There are no longer any Staten Islanders in the Staten Island Cricket Club, one of the country’s oldest. The members are from places like Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad, St Vincent and Grenada. There are just two Europeans; one of them, Joseph O’Neill, a 44-year-old Irishman who grew up in the Netherlands, was educated at Cambridge but has lived in New York since 1998.

That O’Neill in his other life happens to be a novelist is a matter of indifference to most of his teammates. They’re more interested in him as an accomplished batsman, a sure-handed fielder and a decent off-speed bowler. He’s also handy at contributing articles to the club bulletin.

He has clung to cricket, he said recently, because it’s his “athletic mother tongue”, and to learn baseball, say, would be like taking up a foreign language. Even if he became proficient, he wouldn’t get the jokes or the poetry.

The other European on the team is Raymond King, an Englishman who works for Verizon and has played with the club for 20 years after being turned down by a team run by the British Consulate. “I get more from chatting with these fellows than I did with my fellow Brits,” he said recently. “I love hearing the stories of different parts of the world. No matter what our religious, cultural differences, the love of cricket overcomes all that.”

O’Neill’s new book, Netherland (Pantheon), identifies the Staten Island Cricket Club by name, though not any of its players, and there’s a long description of Walker Park, the club’s home ground since 1876, a bumpy, crabgrass-ridden expanse just a block from the Kill Van Kull. It’s bordered now by tennis courts, a baseball field, a children’s playground and, beyond a chain-link fence, some Victorian houses that are occasionally bombarded by cricket balls, little red meteors crashing through front windows or cratering into flower beds.

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