Cricket , class 9 (sst)
Q1. What are
the peculiarities of test Cricket? Or
Why cricket is called a unique game? Give reasons for
these oddities?
Ans. one of the peculiarities of Test cricket is that a match can go
on for five days and still end in a draw. No other modern team sport takes even
half as much time to complete
2. Another curious characteristic of cricket is that the length of
the pitch is specified ñ 22 yards ñ but the size or shape of the ground is not
t. Most other team sports, such as hockey and football lay down .The dimensions of the playing area: cricket does not.
3. There is a historical reason behind both
these oddities. Cricket was the earliest modern team sport to be codified,
which is another way of saying that cricket gave itself rules and regulations
so that it could be played in a uniform and standardized way well before team games like soccer and
hockey.
Q2. What were the first laws of cricket?
Ans. 1. The first written Law of Cricket was drawn
up in 1744.
2. They stated, the principals shall choose from
amongst the gentlemen present two Umpires who shall
absolutely decide all disputes.
3. The stumps
must be 22 inches high and the bail across them six inches. The ball must be
between
5 and 6 ounces
the two sets of stumps 22 yards apart.
4. There were no limits on the shape or size of
the bat. It appears that 40 notches or runs were viewed as a very big score,
probably due to the bowlers bowling quickly at shins unprotected by pads.
Q3.
Differentiate between amateurs and professionals.
Armatures Professionals
1. The rich who played cricket for 1. The poor who played cricket for a living called
Pleasure was
called armatures.
Professionals.
2.
They were called Gentlemen. 2. They were described as
players.
3. They were mostly batsmen. 3. Fast bowling and
fielding was done by professionals.
Q4. What important changes were introduced in cricket
in the 19th century?
Ans. Many important changes occurred during the
nineteenth century:-
1.
The rule about wide balls was
applied.
2.
The exact circumference of the
ball was specified.
3.
Protective equipment like pads
and gloves became available, boundaries were introduced where Previously all
shots had to be run and, most importantly over arm bowling became legal.
Q5. “Cricket
connection with a rural past can be seen in the length of a Test Match “How far
is this statement true?
Ans. Cricket’s
connection with a rural past can be seen in the length of a Test match.
1. Originally, cricket matches had
no time limit. The game went on for as long as it took to bowl out a side
twice.
2. The rhythms of village life
were slower and cricket’s rules were made before the Industrial Revolution.
3. Modern factory work meant that people were
paid by the hour or the day or the week: games that were codified after the
industrial revolution, like football and hockey, were strictly time-limited to
fit the routines of industrial city life.
Q6. “Battle of
waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton “Justify the statement.
Ans. This means that Britain’s military success was
based on the values taught to schoolboys in its public schools. Eton was the most famous of these schools.
The English boarding school was the institution that trained English boys for
careers in the military, the civil service and the church. Men like Thomas
Arnold, headmaster of the famous Rugby School and founder of the modern public
school system, saw team sport like cricket and rugby not just as outdoor play,
but as an organized way of teaching English boys the discipline, the importance
of hierarchy, the skills, the codes of honor and the leadership qualities that
helped them build and run the British empire.
Cricket helped to confirm this self-image of the English elite by
glorifying the amateur ideal, where cricket was played not for victory or
profit, but for its own sake, in the spirit of fair play.
Q7. Give reasons why cricket remain a colonial game?
Ans. cricket
remained a colonial game, limited to countries that had once been part of the
British Empire.
1.
The pre-industrial oddness of
cricket made it a hard game to export.
2.
It took root only in countries that the
British conquered and ruled.
3.
In these colonies, cricket was
established as a popular sport either by white settlers (as in South Africa,
Zimbabwe, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies and Kenya) or by local elites
who wanted to copy the habits of their colonial masters, as in India.
Q8. Who
introduced cricket into the media? How were one-day Internationals introduced?
Ans. Kerry
Packer, an Australian television tycoon who saw the moneymaking potential of
cricket as a televised sport.
1.
In 1971 the first one-day international
match was played between England and Australia in Melbourne.
2.
The popularity of this
shortened version of the game led to the first World Cup being successfully
staged in 1975.
3.
Then in 1977, Kerry signed up
fifty-one of the world’s leading cricketers against the wishes of the national
cricket boards and for about two years staged unofficial Tests and One-Day
Internationals under the name of World Series Cricket.
