Hey fellows, here is a very nice artical i want to share with you its on cricket and i think you will enjoy it. its on how cricket started and got this huge popularity.
We know who invented the telephone. The Russians say it wasn’t America’s Alexander Graham Bell but a Russian named ‘Bellokovsky’ or ‘Grahamovitch’ or someone equally outlandish. Back in the days of the Soviet Union and Khrushchev’s shoe-thumping “We will bury you era, some gung-ho Russians even claim to have invented the Cunard ocean luxury liner “The Queen Mary”.
For some years now, we’ve even known who invented the “war against terrorism” — and, no, it definitely wasn’t a Russian this time. I mean, even the Russians — in their most vodka-drenched moments — would think twice before claiming George W. Bush as one of their own.
These, however, are trivial questions. The real question, even, perhaps, the central question of our time, or indeed of any time, for that matter, at least in those far-flung outposts of the former British Empire where the game is played, is (wait for it): who invented cricket?
Now, the British, let’s face it, flung some of those far-flung outposts of empire pretty far, as Nineteenth Century atlases will readily testify. But even the Brits must have been rocked back on their heels with shock & awe to learn recently that their arch enemies, the French, invented cricket! “The French!” “Sacrilege!” One can imagine ancient Englishmen muttering darkly into their gin-and-tonics at the Long Room at Lord’s “They’ll be telling us W.G. Grace was a Frenchman next!”.
Be that as it may, this astonishing claim concerning the inventor of cricket has been put forward by Didier Marchois, a former president of the French Cricket Federation, who told Britain’s Sunday Express in a recent interview that he has unearthed documents that show that cricket was being played in France “as early as the 13th Century.”
According to Monsieur Marchois, off-duty French soldiers whiled away the hours before meeting a sticky end on the fields of Agincourt at the hands of the English bowmen with a quick 20-overs game.
Agincourt was a famous battle fought in France in 1415, which the English, led by King Henry V, won. There are scenes of this battle in Shakespeare’s play “Henry V,” but the Bard of Avon makes no mention of cricket being played by the French soldiers before hostilities commenced.
Other documents reportedly uncovered by M Marchois reveal that King Louis XI of France was asked to spare the life of a player who had unsportingly killed an opponent during a match in the French port city of Calais in 1478. And cricket was reputedly the favourite sport of Louis XIV (1638-1715). He was also called the “Sun King” because of the beauty and riches of his court at Versailles.
Thirty thousand workers are said to have laboured for more than fifteen years to create the beautiful palace and gardens at Versailles for Louis XIV. Several treaties were signed here, including one that formally ended the First World War and inadvertently set the stage — because of the inequitable terms the treaty imposed on Germany — for the even bloodier Second World War.
Given the nature of the historical events associated with Versailles and the central place the edifice occupies in the French consciousness, it’s not surprising that the French government has now announced a $ 450 million plan to renovate the Sun King’s palace. It must be the mother of all renovations given that you could probably run the government of many a small Third World country for a year or more for that amount of money.
But that’s another story. What concerns us, here, is the origin of cricket. A duck in cricket, of course, is no score at all. But it is well camouflaged. It is really the left-over of the much more descriptive “duck’s egg”. A duckís egg looks like a zero, “nothing”. Americans, however, seem to prefer geese, and in their version of the game a no score thus appears as a “goose egg”. But who would ever guess that in tennis this egg (the French l’oeuf) hatched “love”?
Which brings us back to the good M Marchois, who claims that the first recorded modern cricket match is found in the archives of the Paris Cricket Club, dating back to 1864. “Cricket was born in the north of France and taken across the channel by English soldiers who picked it up from us during truce periods in the Hundred Years War,” Marchois told the Sunday Express, “with a twinkle in his eye.”
The Hundred Years War between England and France, which, in fact, lasted 116 years (1337-1453), resulted from royal quarrels, particularly over land, and ended in the defeat of the English as they were pushed back out of France. Generations of English and French youth died in the conflict, resulting in feelings of thinly disguised ill will between the two countries that have continued to this day — all the talk about one Europe and a European Common Market notwithstanding.
Could it be, then, that it is these same feelings of ill will that have now prompted the French to lay claim to having invented cricket, that most quintessentially English of sports? Or was the former president of the French Cricket Federation just indulging in a bit of harmless English-baiting when he said that cricket was a French game?
Whatever the case, the fact of the matter is that cricket historians since the early 19th Century have sought in vain to date the birth of cricket. But it will remain for ever shrouded in mystery.
Many clues have been dug up as to the game’s antiquity. We know, for example, that cricket was old when the Tudors were young. The Tudors were an English royal dynasty that ruled from 1485 to 1603. Henry VIII (1491-1547), the most famous English king (1509-47), was a Tudor king.
