Cricket, A Very Peculiar History

Anyone for cricket?

Why do people enjoy a sport where 22 players loaf about all day? Well…

It’s simple. One player throws a ball, another tries to hit it. To win, all you have to do is score more runs than the opposition.

Yet complicated. With its many ‘laws’, baffling terminology and unusual scoring system, cricket is also a game of immense complexity and beauty, where skill, strategy and raw emotions combine to create a fever-pitch atmosphere. Australian novelist Thomas Keneally called cricket ‘a sort of mystery’. In the early 1930s, when Adolf Hitler decided to use the game to train his troops for war, he rewrote the laws to make them simpler. Clearly the action of a crazed madman.

It’s dramatic. At its best, cricket is soap opera, with a stock of villains and heroes and regular instalments of melodrama, hysteria and nail-biting suspense.

And tribal. When Australia play England, national pride is at stake. When 260 million people sat down to watch India play Pakistan in 2004, patriotic feelings ran high.

It’s varied. My own experience of playing cricket in a local league is straight out of an Agatha Christie novel: the gentle murmur of conversation around the village green, hefted agricultural strokes, ruddy-faced umpires draped with spare sweaters, and scones and cream in the pavilion. The only thing missing was a body laced with arsenic. A modern international, especially the spectacle enjoyed by India’s passionate cricket supporters, is a different beast altogether, a heady brew of thousands of baying spectators, a bowler racing in like an express train to launch a rock-hard missile at the batsman’s head – and the potential for pandemonium if there’s any controversy on the pitch.