Say “bob in the middle” or “deep square leg back” or “single to long leg” to the average American and it will elicit a questioning look.
Cricket — the so-called “gentleman’s game” with complex rules, humorously worded field positions and matches that last five days — is hardly at the forefront of the United States’ national consciousness, adding to the allure of the Twenty20 World Cup. country will co-host with the Caribbean next month.
However, it was not always like this.
In the mid-19th century, cricket was considered a popular pastime in the United States.
Brought by immigrants, it flourished in New York and Philadelphia in particular. In fact, the first international cricket match – between the United States and Canada – was played in the Big Apple in 1844, and teams from England crossed the Atlantic to play.
By the time of the Civil War in the 1860s, baseball had become the dominant bat-and-ball game in the United States and cricket was declining, becoming instead a sport that took hold in the British colonies in Asia. and in the Caribbean.
“Baseball—then called a ‘flash sport,’ although it had become, for many, very boring and slow—could be played in two to three hours, which suited the hurried American temperament,” said historian John Thorn Major officer. League Baseball, told the Associated Press. “Cricket remained the gentlemen’s sport of choice, but baseball became the democratic ideal.”
That cricket is back in the US via its shortest format – in T20 – perhaps makes sense.
Major League Cricket, a T20 competition, began last year and now there is a World Cup being held as the International Cricket Council seeks to expand into a new market where, according to the sport’s global governing body, there are already 30 millions of cricket fans. It is in the USA that cricket returns to the Olympic program for the Los Angeles Games in 2028.
“The commitment to developing cricket in the USA is real,” said Los Angeles organizing committee sporting director Niccolo Campriani.
This could easily have been said 200 years ago, or perhaps more.
According to USA Cricket, the first concrete evidence that cricket was played in the United States emerged as early as 1709, when William Byrd, owner of Westover Plantation in Virginia, wrote in his diary: “I awoke about 6 o’clock and the Colonel Ludwell, Nat Harrison, Mr. Edwards and I played cricket and I won a little.
The governing body also noted that Benjamin Franklin brought cricket’s official rule book – the Laws of 1744 – from England in 1754 and that there is anecdotal evidence that George Washington’s troops played what they called a “wicket” in 1778, more a decade before he became the first US president.
Although anti-English sentiment hardened after the American Revolution in the late 18th century, cricket was still played in 22 states by as many as a thousand clubs in the mid-19th century. A decline occurred during and after the Civil War, a time when baseball – a sport played in England before the United States, as documented by author David Block – took hold.
According to Thorn, there are “myriad claims… but no concrete evidence” that baseball descended from cricket or even rounders, another bat-and-ball game.
“The linear descent theory of games is a wrong idea, in my opinion: rather than an evolutionary tree, history more closely resembles a bramble bush,” he told the AP.
There is, however, an undoubted crossover between baseball and cricket, particularly in the language used in the two sports, such as “pinch-hitter” or “innings”.
Thorn said baseball tends to follow established trends in cricket, citing over-arm pitching, ball spin transmission and the potential future use of Hawkeye technology, which cricket has deployed since 2001.
On the other hand, the move from five-day Tests to shorter, limited-overs formats such as the Twenty20 and Hundred in England has made it a sport where sluggers can thrive in an all-out attacking environment.
The “home run” in baseball is similar to the “six” in cricket, when hitters try to throw the ball over the boundary rope and into the crowd.
Viewers in Nassau County, New York, Grand Prairie, just outside Dallas, and Broward County, Florida, will likely appreciate these photos more than any others in the coming weeks.
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AP Cricket:
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
