St. Francis De Sales Sr. Sec.

School, Gangapur City

Name:
Dilraj Meena
Class:
9th A
Roll No.:
13
Subject:
S.S.
Topic:
The Story Of Cricket

Submitted To:
Fr. Romeo
 Acknowledgements
I would like to express my special thanks of gratitude to my teacher (Fr. Romeo)
who gave me this golden opportunity to do this wonderful project on this
wonderful project on the topic (The Story of Cricket), which also helped me in
doing a lot of Research and I come to know about so many new things I am really
thankful to them.
Secondly, I would like to thank my parents and friends who helped me a lot in
finalizing this project within the limited time frame.
 Index
Sr. No Topic Page No.
1. History And Sports: The Story Of Cricket 1
2. The Historical Development of Cricket as a Game in England 1
3. Cricket and Victorian England 3
4. The Spread Of Cricket 4
5. Cricket, Race and Religion 6
6. The Modern Transformation Of Game 7
History And Sports: The Story Of Cricket

Cricket grew out of the many stick-and-ball games played in England 500 years ago, under a
variety of different rules. The word ‘bat’ is an old English word that simply means stick or club.
By the seventeenth century, cricket had evolved enough to be to be fined for recognisable as a
distinct game and it was popular enough for its fans playing it on Sunday instead of going to
church. Till the middle of the eighteenth century, bats were roughly the same shape as hockey
sticks, curving outwards at the bottom. There was a simple reason for this: the ball was bowled
underarm, along the ground and the curve at the end of the bat gave the batsman the best chance
of making contact.

The Historical Development of Cricket as a Game in England

The social and economic history of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cricket’s
early years, shaped the game and gave cricket its unique nature.

For example, one of the peculiarities of test cricket is that a match can go on for five days and
still end in a draw. No other modern team sport takes even half as much time to complete. A
football match is generally over in an hour-and-a-half of playing time. Even baseball, a long-
drawn-out bat -and-ball game by the standards of modern sports, completes nine innings in less
than half the time that it takes to play a limited-overs match, the shortened version of modern
cricket!

Another curious characteristic of cricket is that the length of the pitch is specified – 22 yards –
but the size or shape of the ground is not. Most other team sports, such as hockey and football
lay down the dimensions of the playing area: cricket does not. Grounds can be oval or nearly
circular.

There’s a historical reason behind both these oddities. Cricket was the earliest modern team sport
to be codified, which is another way of saying that cricket gave itself rules and regulations so-
that it could be played in a uniform and standardized way well before team games like soccer
and hockey. The first written ‘laws of cricket’ were drawn up in 1744. They stated, ‘the
principals shall choose from amongst the gentlemen present two umpires who shall absolutely
decide all disputes.1

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The stumps must be 22 inches high and the bail across them six inches. The ball must be
between 5 and 6 ounces, and the two sets of stumps 22 yards apart’. There were no limits on the
shape or size of the bat. It appears that 40 notches or runs was viewed as a very big score,
probably due to the bowlers bowling quickly at shins unprotected by pads. The world’s first
cricket club was formed in Hambledon in the 1760s and the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC)
was founded in 1787.

In 1788, the MCC published its first revision of the laws and became the guardian of cricket’s
regulations.

The MCC’s revision of the laws brought in a series of changes in the game that occurred in the
second half of the eighteenth century. During the 1760s and 1770s it became common to pitch
the ball through the air, rather than roll it along the ground. This change gave bowlers the options
of length, deception through the air, plus increased pace. It also opened new possibilities for spin
and swing. In response, batsmen had to master timing and shot selection. One immediate result
was the replacement of the curved bat with the straight one. All of this raised the premium on
skill and reduced the influence of rough ground and brute force.

The weight of the ball was limited to between 5½ to 5¾ ounces, and the width of the bat to four
inches. The latter ruling followed an innings by a batsman who appeared with a bat as wide as
the wicket! In 1774, the first leg-before law was published. Also around this time, a third stump
became common. By 1780, three days had become the length of a major match, and this year
also saw the creation of the first six-seam cricket ball.

While many important changes occurred during the nineteenth century (the rule about wide balls
was applied, the exact circumference of the ball was specified, protective equipment like pads
and gloves became available, boundaries were introduced where previously all shots had to be
run and, most importantly, overarm bowling became legal) cricket remained a pre-industrial
sport that matured during the early phase of the Industrial Revolution, the late eighteenth
century. This history has made cricket a game with characteristics of both the past and the
present day.
Cricket’s connection with a rural past can be seen in the length of a Test match. Originally,
cricket matches had no time limit. The game went on for as long as it took to bowl out a side
twice. The1

rhythms of village life were slower and cricket’s rules were made before the Industrial
Revolution. Modern factory work meant that people were paid by the hour or the day or the
week: games that were codified after the industrial revolution, like football and hockey, were
strictly time-limited to fit the routines of industrial city life.