4.
While Packer’s circus was
folded up after two years, the innovations he introduced during this time
to make cricket more attractive to television audiences endured and changed the
nature of
the game.
Q9. What role did the television play in
revolutionizing the game of cricket?
Ans. Colored dress, protective helmets, f field
restrictions, cricket under
Lights became a standard part of the post-Packer game.
2. Cricket was a marketable game, which could generate
huge revenues.
3. Cricket boards
became rich by selling television rights to television companies.
4. Television channels made money by Selling television spots to companies who were happy to
pay large Sums of money to air commercials for their products to cricket’s
captive
Television audience.
5.
Continuous television coverage
made cricketers Celebrities who, besides being paid better by their cricket
boards, now Made even larger sums of money by commercials for a wide
Range of products, from tiers to colas, on television.
6.
The technology of satellite
television and the world wide reach of Multi-national television companies created a global
market for cricket.
Ans.1. C.K. Naidu, an outstanding Indian batsman of his
time.
2. Some of his great contemporaries like Palwankar
Vithal and Palwankar Baloo have been
Forgotten as they did not play the Test cricket for India.
3.
Naidu was the first cricket
captain of the Indian team and played against England in 1932.
Q11. How did decolonization affect the development of cricket?
Ans. Decolonization,
or the process through which different parts of European empires became
independent nations, began with the independence of India in 1947 and continued
for the next half a century.
2. This process led to the decline of British
influence in trade, commerce, military affairs,
International
politics and, inevitably, sporting matters.
3. This did not
happen at once; it took a while for the relative unimportance of post imperial
Britain to be reflected in the organization of world cricket.
Q12. The history of gymkhana cricket led to
first-class cricket being organized on communal and racial lines. Explain?
Ans. The teams
that played colonial India’s greatest and most famous first-class cricket
tournament
Did not represent
regions, as teams in today’s Ranji Trophy currently do, but religious
communities. The tournament was initially called the Quadrangular, because it
was played by four teams: the
Europeans, the
Parsis, the Hindus and the Muslims. It later became the Pent angular when a
fifth team was added, namely, the Rest, which comprised all the communities
left over, such as the Indian Christians. For example,
Vijay Hazare, a Christian, played for the Rest.
Q13. The establishment of the Parsis Gymkhana became a
precedent for other Indians. Justify?
Ans. The
establishment of the Paris Gymkhana became a precedent for other Indians who in
turn established clubs based on the idea of religious community. By the 1890s,
Hindus and Muslims were busy Gathering funds
and support for a Hindu Gymkhana and an Islam Gymkhana.
Q19: How has cricket become a game with characteristics
of both the past and the present?
Q30 : What was the quarrel between the Bombay Gymkhana
and the Parsi cricket club? How did the
rivalry end?
India entered the world of Test cricket in 1932, a
decade and a half before it became an independent nation. This was possible
because Test cricket from its origins in 1877 was organized as a contest
between different parts of the British Empire ,
not sovereign nations.
Pakistan has pioneered two great advances in bowling:
the doosra and the ‘reverse swing’. Both skills were developed in
response to sub continental conditions: the doosra to counter aggressive
batsmen with heavy modern bats who were threatening to make finger-spin obsolete
and ‘reverse swing’ to move the ball in on dusty, unresponsive wickets
under clear skies.
Q14: Give an example to prove that Englishman gave too
much importance to cricket in the 17th century.
By the
seventeenth century, cricket has evolved enough to be recognized as a distinct
game and it was popular enough for it’s fans to be fined for playing it on
Sunday instead of going to church.
Q15 : Why did the early cricketers in England use bats
with the shape of a hockey stick?
Till the middle
of the eighteenth century, bats were roughly the same shape as hockey sticks,
curving outwards at the bottom. There was a simple
reason for this: the ball was bowled underarm, along the ground and the curve
at the end of the bat gave the batsman the best chance of making contact.
Q16 Why is sports very important?
Sport is a large part of contemporary life- it
is one way in which we amuse ourselves, compete with each other, stay fit, and
express our social loyalties.
Q17: Trace the earliest rules of cricket. Who is the
guardian of cricket regulations?
The first written ‘Laws of Cricket’ were drawn up in
1744. They stated, ‘the principals shall choose from amongst the gentlemen
present two umpires who shall absolutely decide all disputes.
