There is no doubt that as a nation, Brits are rather too proud and among many things that they take pride on, cricket is definitely a major one. However, in the greatest cricket irony of the entire history of this game, a German---the country’s traditional political rival in Europe and an Australian---the country’s traditional rival in cricket, have unearthed a fact that definitely does not make music to English ears! That cricket did not actually originate in England and even in its early days, English rather detested the game of hitting the ball with the bat! The Englishmen had always claimed cricket as their own game. But with the Australian researcher Paul Campbell’s uncovering of this rather impertinent truth, the English seems to have been clean bowled and that is also in most humiliating fashion.

So how did Campbell found out this truth that might have shocked the Brits and perhaps amused the rest of the members of international cricket? Well, the researcher was looking for the variations of the ways that the word, cricket used to be spelt in the infancy of English language. His German guide, Heiner Gillmeister, however gave inkling that the word might have its origin in the word, Flemish. And in his search, Campbell found out this poem titled as, “The Image of Ipocrisie”. The poem is outright insult to the English sense of pride as it proves beyond doubts that the Englishmen were not the inventor of the game; it was actually the weavers from Flanders that brought and spread the game in England. The poem was composed in 1553 by John Skelton, a popular poet and playwright of the contemporary England. In the poem, the poet disapproves the ways of Flemish weavers, whom he called the “Kings of Creckettes” and urged them to get out of his country.

The discovery of the poem is a revolution of sort; previously the excerpt of a 1589 court case involving a man from Surrey was regarded as the earliest written reference to cricket. But the discovery of this poem defies this fact and also establishes that the game as well as the word, cricket was not English in origin. It highlights on the fact that the settlers from the Flanders imported the game to Surrey and Kent. This new founded theory also gets support from the well known cricket historian John Eddowes.

In the international cricket arena, the English have not been faring well in their own game. And with this revolutionary revelation, now they have also lost their moral right to claim as their own something, which has always been regarded quintessentially English. It is to be seen, how the English deal with this intriguing fact and whether the English cricket hits back in the upcoming days with a better performance to reaffirm their claim to the game.

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."

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