It's Not Cricket and Perhaps It Never Was: A Historical View of Violence in the English Game

Cricket is a sport in which one player [the bowler] hurls a hard missile [the ball] at speeds in excess of 120 kph at another player [the batter] less than 20 metres away armed only with a stick [the bat] to defend himself. It is a dangerous sport which in the early 1990s ranked fifth in terms of injuries sustained while playing. 1 Yet the phrase ‘it’s not cricket’ is still part of the English lan…