There are times when it feels as if cricket must be as old as England itself, but this is one of nostalgia’s illusions. Shakespeare knew nothing of the sport, then in its extreme infancy, but his works have been subsequently mined for proleptic cricket allusions, so that one finds cricket anthologies with titles such as Sing all a Green Willow, while fanatics of the game are said, like the dying Falstaff, to have “babbled of green fields”. A visit to the Long Room at Lord’s confirms how English landscape painting, which came of age later than its Dutch equivalent, might sometimes feature a cricket match, and the Augustan era, when such paintings were first made, is the time when cricket arose in the English soul, just as it came to fruition in the 19th century.
Only baseball has a finer literary tradition than cricket.