A brief history of cricket

From a children's game in the weald to a code written for gamblers

A The earliest unambiguous reference to the game appears in a property dispute heard in Surrey in 1597, in which a sixty-year-old witness testified that he and his schoolfellows had played at "creckett" on the disputed ground half a century before. The document is valuable precisely because nobody involved cared about sport: a coroner recording an accident or a court establishing the use of a field describes a pastime incidentally, without embellishment, and such records are consequently more reliable than any account written to celebrate the game. What they show is a children's amusement in the weald of south-east England, played on sheep-cropped grass with a stick and a lump of wool, and not yet an adult activity at all.

B The obscurity of the early period is not an accident of record-keeping. A game played by labouring people on common land, frequently on Sundays, attracted the attention of authority mainly when it interfered with church attendance or archery practice, and the prohibitions issued against it are among the better sources for establishing where and when it was played. The transformation from a rural diversion into an organised sport was driven by gambling. During the eighteenth century the landed gentry began to assemble teams from among their tenants and servants, to match them against the teams of rival landowners, and to bet substantial sums on the outcome. Written articles of agreement were drawn up before matches to establish what was and was not permitted, since a wager cannot be settled without an agreed definition of the contest. The laws of cricket therefore did not emerge from any governing body's desire for order. They emerged from the practical requirements of people with money on the result, which is why the earliest surviving code concerns itself with the width of the bat and the settling of disputes rather than with anything resembling sportsmanship.

C One village club in Hampshire dominated the middle of that century to a degree that has never been repeated, defeating teams representing the whole of England on a regular basis, and its significance is less that it won than that it was recorded. Its matches were written up, its players were named and characterised, and a game that had been played anonymously for two hundred years acquired a literature. The scorer, the newspaper report and the printed scorecard between them created the possibility of comparing one player with another across seasons, which is the foundation of everything the sport has since built on statistics. The club also refined the mechanics: the straight bat replaced the curved one, the third stump was added after a bowler repeatedly sent the ball between the other two, and the length of the pitch was fixed at the distance still used.

D Authority passed at the end of the century to a London club whose members were drawn from the same aristocratic circles and which issued a revised code of laws in 1788. It had no formal jurisdiction over anybody. It acquired authority in the way such bodies often do, by being the institution whose opinion the people who mattered were prepared to accept, and it retained the ownership of the laws for the next two centuries without ever having been granted it. The arrangement has proved surprisingly durable, surviving the transfer of the sport to countries that had no reason to defer to a London club and the transfer of its finances to boards that could have taken the laws for themselves at any point.

E The most contested change in the game's history concerned the way the ball is delivered. Bowling was originally underarm along the ground; a gradual raising of the arm, resisted at every stage, produced round-arm delivery in the 1820s and eventually overarm bowling, which was permitted only in 1864 after decades of dispute in which bowlers were repeatedly no-balled for exceeding the height then allowed. Each stage was denounced as a corruption of the game and each was adopted because it was more effective, a pattern that recurs throughout the sport's history with the objections and the outcome barely varying. Protective equipment followed the same course a century later: pads, gloves and eventually helmets were each described as unmanly by players who had done without them, and each became universal within a decade of a serious injury that could not be explained away.

F International competition grew from the same soil and was formalised late. A single defeat on English soil in 1882 prompted a mock obituary in a newspaper, announcing that English cricket had died and that the body would be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia. A private joke about a fictional urn became the name of the oldest continuing contest in the sport, which is a reasonable illustration of how much of the game's apparatus was improvised and then treated as immemorial.

G What the whole sequence suggests is that the sport's celebrated traditionalism is largely retrospective. Cricket has altered its equipment, its bowling action, its playing conditions, its formats and its commercial basis repeatedly, and on each occasion a body of opinion has held that the essential character of the game was being destroyed. The character has proved considerably more robust than its defenders feared, which is worth remembering when the same argument is made about the newest change, as it invariably is.