Have you ever wondered how modern-day Cricket became what it is now? How did a sport invented by the colonizers become one of the biggest sporting sensations of the world? Or why is the Red Ball format called a Test?
Cricket has almost always been one of the most popular sports in the world. Born in the UK, it quickly travelled the world thanks to the imperialistic approach of the East India Company. This game became the favorite pastime of colonizers residing thousands of miles apart from their beloved Britain.
So, when you ask about a beginner’s guide to the game and its formats, it’s hard to pick up a starting point from this vast history of the game. So, let us start from the initial days.
Red Ball Format: The game’s heritage
If we ought to start, let’s begin from the first official match ever played. It was the late 19th century. On March 15, 1877, the Aussies faced the Englishmen at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and guess what? The Inventors of the game lost to the colonial Australian Cricket team by 45 runs in the first-ever officially recorded cricket match. Typical Britain inventing a sport and then being bad at it.
While the 1877 match was the first recorded official game, Test Cricket has been around ever since the mid- 1800s. Back then, the word “Test” was initially used in more of a literal sense. Test matches in the early days of cricket meant an English team testing itself against the Aussie Colonial teams. However, time went by, the game evolved, but the name stuck around. Well, maybe it’s for the best because Test cricket still is the hardest test for any cricketer in the world.
Test matches run for five days, and there are four innings in test cricket, so each team gets to bat twice in every game. Innings end when the bowlers bowl all the opponent players out. After the first innings, when the bowling team comes to bat, their main goal is to score more runs than the batting team scored in the first innings. The extra runs the bowling team scores is their lead over the batting team.
After the second innings, the batting team again comes out to bat, and tries to score more than what the bowling team scored during their batting. Once they equal the scores of the bowling team, anything extra that they score before getting all-out again becomes the target that the bowling team has to achieve within the remaining days of the game.
But what if the bowling team fails to score what the batting team scored in the first innings? Well, here comes the concept of follow-on. The team that batted first would then be able to decide whether they want the opposition to continue chasing their first inning’s score, or kickstart their second innings to increase the total target for the bowling team. If the batting team decides to let the bowling team continue chasing their first inning’s target, it is called a follow-on.
However, if the bowling team still fails to cross their first inning’s target after the follow-on, it results in a humbling innings defeat for the bowling team.
Test matches used to last until a result was achieved during their early days. One particular game in 1939 went on for 9 days, without a result. However, in the 1950s, matches were standardized to a maximum of five days, and thus began White Ball cricket’s journey towards its current form.
The White Ball cricket: Commercialization of the game
In the 1900s, the whole world was changing rapidly, and so was the game of cricket. While the five-day games were the first format of the game known to civilization, it was time-consuming for the audience. The game needed to move fast.
Here comes Karry Packer, an Australian businessman. Packer observed that the colonizers were huge fans of the game and tried to commercialize the game. His big idea was to launch a World Series Cricket competition.
However, there was a problem. Packer wanted to introduce cricket under the floodlights to attract more audience to the tournament. But it was hard to see the red ball under the yellow floodlights. Besides, who would watch a series where each match takes at least five days to complete?
But Packer had a solution. He changed the color of the ball from red to white. Also, so far, cricket was played in all whites, but Packer introduced uniforms for different teams. The white ball cricket started taking shape.
The championship has occurred every four years since 1975. Australia XI, West Indies, and World XI (composed of top players from the rest of the world) were the three teams that were participating in the tournament. WSC featured two innings in each match, and 40-overs per innings. The 50-over per innings ODI format was not a thing until the 1987 World Cup.
Cricket started getting popular around this time. India’s World Cup victory in 1983 significantly increased the game’s craze within the sub-continent. Teams like India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka started terrorizing the cricketing giants that once ruled the sub-continent.
However, the game wasn’t done yet. ODI was good, but the audience was asking for something even faster-paced, more exciting. So, late in the first decade of the 21st century, ICC began to test a new format of white-ball cricket.
This was the birth of T-20 cricket. Twenty-over-per-innings matches started getting popular. Franchise leagues arrived around this time. After IPL’s success, almost every cricket-playing country started its own T-20 franchise tournaments. Cricket got in touch with glamour, franchise leagues, and the thrill of twenty-over cricket brought in more engagement, and with it came money.
Currently, ICC has a World Cup of all these three formats of the game that arrives once every four years. The organisation has also introduced pink-ball cricket to popularize test cricket again by conducting day-night test matches.
This is the story of the Gentleman’s Game. The game kept evolving to keep things exciting for the audience, which keeps bringing in more and more viewership to the game despite it being played in only a select few countries worldwide.
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