The most well-known fact about Henry VIII is that he had six wives. His first wife, Catherine of Aragon, failed to bear him a son, but the Pope would not allow him to divorce her. As a result, the Church of England broke away from the Roman Catholic Church, and Henry married Anne Boleyn. She was later found guilty of adultery and Henry had her head cut off.
His other wives were Jane Seymour, who died while giving birth to a child, Anne of Cleves, who Henry divorced, Catherine Howard, who was executed, and Catherine Parr, who lived on after Henry’s death. But while his wives had a torrid and frequently fatal time of it, England, under Henry, became richer and more powerful than it had ever been. If there’s a moral in the story, historians have yet to discover it.
We know, too, that Englishmen played cricket as well as bowls at the time that the Spanish Armada — a collection of armed ships sent by Spain — was sighted in 1588. The Spanish were defeated by the English navy led by Sir Francis Drake. He was a good bowls player, famously remarking that there was time enough to finish his game before dealing with the Spanish Armada. But whether he was an equally good cricketer is something that history unfortunately doesn’t tell us.
Historian Andrew Lang wrote: “No one invented cricket. Like almost everything else cricket was evolved.” The 18th-Century historian, Joseph Strutt, suggested that, “The pleasant and manly exercise of cricket originated from club-ball.” The late H. S. Altham, greatest of all cricket historians, endorses the findings of an earlier researcher identified only by his initials “H. P.-T.” who had supported the derivation from club-ball.
John Nyren writing in 1833 says that this game “appears to have been no other than the present well-known bat-and-ball.” The Reverend James Pycroft in “The Cricket Field” (1851) also identifies club-ball as “the name which usually stood for cricket in the 13th Century.” F. S. Ashley-Cooper writing in 1922 endorses Pycroft’s view in a summary of the evidence.
But what was this club-ball? “H. P.-T” points out that it is a generic term, as football and handball used to be. It stood for any game in which a club and a ball were used. It is, in fact, the ancestor of most English ball games. We may never discover when cricket ceased to be club-ball and became itself. Cricket, in fact, just grew up.
Two fruit-baskets gave the world basketball. Football was so called not because a ball was kicked with the foot, but because it was a game played “on foot” — to distinguish it from polo, played, of course, on horseback, though there’s also cycle-polo and even (would you believe it?) elephant-polo, which is played in certain parts of India.
But what of the word “cricket” itself? Well, apparently, it’s simply the diminutive of “cric” — the little cric or curved staff and more especially a shepherd’s staff or crook. Are cricketers “crooketers”, then? Perish the thought that anybody should ever have the temerity to call them that. Did someone say, “Match-fixing”?
give me your feedback and comment on the artical.
We know who invented the telephone. The Russians say it wasn’t America’s Alexander Graham Bell but a Russian named ‘Bellokovsky’ or ‘Grahamovitch’ or someone equally outlandish. Back in the days of the Soviet Union and Khrushchev’s shoe-thumping “We will bury you era, some gung-ho Russians even claim to have invented the Cunard ocean luxury liner “The Queen Mary”.
For some years now, we’ve even known who invented the “war against terrorism” — and, no, it definitely wasn’t a Russian this time. I mean, even the Russians — in their most vodka-drenched moments — would think twice before claiming George W. Bush as one of their own.
These, however, are trivial questions. The real question, even, perhaps, the central question of our time, or indeed of any time, for that matter, at least in those far-flung outposts of the former British Empire where the game is played, is (wait for it): who invented cricket?
Now, the British, let’s face it, flung some of those far-flung outposts of empire pretty far, as Nineteenth Century atlases will readily testify. But even the Brits must have been rocked back on their heels with shock & awe to learn recently that their arch enemies, the French, invented cricket! “The French!” “Sacrilege!” One can imagine ancient Englishmen muttering darkly into their gin-and-tonics at the Long Room at Lord’s “They’ll be telling us W.G. Grace was a Frenchman next!”.
Be that as it may, this astonishing claim concerning the inventor of cricket has been put forward by Didier Marchois, a former president of the French Cricket Federation, who told Britain’s Sunday Express in a recent interview that he has unearthed documents that show that cricket was being played in France “as early as the 13th Century.”
According to Monsieur Marchois, off-duty French soldiers whiled away the hours before meeting a sticky end on the fields of Agincourt at the hands of the English bowmen with a quick 20-overs game.
Agincourt was a famous battle fought in France in 1415, which the English, led by King Henry V, won. There are scenes of this battle in Shakespeare’s play “Henry V,” but the Bard of Avon makes no mention of cricket being played by the French soldiers before hostilities commenced.
Other documents reportedly uncovered by M Marchois reveal that King Louis XI of France was asked to spare the life of a player who had unsportingly killed an opponent during a match in the French port city of Calais in 1478. And cricket was reputedly the favourite sport of Louis XIV (1638-1715). He was also called the “Sun King” because of the beauty and riches of his court at Versailles.