The size of the commons varied from one village to another, so there were no designated
boundaries or boundary hits. When the ball went into the crowd, the crowd cleared a way for the
fieldsman to retrieve it. Even after boundaries were written into the laws of cricket, their distance
from the wicket was not specified. The laws simply lay down that ‘the umpire shall agree with
both captains on the boundaries of the playing area’.

If you look at the game’s equipment, Cricket’s most important tools are all made of natural, pre-
industrial materials. The bat is made of wood as are the stumps and the bails. The ball is made
with leather, twine and cork. Even today both bat and ball are handmade, not industrially
manufactured. The material of the bat changed slightly over time. Once it was cut out of a single
piece of wood. Now it consists of two pieces, the blade which is made out of the wood of the
willow tree and the handle which is made out of cane that became available as European
colonialists and trading companies established themselves in Asia.

But in the matter of protective equipment, cricket has been influenced by technological change.
The invention of vulcanised rubber led to the introduction of pads in 1848 and protective gloves
soon afterwards, and the modern game would be unimaginable without helmets made out of
metal and synthetic lightweight materials.

Cricket and Victorian England

The organisation of cricket in England reflected the nature of English society. The rich who
could afford to play it for pleasure were called amateurs and the poor who played it for a living
were called professionals. The rich were amateurs for two reasons. One, they considered sport a
kind of leisure. To play for the pleasure of playing and not for money was an aristocratic value.

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Two, there was not enough money in the game for the rich to be interested. The wages of
professionals were paid by patronage or subscription or gate money. The game was seasonal and
did not offer1

employment the year round. Most professionals worked as miners or in other forms of working
class employment in winter, the off-season

The social superiority of amateurs was built into the customs of cricket. Amateurs were called
Gentlemen while professionals had to be content with being described as Players. They even
entered the ground from different entrances. Amateurs tended to be batsmen, leaving the
energetic, hardworking aspects of the game, like fast bowling, to the professionals. That is partly
why the laws of the game always give the benefit of the doubt to the batsman. Cricket is a
batsman’s game because its rules were made to favour ‘Gentlemen’, who did most of the
batting. The social superiority of the amateur was also the reason the captain of a cricket team
was traditionally a batsman: not because batsmen were naturally better captains but because they
were generally Gentlemen. Captains of teams, whether club teams or national sides, were always
amateurs. It was not till the 1930s that the English Test team was led by a professional, the
Yorkshire batsman, Len Hutton.

It’s often said that the ‘battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’. This means
that Britain’s military success was based on the values taught to schoolboys in its public schools.
Eton was the most famous of these schools. The English boarding school was the institution that
trained English boys for careers in the military, the civil service and the church, the three great
institutions of imperial England.

In actual fact the Napoleonic wars were won because of the economic contribution of the iron
works of Scotland and Wales, the mills of Lancashire and the financial houses of the City of
London. It was the English lead in trade and industry that made Britain the world’s greatest
power, but it suited the English ruling class to believe that it was the superior character of its
young men, built in boarding schools, playing gentlemanly games like cricket, that tipped the
balance.

The Spread Of Cricket

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While some English team games like hockey and football became international games, played all
over the world, cricket remained a colonial game, limited to countries that had once been part of
the British empire. The pre-industrial oddness of cricket made it a hard game to export. It took root
only in countries that the British conquered and ruled. In these colonies, cricket was established as1

a popular sport either by white settlers (as in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia, New Zealand,
the West Indies and Kenya) or by local elites who wanted to copy the habits of their colonial
masters, as in India.

The first non-white club in the West Indies was established towards the end of the nineteenth
century, and even in this case its members were light-skinned mulattos. So while black people
played an enormous amount of informal cricket on beaches, in back alleys and parks, club
cricket till as late as the 1930s was dominated by white elites.

in the West Indies, the game became hugely popular in the Caribbean. Success at cricket became
a measure of racial equality and political progress. At the time of their independence many of
the political leaders of Caribbean countries like Forbes Burnham and Eric Williams saw in the
game a chance for selfrespect and international standing. When the West Indies won its first Test
series against England in 1950, it was celebrated as a national achievement, as a way of
demonstrating that West Indians were the equals of white Englishmen. There were two ironies to
this great victory. One, the West Indian team that won was captained by a white player. The first
time a black player led the West Indies Test team was in 1960 when Frank Worrell was named
captain. And two, the West Indies cricket team represented not one nation but several dominions
that later became independent countries. The pan-West Indian team that represents the Caribbean
region in international Test cricket is the only exception to a series of unsuccessful efforts to
bring about West Indian unification.

