History of cricket

The origins of the game are most likely to be in Northern Europe, before the 11th Century. This was a simple game, with one player propelling an object – a piece of wood or some other form of ball - and another player striking it with a suitable club.

Historians have placed this game in the Celtic, Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, Dutch and Norman-French lands, but clear evidence is lacking.
However, even non-historians will recognise the link between this ancient pastime and the gladiatorial contests of the 21st Century, with Morne Morkel propelling a ball at over 150kph to Sachin Tendulkar.
Court documents from 1597 provide the first clear record of the history of cricket in more recent times. They concern a dispute over the ownership of a plot of school land. A 59-year old coroner, John Derrick, testified that he and his school friends had played "kreckett" on the site fifty years earlier – around 1550.
By the early 1600s, village cricket was played in the English counties of Surrey, Kent and Sussex and was soon adopted as a leisure pursuit in many schools. However, the local Judiciary considered it a bad influence on young men, and in 1611 two men in Sussex were prosecuted for playing cricket on Sunday instead of going to church!