Whence
Cricket
Game

Where does Cricket come from?

Cricket comes from south-east England, most likely from the Weald, the wooded country of Kent, Sussex and Surrey. It seems to have begun as a children's game, and the earliest definite record of it is a court case from 1598.

Schoolboys at Guildford

In January 1598 a court at Guildford, Surrey, heard a dispute over a plot of land. A 59-year-old coroner, John Derrick, testified that some fifty years earlier, as a pupil at the town's free school, he and his friends 'did runne and play' there 'at creckett and other plaies'. That proves schoolboys played it around 1550. Its true beginning is unknown, but historians place it earlier, probably in Kent, Sussex or Surrey, among the North Downs, the South Downs and the Weald.

From village greens to the world

By about 1610 adults played too: a 1640 court case recalls a match from around then between 'the Weald and the Upland' and 'the Chalk Hill' at Chevening, Kent, the earliest match on record anywhere. Village teams multiplied, and after 1660 the nobility made cricket a major sport. Its Laws were first written down in 1744, and the Marylebone Cricket Club, founded at Lord's in 1787, became their keeper. Colonists and sailors carried the game to North America, the West Indies, India and Australia.

Why people think of India

Cricket is the most popular sport in India, and its top players are celebrities. But the game arrived with the British: East India Company mariners brought it in the first half of the 1700s, and the earliest record of cricket in India dates from 1721. India became a Test-playing nation in 1932, losing its first Test at Lord's, and won the World Cup in 1983 and 2011. Today the Board of Control for Cricket in India is the richest governing body in the sport.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org › History of cricket to 1725 ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › History of cricket ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Cricket in India ↗ · britannica.com ↗

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