The Evolution of Cricket: A Brief History of the Gentlemen's Game

This article was inspired by our Cricket Evolution t-shirt design, check it out here.

I’ll kick things off with a disclaimer; to my eternal shame my cricketing knowledge is a wee bit shaky. Since taking over as PunkCricket’s Community Manager I’ve made it my mission to suck up as much cricketing knowledge as possible, and it’s my hope that by pumping articles into this blog, and interacting with our lovely community, I’ll be a cricket genius in no time. With that in mind, I thought what better way to brush up on my cricketing basics than by going back to very beginning and looking at the origins of the game? So join me as I journey back in time and find out where it all began. Cue flashback sequence.

With the dissolution of the good ol’ Roman Empire, civilisation took a bit of a wrong turn and we ended up trading palatial villas and paved roads for straw huts and muddy turnip fields.  It wasn’t all bad, however, and from the squalor of the Dark Ages cricket was born. As far as we can tell, the game was created by kids living in the Weald. The game survived, in some form, through the generations before being taken up by the nobility at the dawn of the 17^th century.  Played on grazing land or in woodland clearings, these proto-players took up hunks of wood, crooks, or whatever else was at hand, to hit lumps of matted sheep wool, wood, or stones in lieu of a ball. A handy tree stump or gate stood in as a wicket.

How and when this simple game of sticks and stones morphed into the game we know and love today is up for debate. The first definite mention of cricket arrived in 1598 during -quite bizarrely- a court case surrounding an ownership row over a plot of land in Guildford, Surrey.  Aging coroner, John Derrick, testified that he and his school chums had played creckett on the same site some fifty years before, providing concrete proof that cricket was already all the rage in Surrey during the 1550s.

The game went global in 1844 when the USA took to the field for a game against northern neighbours Canada at the St. George’s Cricket Club in New York.

In 1877, England’s legendary rivalry with Australia was kindled as the two teams met to take part in what is now widely considered the first ever test matches. The year after, Australia hit the road touring England to rapturous success. From that point onward, the seeds were sown, the game’s popularity grew and grew and the Golden Age of Cricket began.

So there you have it, the humble game of cricket has been with us in one form or another for well over a thousand years. I kind of like the thought of our downtrodden, Dark Age ascendants taking to the untamed fields of ye olde England for a quick round.Here’s to another thousand years!