on the subway. Later, when everything had calmed down, we started finding debris in our garden. One of the pieces was a small, heavy metal block. It’s called a ‘striking element’ – a part of the missile designed to cause even more destruction and death.”
Three months ago, Novikova discovered a new sport. Cricket – played with tennis balls, plastic bats and stumps – has gained an unlikely foothold at Euroland school and at the National University in Kyiv.
“In Ukraine, we don’t even hear about the sport. When in my university, people proposed to try, I was excited, because I never heard of it, and I want to try. It was wonderful. I like the feeling when I play.
“In cricket, no one knows how to play. It’s fresh, it’s new and you can do anything. You can make a mistake.”
For Novikova, the greatest joy of staying at Rugby is a simple one: getting a full night’s sleep, uninterrupted by constant air-raid sirens and Russian drone attacks. “In Ukraine, you can sleep only one or two hours. And when it’s finished, you need to get dressed and go to study at work.”
Initially, at Rugby, the visiting children mistook the sound of doors slamming for Russian drones. At the school, Novikova has also learnt that planes need not signify bombs and terror.
“Sometimes when I see the plane in the sky, I’m like, ‘oh my gosh, they have a normal plane here for people, it’s not military. It’s just normal.’ For years, we don’t see that in Kyiv.”
Novikova is one of seven Ukrainian children who are spending the end of October on a week-long cricket tour of the UK. The highlight of the trip will be a visit to Lord’s on Thursday.
The group undertook an arduous journey to reach England, taking a 19-hour train to Budapest before flying to Birmingham. On Saturday, they will begin the journey in reverse, and return to a war zone.
While England’s cricket pitches are now covered in autumnal leaves, Rugby School invited the group to use their indoor facilities for a week, and stay on site at a heavily subsidised rate. The bulk of the trip’s cost was covered by the children’s parents.
Originally, about 20 children planned to go on the trip, but the rapidly deteriorating situation in Kyiv made many parents and children nervous about being separated. Russia launched 6,129 Shahed drones in July, 14 times more than in the same month last year.
At Rugby, even outside the cricket season, students can play in five nets, with soft-ball coaching from former Warwickshire captain Michael Powell and ex-England player Neal Radford. The contrast with the sessions in Kyiv is impossible to overstate.
At Euroland and National University alike, cricket sessions take two forms. In theory, cricket is played outside in the summer, and indoors in the winter. In practice, even summer cricket is often played in air-raid shelters, because of sirens warning of impending Russian attacks, forcing everyone inside.
As Moscow’s drone attacks ratcheted up, many outdoor cricket sessions were stopped within five minutes; children and coaches would rush to take bats and balls inside as the sirens blared out again. “A lot of our cricket is done in bomb shelters,” laments one coach. With extra funding, the cricket coaches in Ukraine would like to get netting to make it easier to play in air-raid shelters.
A week before the children arrived in England, eight mixed teams took part in a week-long competition in Kyiv, played outside at the university. On two days, play had to be cancelled because of red alerts; the Air Alert! mobile app, which all Ukrainians have become grimly familiar with, showed that Russian missile attacks were ongoing.
‘In Ukraine we don’t have a word for wicket’
Olena Kravchenko is the only qualified Ukrainian cricket coach. Kravchenko returned to Ukraine from Newcastle just after the outbreak of war.
“Everyone from the UK said, ‘Are you kidding? Are you crazy’?” she recalls. “Yeah, it’s dangerous. It’s crazy, but it’s just… I know when I see my family around, I know where they are exactly. I don’t need to call them every day.
“I couldn’t sleep at night thinking about what’s happening to my family, when I’m in another country. Lots of families stay together because of that.”
Earlier this year, Kravchenko completed the International Cricket Council Coaching Foundation Certificate, studying through the ICC’s app. She now coaches at both National University and Euroland school.
While Kravchenko had never played cricket before, her five years living in England had at least given her some experience of the game. As a previous finalist at the World Pole Dance Championships, her cricket coaching focuses on movement. Watching YouTube footage, “I can copy, I can analyse how the body moves”.
Now, as a teacher at Euroland and at the National University, she has the unusual task of translating cricket dialect, with all its idiosyncrasies, into Ukrainian.
“Sometimes I make my own story, when I translate something really complicated. Some specific words about cricket – in Ukrainian, we don’t have them. So I need to translate to build a story for kids explaining what are wickets, we don’t have any specific word. They have to memorise wickets. Sometimes we even draw them.”
As the children at Rugby delight in hitting balls with a plastic bat, and attempting leaping catches on mats, Kravchenko smiles. “You see what cricket brings to our life – connections, friends, new people, community. It’s fun. And it’s a chance for them to forget about everything.”
‘I like cricket, it helps me understand your culture’
On Sunday, Kira Melnychenko celebrated her 16th birthday at Rugby School. For her entire teenage years, Melnychenko has lived in a war zone.
“I don’t remember any normal teenage life,” she says. But at Rugby, she saw a group of boys playing football. “I was so happy to see that. Happy to see these boys and understand they have a normal life, and they can play football. One helicopter flew past – I was scared, but they were playing football. They don’t understand it can be dangerous.
“I hear bombs every day. I need to enjoy life, but it’s so hard because I understand my family, my friends are in a shelter, and it’s scary.”
For Melnychenko, cricket doubles as a window into British life. “I like cricket because I can understand your culture and understand how you live.”
The difficulty of this strange game is a source of immersion relief. “It’s so hard,” Melnychenko says, breaking into a smile. “When I see cricket, I think ‘OK, bat, ball, and this is where you need to stand’.”
Ukrainian cricket is fundraising for equipment, including nets that can be put in air-raid shelters, and hope to tour England again next year.
Some or most of the greatest competitive sports ever invented come from the British Isles : football, golf, tennis, rugby, netball, badminton, rowing, squash, table tennis, water polo and the greatest game of all time: cricket!
The mods allowed me to post the following:
“Just look at their lovely innocent faces and reflect on the indescribable evil and hatred that is being inflicted upon them by savages.
The Hague awaits.
Every west-based politician, media figure or business figure who operates like Lord Haw-Haw; actively assisting Putin’s murderous assault on children also deserves prosecution for war crimes. The punishment that was received by Haw-Haw (William Joyce) should not be ruled out for the worst ones.”
It got close to 100 likes.
Well said, Sir Scradge, and good that the sad sacks at The Telegraph allowed it to be posted.