cricket

cricket. As with most games, cricket was played in a primitive form many years before rules were drawn up, and some of the most enjoyable cricket is still played in back lanes with a dustbin as wicket. There are suggestions that shepherds in the Sussex weald played some form of the game in forest clearings, presumably with stones, a stick, and a tree stump. Among the games condemned by Edward III for distracting men from archery practice was club-ball. Cricket is not mentioned in James I's Book of Sports (1617) but was certainly well developed before the end of the century. An eleven-a-side match for 50 guineas was played in Sussex in 1697 and in 1709 Kent played Surrey at Dartford. Bowling was underarm and the bat was a heavy curved club. In 1744 there was an attempt to formulate agreed rules and the same year an All England XI played the men of Kent at the Artillery Ground, Finsbury. The patronage of the nobility helped to make the game fashionable. Frederick, prince of Wales, was a keen cricketer in the 1740s and the duke of Dorset in the 1770s, being a member of the Hambledon Club which played on Broadhalfpenny Down (Hants), outside the Bat and Ball Inn, and a patron of the White Conduit Club, which played at Islington Fields. A meeting at the Star and Garter in 1774 drew up new rules, with 22-yard pitches, 4-ball overs, stumping, and no-balling: ‘the wicket-keeper should not by any noise incommode the striker.’ In 1785 the White Conduits played Kent for 1,000 guineas, winning by 306 after Kent's second innings had collapsed for 28. In 1787 Thomas Lord opened his new ground at Marylebone and in 1788 the Marylebone Cricket Club issued revised rules, prohibiting any attempt to impede a fielder while making a catch. The club moved to its present ground in 1814.

The most important change in the rules in the 19th cent. was the introduction of overarm bowling in 1864 after some vehement controversies. The Gentlemen v. Players match was first held in 1806 and was annual after 1819; Oxford v. Cambridge dates from 1827. By 1864 enough cricket was being played for John Wisden, himself a celebrated bowler (who took all ten wickets playing in 1850 for North v. South), to launch his Cricketers' Almanack. The first test match was played at Melbourne in 1877, when Australia won, and when they won again at the Oval in 1882 (England needing 85 in the second innings were all out for 77, Spofforth taking 7–44), the Sporting Times declared that the ashes of English cricket would be taken to Australia. Though county teams competed from early days, the county championship did not start until 1889, and was dominated in its early years by Nottinghamshire, Surrey, Yorkshire, and Lancashire. Gloucestershire, for whom the great W. G. Grace played, had been strong in the 1870s. Grace, probably the best known of all Victorian figures, gave cricket a national following. When he first turned out at 16 for the Gentlemen in 1865 they had lost their last 17 matches to the Players: subsequently they won 35 out of 39. Grace played until well over 50 and took ten wickets on two occasions, in 1873 and 1886—on the second occasion scoring a century as well.

The two main developments of 20th-cent. cricket were the spread of international competition, as the West Indies, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and others came in to join England, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, and the introduction after the Second World War of limited-over cricket at the highest level. Limited-over cricket was not quite the innovation sometimes suggested, since village, club, and northern league cricket had always been played on that basis. It was made necessary because gate money could no longer support the traditional county championship in the face of alternative leisure attractions. With limited-over cricket came sponsorship—the Gillette Cup in 1963, the John Player League in 1969, the Benson and Hedges Cup in 1972. It is not difficult to deplore negative bowling, six-hitting flails, complex rules, and often predictable finishes, but cricket has always had its bizarre side. Married women and maidens played at Bury in Sussex in 1793; one-legged Greenwich pensioners v. one-armed Greenwich pensioners in 1796; teetotallers v. whiskey-drinkers at Ballinasloe in 1840; and cricket on the ice at Cambridge in 1870. Disagreeable developments of more recent years have been the intrusiveness of crowd behaviour and the revelation that heavy betting has led to widespread corruption.

Nicholas J. Bryars; and Professor J. A. Cannon