This article is about the sport. Test matches played over five days. Cricket theme cake earliest reference to cricket is in South East England in the mid-16th century.

It spread globally with the expansion of the British Empire, with the first international matches in the second half of the 19th century. Women’s cricket, which is organised and played separately, has also achieved international standard. A medieval “club ball” game involving an underarm bowl towards a batter. Ball catchers are shown positioning themselves to catch a ball. Detail from the Canticles of Holy Mary, 13th century.

It is generally believed that cricket originated as a children’s game in the south-eastern counties of England, sometime during the medieval period. Being a scholler in the ffree schoole of Guldeford hee and diverse of his fellows did runne and play there at creckett and other plaies. Given Derrick’s age, it was about half a century earlier when he was at school and so it is certain that cricket was being played c. In Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, he derived cricket from “cryce, Saxon, a stick”. 1760 when pitched delivery bowling began. North American variant of cricket known as wicket retained many of these aspects.

In 1611, the year Cotgrave’s dictionary was published, ecclesiastical court records at Sidlesham in Sussex state that two parishioners, Bartholomew Wyatt and Richard Latter, failed to attend church on Easter Sunday because they were playing cricket. Cricket remained a low-key local pursuit for much of the 17th century. It is known, through numerous references found in the records of ecclesiastical court cases, to have been proscribed at times by the Puritans before and during the Commonwealth. According to the social historian Derek Birley, there was a “great upsurge of sport after the Restoration” in 1660. The game underwent major development in the 18th century to become England’s national sport. Its success was underwritten by the twin necessities of patronage and betting. Lord’s Old Ground in 1787, Hambledon was both the game’s greatest club and its focal point.