Cricket

“Cricket to us was more than play; it was a worship in the summer sun.” Edmund Blunden

Cricket is a bat and ball sport typically played outdoors during the summer when the weather is at its finest. Enjoyed around the world, cricket is a truly international game, only surpassed by football (soccer) in terms of global popularity.

Cricket History

The roots of cricket can be found in England, where it began life as a rudimentary game which saw players throw a stone at a tree stump or sheep pen, while an opponent defended it with a long, heavy tree branch. In the 17th and 18th centuries, players developed a more complex set of rules for the game, and the equipment changed too – the stone was replaced by a ball; the branch became a broad wooden bat with a handle; and the target became a “wicket” (3 thin wooden stumps with a bail across the top that could be dislodged on impact).

According to many records, the first true 11-a-side cricket match was played in Sussex in 1697. As time went by, English counties began to play matches against one another. New techniques for batting and bowling were also mastered.

Having spread across the British Isles, cricket was soon being played in India, Australia, and the West Indies, where it remains wildly popular today. In an attempt to gain new fans and quicken the tempo of the sport, shorter, more intense formats of cricket, like Twenty20 and One-Day matches, have been developed and are now enjoyed around the world alongside traditional 4- or 5-day Test matches.

Cricket Format & Scoring

While at first glance cricket can seem complicated, at its heart, it is a competition between 2 teams of 11 players trying to score runs by striking a ball with a bat and running between wooden wickets while the ball is in play. Runs can also be scored by hitting “boundaries”. A ball hit across the boundary (a rope surrounding the pitch) with at least one bounce is worth 4 runs, while a ball hit over the boundary without a bounce is worth 6.

Meanwhile, the non-batting team attempts to prevent the other team from scoring runs by getting their batters “out”. There are numerous ways to get a player out in cricket, including catching a ball hit into the air before it lands on the ground, and, most commonly, by striking the wicket with the ball.

After 10 players on the batting side are “out”, or, if it is a limited-over match, a team has received all its allotted balls, the batting and bowling teams switch places. After both teams have batted (once each in a One-Day or T20 game, twice each in a Test) the team with the most runs scored, wins.