Hughes - And God Created Cricket

For centuries, the sport of cricket has been known for its spirit of fair play and gentlemanly conduct. Wrong. Since the earliest primitive hit-abouts, it has been rife with gambling, corruption, subterfuge and violence, and has been run by a bunch of self-appointed incompetents. Well, some things never change.

In And God Created Cricket, award-winning writer and broadcaster Simon Hughes casts his expert eye over this most English of sports, evaluating how the game took shape in eighteenth and nineteenth century England and assessing how the rest of the world soon started beating them at it. With his unique blend of sharp humour, biting analysis and deep affection for cricket, Hughes revisits its history and delves into the characters who have given the game its unique fascination. And through it all runs the seam of the Ashes, ending, rather conveniently, as England beat the Aussies again in 2009.

Simon Hughes won eight titles with Middlesex, including four county cricket championships, between 1980 and 1991 before finishing his playing career at Durham. He started writing for the Independent while still playing, and has written for the Daily Telegraph and broadcast for the BBC since his retirement in 1994. He is known to millions of cricket fans as The Analyst for his role in Channel 4s cricket coverage, and is now part of Fives cricket commentary team as well as commentating for BBC radio. He is the author of five previous books including A Lot of Hard Yakka, winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award in 1997. He lives in Hammersmith with Tanya and their three children Callum, Nancy and Billy.

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Also by Simon Hughes

From Minor to Major

A Lot of Hard Yakka

Yakking Around the World

Jargonbusting: The Analysts Guide to Test Cricket

Morning Everyone: An Ashes Odyssey

Simon Hughes

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AND GOD CREATED CRICKET
A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552775069

First published in Great Britain
in 2009 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Corgi edition published 2010

Copyright Simon Hughes 2009

Simon Hughes has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Extract from Netherland by Joseph ONeill, published by HarperCollins.
Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins.

Extract from Beyond a Boundary by C.L.R. James, published by Yellow Jersey.
Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

Extract from Basil DOliveira: Cricket and Conspiracy by Peter Oborne.
Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown Book Group.

Extract from Stiff Upper Lips and Baggy Green Caps by Simon Briggs
Simon Briggs 2008. Published by Quercus Books.

Extract from Grovel! By David Tossell. Reprinted by permission of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

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To M.S.B.F.P

Cricket is baseball on valium. Robin Williams, 1974.

There is a lot of literature on English crickets history. There is so much, in fact, that as you scan the groaning shelves of the MCC Library at Lords, looking at the anthologies and leather-bound manuals and cut-and-paste autobiographies chronicling how we somehow managed to get them out for 165 in 52.3 overs, you wonder what on earth persuaded you to want to add to it. I only have one explanation. That after a forty-year association with the game, I realize I actually know three eighths of two sixths of naff all about it. Its about time I found out a bit more. This is my journey of discovery (permission to barf granted).

Dont expect a comprehensive account of every historical development and key match and notable patron as cricket evolves from a primitive seventeenth-century hitabout to a sophisticated but still bewildering business: one that can command billion-dollar rights from TV channels yet simultaneously remain a byword for manners and fair play. No. I want to retain an ounce of sanity and finish this book before I die and anyway an assortment of scholars and archivists and ex-prime ministers have already done the chronology job far better than I ever could.

What Im doing here is imagining cricket as a sort of human settlement, and identifying the defining moments and people that transformed it from a collection of rustic dwellings to a throbbing metropolis. Well, a buzzing city anyway. Ill chat to old timers in the pubs and linger down a few back alleys to get under the skin and find the soul of the place and how it reflects society. Its what you might call selective excavation: and, as with any archaeological dig, theres an element of luck in what you find. Just as long as you get your hands dirty...

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was creag. At least that was the word in the 1300 wardrobe accounts of Edward I referring to a ball game which may or may not have been an early version of cricket. Also there was cryce or cric, which was an Anglo-Saxon term for a stick or staff, and the Normans introduced the word criquet (a stick-and-ball game) into the English language after the Conquest. In the sixteenth century, immigrants from Flanders living in southern England are described playing creckette by the poet John Skelton. This morphed into Crickett (1598) in a coroners account of schoolboy games in Guildford. All this sounds plausible to explain the origin of the word cricket.

The game itself evolved from a variety of folk hitabouts played in villages on both sides of the Channel, each with its own local idiosyncrasies. The Almighty decreed that at some point one variety of this primitive cricket would usurp the others: shock horror! It could well have been the type the Frogs developed north of Paris. So we conclude that Brigitte Bardots ancestors created cricket. As Norman French vocabulary also included wiket (a small gate) and beil (a crosspiece), it must be true. No one knows for sure, of course, because no one wrote it down. Its not really that surprising. In those Tudor times there were rather too many Armadas and plagues and beheadings going on for anyone to be overly concerned with silly ball games.