Centuries ago, a game was developed that involved one player throwing a missile, perhaps a large stone, at a target, which another player tried to defend. It is thought that the target may at first have been the wicket-gate to a sheep pasture (origin of the wicket in the modern-day game), while the defending player would have used his shepherd’s crook (or "crick", as it was then known) as a bat.

An intriguing reference in the household accounts of Edward I for 1300 mentions the King’s son, Prince Edward, playing a game that sounds very like cricket with his best friend, Piers Gaveston, at Newenden in Kent. The first written record of an organised match played between teams, as opposed to two individuals, dates from 1646. Between those times, cricket had become a popular pastime among country labourers, but it was only in the 18th century that it began to be played by the gentry, whose landed estates provided plenty of space for marking out pitches.

The first cricket club in England was founded in the 1750s at one such estate at Hambledon in Hampshire. Basic rules were worked out, specifying the length of the pitch, the size of the wickets and the weight of the ball, and some of today’s recognised bowling and batting techniques were established. At this time, the bat still bore some ancestral resemblance to the shepherd’s crook, having a curve at the end a little like a modern hockey stick. It wasn’t until the 1780s that the laws of cricket as a national game were formulated with the foundation of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) in London.

In 1853, the modern bat – now straight-sided and made of willow wood with a rubber-coated handle – was introduced. The ball was by now a cork sphere, bound in hand-stitched leather pieces and dyed red.

Cricket thrived in public schools, where it was held to be the less hectic alternative to rugby or football for turning out gentlemen players. An annual fixture in the sporting calendar from the early 19th century until 1963 was the Gentlemen vs Players match, in which the recognised cricketers of the day would be taken on by a team of university students and older pupils from the public schools.