Corner of a Foreign Field : The Indian History of a British Sport (Paperback)

NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND gave the world the railroad, electricity and the theory of evolution, but also football, rugby and hockey. The major team sports were all invented in one island, as were the popular racket games of badminton, table tennis and tennis. Men have raced and punched one another since the invention of fire, but it was Englishmen who gave athletics and boxing their modern forms. Only two of the great games of humankind are not of English origin: basketball, which was patented in New England in the 1890s, and golf, the contribution of the Scots across the border.
Early modern England has verily been the 'games-master' of the world. Of all the sports they gave birth to, cricket is the one which the English themselves recognize and uphold as their national game. In its origins a rural sport which was once hugely popular in the villages of southern England, in the nineteenth century cricket was made part of the life of the industrial towns. The rules of cricket, and still more its ethos, most fully embodied the self-image of the Victorian elite, its aspiration to set moral standards for the rest of humanity. In 1851 the West Country parson James Pycroft suggested
that
The game of cricket, philosophically considered, is a standing panegyric on the English character: none but an orderly and sensible race of people would so amuse themselves. It calls into requisition all the cardinal virtues, some moralist would say. As with the Grecian games of old, the player must be sober and temperate. Patience, fortitude, and self-denial, the various bumps