A 22-yard English pitch became an empire's favorite summer game
Cricket pits two eleven-player sides around a 22-yard (20 m) pitch with wickets of three stumps and two bails. Mid-sixteenth-century Southeast England supplies the earliest firm references; a Guildford court case of January 1597 mentions play. The ICC now governs a sport Australia has dominated in ODIs and Tests.
Bowling aims to dismiss batters by knocking bails, catches, and other modes while runners steal runs. Whites suit Tests; colored kits mark limited overs. Hard leather-on-cork balls demand pads and helmets. Women's cricket surged in the twenty-first century after centuries of male dominance.
Testimony from 1597 about schoolboys at Guildford shows the game was being played in Surrey around 1550. The name may come from Old English cryce, a staff, which Samuel Johnson cited, or from an Old French criquet meaning a club. Randle Cotgrave's 1611 dictionary treats it as a boys' game, and that same year two Sussex parishioners were fined 12 pence each for skipping Easter Sunday service to play, the earliest record of adults taking part. Puritans sometimes banned Sunday matches, but after the Restoration of 1660 courtiers of Charles II took it up, and gambling grew so large that a 1664 act capped stakes at £100.
Patronage and betting made it England's national sport in the eighteenth century, with big crowds at the Artillery Ground in Finsbury, while gentlemen players styled themselves amateurs to set themselves apart from working-class professionals, down to separate changing rooms. The Hambledon Club led the game from the 1760s until the Marylebone Cricket Club formed and Lord's Old Ground opened in 1787; MCC became keeper of the Laws, which soon added a third stump and leg before wicket. Underarm bowling gave way to roundarm and then overarm in the nineteenth century, Sussex became the first county club in 1839, and the County Championship began in 1890.
Source: Cricket
