Quote:The match between Australia and England, at the MCG, was only subsequently awarded Test status, and was originally billed as "All England v A Combined New South Wales and Victoria XI". Neither side was at full strength: Australia, who were effectively a combined Melbourne and Sydney XI, had no Frederick Spofforth. England had no amateurs - which meant no Grace, for a start - and no wicketkeeper, after Surrey's Ted Pooley was arrested in New Zealand the day after a gambling scam. Australia's Charles Bannerman, who was born in Kent, faced the first ball from Alfred Shaw, scored the first run, off the next ball, and the first hundred as well. He went on to 165 - the only century of his first-class career - before retiring hurt when George Ulyett smashed one of his fingers. In all, he scored 67.3% of his team's total of 245, which is still a record, 130-odd years later. Australia eventually won by 45 runs: on the same ground 100 years later, they beat England by exactly the same margin in the Centenary Test, which was arranged to celebrate this inaugural match.

Quote:If Pooley is known at all now, it is because he should have been in England’s team for the very first Test, against Australia at Melbourne in 1877. But he missed it, because he was in a prison cell in Christchurch. Pooley was a gambling man, though he often tried to deny it. He was once involved in what one of his obituaries described as “a certain unpleasantness” in a match against Yorkshire at Bramall Lane, when he was accused of trying to lose. “I never was a gambler on cricket,” Pooley said. But Surrey suspended him when it was proven that he had won a bottle of champagne in a wager with a colleague. Pooley had it with his breakfast and so had to be replaced as ‘keeper just after lunch. Despite that, Pooley was picked by James Lillywhite for England’s tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1876-77.

In Christchurch, England were due to play 18 men of Canterbury, in what they called an “odds match”, the bookmakers’ prices published in the local papers. Pooley struck a wager with a man named Ralph Donkin. He bet Donkin a shilling apiece that each of Canterbury’s 18 batsmen would be out for a duck. A fair bet, but for the fact that Pooley was injured and unable to play, so stood as umpire instead. In the end 11 men were out for nought, and Pooley won a healthy sum. Donkin refused to pay. He said that he had declared the bet off before the game. So Pooley punched him three times in the face. Donkin later accused Pooley of breaking into his hotel room and trashing his belongings. Pooley was arrested, along with England’s kit man, Alfred Bramhall, and a trial scheduled. The team travelled on to Melbourne without them, and John Selby took over as wicketkeeper for the first Test. Pooley was eventually found not guilty of destroying Donkin’s property. He travelled back to England with Bramhall, arriving home a month after the rest of the team.

Quote:In a diary he kept between 1709 and 1712, William Byrd, owner of the Virginia plantation Westover, noted, "I rose at 6 o'clock and read a chapter in Hebrew. About 10 o'clock Dr. Blair, and Major and Captain Harrison came to see us. After I had given them a glass of sack we played cricket. I ate boiled beef for my dinner. Then we played at shooting with arrows...and went to cricket again till dark."

The first public report of a cricket match in North America was in 1751, when the New York Gazette and the Weekly Post Boy carried an account of a match between a London "eleven" (as cricket teams, or "sides," are called) and one from New York City. The latter side won, though it is almost certain that both teams comprised residents of New York.

The rules of the game on this side of the Atlantic were formalized in 1754, when Benjamin Franklin brought back from England a copy of the 1744 Laws, cricket’s official rule book. There is anecdotal evidence that George Washington's troops played what they called "wickets" at Valley Forge in the summer of 1778. After the Revolution, a 1786 advertisement for cricket equipment appeared in the New York Independent Journal, and newspaper reports of that time frequently mention "young gentlemen" and "men of fashion" taking up the sport. Indeed, the game came up in the debate over what to call the new nation's head of state: John Adams noted disapprovingly—and futilely—that "there are presidents of fire companies and cricket clubs."

Yet cricket went down swinging: in 1878, some 15,000 people in Philadelphia watched a local eleven hold the Australians, already emerging as a cricketing powerhouse, to a draw. Fifteen years later, Philadelphia—then, as now, the crucible of North American cricket—beat the Aussies. "In its heyday, Philadelphia had more than 100 cricket clubs," says John Douglas, acting director of athletics at Pennsylvania's Haverford College, the only U.S. college or university that still has a varsity cricket team. "Every neighborhood in Philadelphia had a cricket team, and all the teams supplied players for the famous Gentlemen of Philadelphia who toured England in the 19th century."