Lying some thirty miles off the Dalmatian coast, the Croatian island of Vis has a long and dramatic history bound up with various European empires, from Ancient Greece and Rome through the Venetian Republic and Austria-Hungary to fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the twentieth century. For forty years in the latter half of that century it was a closed military base. Today the islands 4,000 inhabitants try to strike a balance between their traditional agricultural livelihood and the pressures and temptations of European tourism in an age of globalization. This book tells the story of how a group of distinctly average cricketers became unlikely sporting ambassadors and, quite by accident, helped re-introduce an island to its forgotten past.