KRTBaseball on a soccer field? That’s exactly what cricket is when it all boils down, or that’s how some might refer to it if they are unfamiliar with the historical sport.
“Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended,” George Bernard Shaw was once quoted saying in the 1990 edition of The Guiness Dictionary of Sports Quotations.
According to Wikipedia, “Cricket is a team sport played between two teams of 11 players on each side. It is a bat-and-ball game played on a roughly elliptical grass field, in the centre of which is a hard, flat strip of ground 22 yards (20.12 m) long, called a pitch.”
Beginning in the early 1300s, and originally referred to as creckett, it was started in England. Cricket was played all over from Kent down to Sussex. By the end of the 17th century, it had grown to a large, organized sport, being played throughout all of England and there was much gambling surrounding it.
“The game underwent major development in the 18th Century and had become the national sport of England by the end of the century. Betting played a major part in that development and rich patrons began forming their own ‘select 11’,” according to Wikipedia.
The most prominent venue for cricket was the Artillery Grounds in Finsbury, England.
In the 1963 and 1975 two things were developed, the One-day International matches and the International Cricket Council. Both changes to the sport revolutionized how many people went to games and how the game was administered.
Presently, cricket has taken over England. With a new structure and format, the sport has modernized the way fans participate and show enthusiasm.
“For its fans, the sport and the intense rivalries between top cricketing nations provide passionate entertainment and outstanding sporting achievements. It has even occasionally given rise to diplomatic outrage, the most infamous being the Bodyline series played between England and Australia,” according to Wikipedia.
A match or game can take anywhere from six hours to five days, depending on the form of the game.
There are three forms: test cricket, one-day cricket and Twenty20.
To date, cricket is the second-most popular sport overseas, just falling short of European football (soccer).
