Question: Who are the current Olympic silver medalists in cricket? Answer: France, and they want a re-match against England, who won gold at the Paris Games in 1900. France Cricket, the governing body for the sport in the country, is preparing to issue a challenge to England – a return game in Lille ahead of the London Olympics in 2012.

"It would be a one-day game," Maxime Parent, spokesman for France Cricket, told the Independent "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."

Cricket in France has come a fair way since it was banned as an "alien" sport in 1940 by the Vichy government. There are now ten clubs in France’s super-league and about one-third of its players are French. It might have been very different if the MCC had gone ahead with its first foreign tour – to France – in 1789. They had to cancel because of the French revolution.

Boris Johnson, the left-field London mayor, has backed cricket’s inclusion in the 2012 Olympics that will be hosted by the city ... even though it’s an impossible campaign. "It is high time we install in the Olympics Twenty20 cricket," Johnson said at a business lunch in London.

Last month the London Assembly passed a unanimous motion to lobby international cricket authorities and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to include the sport. “Let’s face it, if they want to draw in south Asian audiences to watch the Olympics, they have to have cricket,” Murad Qureshi, the London Assembly member who moved the motion, said. “India is one of the biggest markets out there, we have to make it relevant to people.”

Previous host nations had been able to introduce a national sport as a “demonstration” event in the Games, but the IOC changed the rule for Beijing 2008, allowing China to showcase a traditional discipline as part of a “cultural Olympiad”. Cricket, which last made a five-ringed appearance in 1900 in Paris, cannot be an official sport until at least 2020, with the finalisation of events for those Games occurring in 2013.