STL All Sports

Cricket is played on a comparatively small scale in the United States, but it is a leading British sport. Britons view the sport in the same manner that Americans take to baseball. The game, which is played at a much slower tempo than baseball, spread from the British Isles to most of British possessions and commonwealths. It commands large amounts of newspaper space, particularly during the playing of Test matches and The Ashes, the world series of cricket. However, though these events generate great interest, there is no unseemly celebration of victory. Unlike American baseball fans, Britons don't push, shove or shout, and the police are not needed to keep them off the playing area. The seeking of autographs is frowned upon. Nevertheless, in the case of big matches, work stops while the Britons watch their television sets or listen to radio accounts of the play.

Cricket in England, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the West Indies and, to a degree, Canada, is a sport for the masses as well as the classes. Records are kept as scrupulously as are those in baseball and football in the United States, and some of the finest sports literature has been written about the game. One London collector has 3,852 different books and pamphlets on the game. In the United States, K.A. Auty, M.B.E., of Chicago, Ill., is reputed to have the largest library of cricket books and "cricketana" in this hemisphere.

While all logical evidence points to the English as inventors of the game, some historians think that the name cricket is derived from croquet, a game that was popular in France before the beginning of cricket. They believe that the French might have devised a crude form of cricket as an offshot of croquet and that the English borrowed the idea and perfected it into modern cricket. Historians point out that there is a French word "crequet," pronounced "krick kay" and that this is evidence that France created the game and named it. However, cricket was unknown in France through the years when it was gaining great favor in England around the 12th or 13th Century. Further, the word "croquet" did not make its appearance in the French language until 1478, when, obviously, it was used to describe a sport that existed in England.