Cricket’s Revolution: Its Sudden Leap into Modernity
£15.00
By Eric Midwinter
For the better part of two hundred years, cricket was a folk game played in various versions in scores of isolated localities by young men enjoying brief exercise before or after work.
Late in that period, a small number of gentry, chiefly in the London and the Home Counties, organised fixtures more regularly, but this represented only a temporary element in the general pattern.
Then, in a thirty-year period, early in the 19th century, with relative suddenness and little opposition, cricket adopted the basics of a fully accepted national format. Laws were agreed and central authority was undisputed as cricket developed into a singular and recognisable sport.
Why and how did this switch happen?
The answer is that it was a part of the equally abrupt emergence of a nation turning to the rationalisation of society away from the arbitrary confusion of the 18th century.
Against that background, this book explores the development of the unified format of cricket’s laws, controls, clubs, competitions, records and statistics.