Thirty thousand workers are said to have laboured for more than fifteen years to create the beautiful palace and gardens at Versailles for Louis XIV. Several treaties were signed here, including one that formally ended the First World War and inadvertently set the stage — because of the inequitable terms the treaty imposed on Germany — for the even bloodier Second World War.
Given the nature of the historical events associated with Versailles and the central place the edifice occupies in the French consciousness, it’s not surprising that the French government has now announced a $ 450 million plan to renovate the Sun King’s palace. It must be the mother of all renovations given that you could probably run the government of many a small Third World country for a year or more for that amount of money.
But that’s another story. What concerns us, here, is the origin of cricket. A duck in cricket, of course, is no score at all. But it is well camouflaged. It is really the left-over of the much more descriptive “duck’s egg”. A duckís egg looks like a zero, “nothing”. Americans, however, seem to prefer geese, and in their version of the game a no score thus appears as a “goose egg”. But who would ever guess that in tennis this egg (the French l’oeuf) hatched “love”?
Which brings us back to the good M Marchois, who claims that the first recorded modern cricket match is found in the archives of the Paris Cricket Club, dating back to 1864. “Cricket was born in the north of France and taken across the channel by English soldiers who picked it up from us during truce periods in the Hundred Years War,” Marchois told the Sunday Express, “with a twinkle in his eye.”
The Hundred Years War between England and France, which, in fact, lasted 116 years (1337-1453), resulted from royal quarrels, particularly over land, and ended in the defeat of the English as they were pushed back out of France. Generations of English and French youth died in the conflict, resulting in feelings of thinly disguised ill will between the two countries that have continued to this day — all the talk about one Europe and a European Common Market notwithstanding.
Could it be, then, that it is these same feelings of ill will that have now prompted the French to lay claim to having invented cricket, that most quintessentially English of sports? Or was the former president of the French Cricket Federation just indulging in a bit of harmless English-baiting when he said that cricket was a French game?
Whatever the case, the fact of the matter is that cricket historians since the early 19th Century have sought in vain to date the birth of cricket. But it will remain for ever shrouded in mystery.
Many clues have been dug up as to the game’s antiquity. We know, for example, that cricket was old when the Tudors were young. The Tudors were an English royal dynasty that ruled from 1485 to 1603. Henry VIII (1491-1547), the most famous English king (1509-47), was a Tudor king.
The most well-known fact about Henry VIII is that he had six wives. His first wife, Catherine of Aragon, failed to bear him a son, but the Pope would not allow him to divorce her. As a result, the Church of England broke away from the Roman Catholic Church, and Henry married Anne Boleyn. She was later found guilty of adultery and Henry had her head cut off.
His other wives were Jane Seymour, who died while giving birth to a child, Anne of Cleves, who Henry divorced, Catherine Howard, who was executed, and Catherine Parr, who lived on after Henry’s death. But while his wives had a torrid and frequently fatal time of it, England, under Henry, became richer and more powerful than it had ever been. If there’s a moral in the story, historians have yet to discover it.
We know, too, that Englishmen played cricket as well as bowls at the time that the Spanish Armada — a collection of armed ships sent by Spain — was sighted in 1588. The Spanish were defeated by the English navy led by Sir Francis Drake. He was a good bowls player, famously remarking that there was time enough to finish his game before dealing with the Spanish Armada. But whether he was an equally good cricketer is something that history unfortunately doesn’t tell us.
Historian Andrew Lang wrote: “No one invented cricket. Like almost everything else cricket was evolved.” The 18th-Century historian, Joseph Strutt, suggested that, “The pleasant and manly exercise of cricket originated from club-ball.” The late H. S. Altham, greatest of all cricket historians, endorses the findings of an earlier researcher identified only by his initials “H. P.-T.” who had supported the derivation from club-ball.
John Nyren writing in 1833 says that this game “appears to have been no other than the present well-known bat-and-ball.” The Reverend James Pycroft in “The Cricket Field” (1851) also identifies club-ball as “the name which usually stood for cricket in the 13th Century.” F. S. Ashley-Cooper writing in 1922 endorses Pycroft’s view in a summary of the evidence.
But what was this club-ball? “H. P.-T” points out that it is a generic term, as football and handball used to be. It stood for any game in which a club and a ball were used. It is, in fact, the ancestor of most English ball games. We may never discover when cricket ceased to be club-ball and became itself. Cricket, in fact, just grew up.
Two fruit-baskets gave the world basketball. Football was so called not because a ball was kicked with the foot, but because it was a game played “on foot” — to distinguish it from polo, played, of course, on horseback, though there’s also cycle-polo and even (would you believe it?) elephant-polo, which is played in certain parts of India.
But what of the word “cricket” itself? Well, apparently, it’s simply the diminutive of “cric” — the little cric or curved staff and more especially a shepherd’s staff or crook. Are cricketers “crooketers”, then? Perish the thought that anybody should ever have the temerity to call them that. Did someone say, “Match-fixing”?
give me your feedback and comment on the artical.
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