Say “silly mid-off” or “deep backward square leg” or “a single to long leg” to the average American and it’ll trigger a quizzical look.
Cricket — the so-called “gentlemen’s game” with complex rules, funnily worded fielding positions and matches that go on for five days — is hardly high up in the national consciousness of the United States, adding to the fascination of the Twenty20 World Cup the country is co-hosting with the Caribbean next month.
Yet it wasn’t always this way.
In the mid-19th century, cricket was regarded as something of a popular pastime in the United States.
Brought over by immigrants, it flourished in New York and Philadelphia in particular. Indeed, the first ever international cricket match — between the United States and Canada — was played in the Big Apple in 1844, and touring teams from England crossed the Atlantic to play.
By the time of the Civil War in the 1860s, baseball had become the dominant bat-and-ball game in the States and cricket was tailing off, becoming instead a sport that took a deeper hold in British colonies in Asia and the Caribbean.
“Baseball — at that time called ‘the lightning sport,’ though it became, for many, too stodgy and slow — could be played in two to three hours, which suited the hasty American temperament,” John Thorn, the official historian for Major League Baseball, told The Associated Press. “Cricket continued as the preferred sport of gentleman, but baseball became the…
