History And Sport : The Story Of Cricket

The social and economic history of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shaped cricket and gave it its unique nature. 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 sport takes even half as much time to complete. 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. There is a historical reason behind both these oddities. Cricket’s connection with a rural past can be seen in the length of a Test match. Cricket was the earliest modern 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.

Originally, cricket matches had no time limit. The game went on for as long as it took to bowl out a side twice. The rhythms of the village life were slower and cricket’s rules were made before the Industrial Revolution. Modern factory worker meant that people were paid by the hour or the day or the week.

In the same way, cricket’s vagueness about the size of a cricket ground is a result of its village origins. Cricket was originally played on country commons, unfenced land that was public property. The size of commons varied from one village to another, so there were no designated boundaries or boundary hits.

If we look at cricket’s equipment, we can see how cricket both changed with the changing times and yet fundamentally remained true to its origins in rural England. 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 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 become available as European colonialists and trading companies established themselves in Asia. Unlike golf and tennis, cricket has refused to remake its tools with industrial or man-made materials; plastic, fiber glass and metal have been firmly rejected.

But in the matter of protective equipment, cricket has been influenced by technological change. The invention of vulcanized 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 remained a colonial game, limited to countries that had once been a part of the British Empire. While British imperial officials bought the game to the colonies, they made little effort to spread the game, especially in colonial territories where the subjects of the Empire were mainly non- white such as India and West-Indies. Here, playing cricket became a sign of superior social and racial status, and the Afro- Caribbean population was discouraged from participating in organized club cricket, which remained dominated by white plantation owners and their servants. Despite the exclusiveness of the white cricket elite in the West Indies, the game became hugely popular in the Caribbean. Success at cricket became a measure of racial equality and political progress in British colonies.

South America was never been colonized by the British, hence the sport couldn’t reach to this part of the world. At present, Portugal, Spain, Mexico etc. form South American continent and none of these countries are into cricket because cricket was never propagated here.

The origins of India cricket, that is, cricket played by the Indians are to be found in Bombay and the first Indian community to start playing the game was the small community of the Zoroastrians, the Parsis. Brought into close contact with the British because of their interest in trade and the first Indian community to westernize, 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 Tata and the Wadias. The white cricket elite in India offered no help to enthusiastic Parsis.

The establishment of Parsi Gymkhana became a precedent for other Indians who in turn established clubs based on the idea of religious community.

This history of gymkhana cricket led to first-class cricket being organized 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. . Mahatma Gandhi, condemned the pentangular tournament as a communally divisive competition that was out of place in a time when nationalists were trying to unite India’s diverse population.

Even after Indian independence kick-started the disappearance of the British Empire, the regulation of international cricket remained the business of the Imperial Cricket Conference ICC. The ICC, renamed the International Cricket Conference as late as 1965, was dominated by its foundation members, England and Australia, which retained the right of veto over its proceedings. Not till 1989 was the privileged position of England and Australia scrapped in favor of equal membership.

The 1970s were the decade in which cricket was transformed: it was a time when a traditional game evolved to fit a changing world. The technology of satellite television and the world wide reach of multi-national television companies created a global market for cricket. Matches in Sydney could now be watched live in Surat. This simple fact shifted the balance of power in cricket: a process that had been begun by the break-up of the British Empire was taken to its logical conclusion by globalization. Since India had the largest viewership for the game amongst the cricket-playing nations and the largest market in the cricketing world, the game’s center of gravity shifted to South Asia. This shift was symbolized by the shifting of the ICC headquarters from London to tax-free Dubai.

Kerry Packer, an Australian television tycoon who saw the moneymaking potential of cricket as a televised sport, signed up fifty-one of the world’s leading cricketers against the wishes of the national cricket boards and for about two years staged unofficial Tests and One-Day internationals under the name of World Series Cricket. While Packer’s ‘circus’ as it was then described folded up after two years, the innovations he introduced during this time to make cricket more attractive to television audiences endured and changed the nature of the game.

Television channels made money by selling television spots to companies who were happy to pay large sums of money to air commercials for their products to cricket’s captive television audience. Continuous television coverage made cricketers celebrities who, besides being paid better by their cricket boards, now made even larger sums of money by making commercials for a wide range of products, from tyres to colas, on television. Television coverage changed cricket. It expanded the audience for the game by beaming cricket into small towns and villages. It also broadened cricket’s social base. Children who had never previously had the chance to watch international cricket because they lived outside the big cities, where top-level cricket was played, could now watch and learn by imitating their heroes.