Cricket

by Read Listen Learn

Cricket: if you don’t know the game, it’s the one where about a dozen men stand around in a field, all dressed in white, while nothing much happens for long periods of time. If you do know the game, then you are possibly a fan already or, at least, see it as an important symbol of your country and culture.

It’s quite a complicated game, which is why we won’t pay much attention to the rules here. Rather, we’ll be looking at the social history of cricket, first in its native England and then as it spread around the world.

England is the home of a surprising number of international sports but cricket is the most ‘English’ of them. It started among shepherds who carried small wicker gates to enclose their sheep. When not needed as gates, these made perfect targets for one shepherd to throw a stone at, while another would use a thick stick to try and stop the stone hitting the ‘wicket’.

So, cricket began life as a rural pastime. From these origins, the game developed rules. If the person with the stick could hit the stone far enough, he could make points or ‘runs’. If the stone thrower or one of the other men standing around could catch the stone in his hands before it touched the ground, the stick man (or ‘batsman’) was ‘out’ and had to pass the stick to someone else. Often an older man, called an ‘umpire’, was asked to judge when there were arguments about the rules.

The game spread geographically and socially. The first reference to cricket in a historical document was in a court case in which a game of “creckett” between village schoolboys was mentioned in the year 1550. Over time the game became almost religiously important in some schools and by the eighteenth century, any upper - class Englishman might organise a cricket match at his country house and another rich man would be invited to bring a team to play against it. Betting on these matches was all-important and very large amounts of money were won and lost on single matches. And the matches could take three days to complete.

In order to win more matches, bets and a sporting reputation, rich cricket lovers would go around their local areas looking for young men with talent. If someone looked promising, he could be given a job at the rich man’s house as a servant and also earn extra money every time he played cricket. There were bonuses too, if he played especially well.

So, in the 1700s, the typical country house cricket team would consist of the patron (as captain, of course), one or two of his sons or nephews and the local doctor’s son. These were the amateurs who received no pay and were referred to as ‘Mr J. Smith’ in press reports. The house servants and gardeners, who were paid for playing, were referred to as ‘Smith J.’.

These two different socio-economic groups were known as the ‘gentlemen’ and the ‘players’. Ironically, many ‘gentlemen’ got more money in expenses than the paid players got.

However, it was the adoption of cricket by the top schools and universities in England during the nineteenth century that guaranteed the game’s future and settled the rules in written form. And, of course, many of the students at these schools and universities were just the kind of young men who went into the army or navy, or worked abroad in Britain’s colonies as businessmen or civil servants. They took cricket with them and were often surprised at how quickly people from Africa to India to the South Pacific islands learnt to love the game.

On one Pacific island, for instance, the people decided to stop fighting wars and play cricket matches to decide their arguments. Not only did this seem to work, but they also made cricket a part of the local religion. And, although cricket may not have ended war everywhere, the passion of fans in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the West Indies is legendary.

Which is strange, because cricket in these former colonies should be a hated symbol of the British Empire (as it is in Scotland, for example). West Indian Marxists, Indian and Pakistani nationalists and South African Boers have all sat down to write long articles complaining of the evils of the Empire and then written another about their profound love of cricket.

A paradox? Perhaps, but cricket does have unusual qualities. It has a generally relaxed pace which allows people to play to a later age than in many sports. Cricket also has a strong code of fair play. Not everyone believes in it but for many boys and young men in the cricket-playing parts of the world, a match is as much a chance to show your honour as it is an opportunity to win a game. This is why, traditionally, even at international level, the umpire is chosen from the home side – the cricketing code of honour means that he will slightly favour the visitors.

Finally, we must get rid of one misconception. Some people believe that cricket is an old-fashioned game and that it’s not as widespread as it used to be. It’s easy to think that baseball, for instance, is a more popular sport than cricket because there are so many films about it, but this is the opposite of the truth. In the Indian subcontinent alone, more people play and follow cricket than there are adult men in the U.S.A. and the game is still growing, with new international teams in Kenya, Holland and Ireland.