Cricket fans know that watching a match involves taking sides. In a Ranji Trophy match when
Delhi plays Mumbai, the loyalty of spectators depends on which city they come from or support.
When India plays Australia, the spectators watching the match on television in Bhopal or Chennai
feel involved as Indians – they are moved by nationalist loyalties. But through the early history of
Indian firstclass cricket, teams were not organised on geographical principles and it was not till
1932 that a national team was given the right to represent India in a Test match. So how were

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teams organised and, in the absence of regional or national teams, how did cricket fans choose
sides? We turn to history for answers, to discover how cricket in India developed and to get a sense
of the loyalties that united and divided Indians in the days of the Raj.1

Cricket, Race and Religion

Cricket in colonial India was organised on the principle of race and religion. The first record we
have of cricket being played in India is from 1721, an account of recreational cricket played by
English sailorsin Cambay. The first Indian club, the Calcutta Cricket Club, was established in
1792. Through the eighteenth century, cricket in India was almost wholly a sport played by
British military men and civil servants in all-white clubs and gymkhanas. Playing cricket in the
privacy of these clubs was more than just fun: it was also an escape from the strangeness,
discomfort and danger of their stay in India. Indians were considered to have no talent for the
game and certainly not meant to play it. But they did.

The origins of Indian cricket, that is, cricket played by Indians are to be found in Bombay and
the first Indian community to start playing the game was the small community of Zoroastrians,
the Parsis. Brought into close contact with the British because of their interest in trade and the
first Indian community to westernise, the Parsis founded the first Indian cricket club, the Oriental
Cricket Club in Bombay in 1848. Parsi clubs were funded and sponsored by Parsi businessmen
like the Tatas and the Wadias. The white cricket elite in India offered no help to the enthusiastic
Parsis. In fact, there was a quarrel between the Bombay Gymkhana, a whites-only club, and Parsi
cricketers over the use of a public park. The Parsis complained that the park was left unfit for
cricket because the polo ponies of the Bombay Gymkhana dug up the surface. When it became
clear that the colonial authorities were prejudiced in favour of their white compatriots, the Parsis
built their own gymkhana to play cricket in. The rivalry between the Parsis and the racist
Bombay Gymkhana had a happy ending for these pioneers of Indian cricket. A Parsi team beat
the Bombay Gymkhana at cricket in 1889, just four years after the foundation of the Indian
National Congress in 1885, an organisation that was lucky to have amongst its early leaders the
great Parsi statesman and intellectual Dadabhai Naoroji.

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The establishment of the Parsi Gymkhana became a precedent for other Indians who in turn
established clubs based on the idea of religious community. By the 1890s, Hindus and Muslims
were busy gathering funds and support for a Hindu Gymkhana and an Islam Gymkhana. 2

In the late nineteenth century, many Indian institutions and movements were organised around
the idea of religious community because the colonial state encouraged these divisions and was
quick to recognise communal institutions.

This history of gymkhana cricket led to first-class cricket being organised on communal and
racial lines. The teams that played colonial India’s greatest and most famous first-class cricket
tournament did not represent regions, as teams in today’s Ranji Trophy currently do, but
religious communities. The tournament was initially called the Quadrangular, because it was
played by four teams: the Europeans, the Parsis, the Hindus and the Muslims. It later became the
Pentangular when a fifth team was added, namely, the Rest, which comprised all the
communities left over, such as the Indian Christians. For example, Vijay Hazare, a Christian,
played for the Rest.

By the late 1930s and early 1940s, journalists, cricketers and political leaders had begun to
criticize the racial and communal foundations of the Pentangular tournament. The distinguished
editor of the newspaper the Bombay Chronicle, S.A. Brelvi, the famous radio commentator
A.F.S. Talyarkhan and India’s most respected political figure, Mahatma Gandhi, condemned the
Pentangular as a communally divisive competition that was out of place in a time when
nationalists were trying to unite India’s diverse population. A rival first-class tournament on
regional lines, the National Cricket Championship (later named the Ranji Trophy), was
established but not until Independence did it properly replace the Pentangular. The colonial state
and its divisive conception of India was the rock on which the Pentangular was built. It was a
colonial tournament and it died with the Raj.

The Modern Transformation Of Game

Modern cricket is dominated by Tests and one-day internationals, played between national
teams. The players who become famous, who live on in the memories of cricket’s public, are

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those who have played for their country. The players Indian fans remember from the era of the
Pentangular and the Quadrangular are those who were fortunate enough to play Test cricket.
C.K. Nayudu, an outstanding Indian batsman of his time, lives on in the popular imagination
when some of his great contemporaries like Palwankar Vithal and Palwankar Baloo have been
forgotten because his career lasted long enough for him to play Test cricket for India while theirs
did not. Even though Nayudu1

was past his cricketing prime when he played for India in its first Test matches against England
Test captain starting in 1932, his place in India’s cricket history is assured because he was the
country’s first.

India entered the world of Test cricket in 1932, a decade and a half before it became an
independent nation. This was possible because Test cricket from its origins in 1877 was
organised as a contest between different parts of the British empire, not sovereign nations. The
first Test was played between England and Australia when Australia was still a white settler
colony, not even a self-governing dominion. Similarly, the small countries of the Caribbean that
together make up the West Indies team were British colonies till well after the Second World
War.2

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