The stumps must be 22 inches high and the bail across
them six inches. The ball must be between5 and 6 ounces, and the two sets of
stumps 22yards apart’.
There were no limits on the shape or size of the bat. It
appears that 40 notches or runs was viewed as a very big score, probably due to
the bowlers bowling quickly at shins unprotected by pads.
The world’s first cricket club was formed in Hambledon in
the 1760s and the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) was founded in 1787. In1788,
the MCC published its first revision of the laws and became the guardian of cricket’s regulations.
Q18:
What were the changes introduced by the MCC in the rules of cricket in the
eighteenth century?
i)During
the 1760s and 1770s it became common to pitch the ball through the air, rather
than roll it along the ground. This change gave bowlers the options of length,
deception through the air, plus increased pace. It also opened new
possibilities for spin and swing. In response, batsmen had to master timing and
shot selection.
ii)One
immediate result was the replacement of the curved bat with the straight one.
All of this raised the premium on skill and reduced the influence of rough
ground and brute force.
iii)The
weight of the ball was limited to between 5½ to 5¾ ounces, and the width of the
bat to four inches. The latter ruling followed an innings by a batsman who
appeared with a bat as wide as the wicket!
iv)In
1774, the first leg-before law(LBW) was published. Also around this time, a
third stump became common.
v)By
1780, three days had become the length of a major match, and this year also saw
the creation of the first ‘six-seam’ cricket ball.
Cricket’s connection with a rural past can be seen in the
length of a Test match. Originally, cricket matches had no time limit. The game
went on for as long as it took to bowl out a side twice. The rhythms of village
life were slower and cricket’s rules were made before the Industrial
Revolution.
In the same way, cricket’s vagueness about the size of a
cricket ground is a result of its village origins. Cricket was originally
played on country commons, unfenced land that was public property. The size of
the ‘commons’ varied from one village to another, so there were no designated
boundaries or boundary hits. ….Continue
next answer
Q20 : Cricket both changed with changing times and yet
fundamentally remained true to it’s origins. Explain.
i)Cricket’s
most important tools are all made of natural, pre-industrial materials. The bat
is made of wood, as are the stumps and the bails.
ii)The
ball is made with leather, twine and cork. Even today both bat and ball are
handmade, not industrially manufactured.
iii)The
material of the bat changed slightly over time. Once it was cut out of a single
piece of wood. Now it consists of two pieces, the blade, which is made out of
the wood of the willow tree, and the handle, which is made out of cane that
became available as European colonialists, and trading companies established
themselves in Asia .
iv)Unlike
golf and tennis, cricket has refused to remake its tools with industrial or
man-made materials: plastic, fibre glass and metal have been firmly rejected.
v)But in
the matter of protective equipment, cricket has been influenced by
technological change. The invention of vulcanized rubber led to the
introduction of pads in 1848 and protective gloves soon after wards, and the
modern game would be unimaginable without helmets made out of metal and
synthetic lightweight materials.
Q21: ‘The social
superiority of amateurs was built in to the customs of cricket’. Explain.
i)The
social superiority of amateurs was built into the customs of cricket. Amateurs
were called Gentlemen while professionals had to content with being described
as Players.
ii)They
even entered the ground from different entrances. Amateurs tended to be
batsmen, leaving the energetic, hardworking aspects of the game, like fast
bowling, to the professionals. That is partly why the laws of the game always
give the ‘benefit of the doubt’ to the batsman.
iii)Cricket
is a batsman’s game because its rules were made to favour ‘Gentlemen’, who did
most of the batting. The captain of a cricket team was traditionally a batsman.
iv)The
social superiority of the amateur batsman was not because batsmen were
naturally better captains but because they were generally Gentlemen. Captains
of teams, whether Club teams or national sides, were always amateurs.
Q22: Why is it said that ‘The Battle of Waterloo’ was
won on the playing fields of Eton?
This means that Britain ’s military success was
based on the values taught to schoolboys in its public schools. Eton was the most famous of these schools. The English
boarding school was the institution that trained English boys for careers in
the military, the civil service and the church, the three great institutions of
imperial England .
They introduced
team sport like cricket and rugby not just as outdoor play, but as an organized
way of teaching English boys the discipline, the importance of hierarchy,
the skills, the codes of honor and the
leadership qualities that helped them build and run the British empire.
Q23: Why did Thomas Arnold introduce cricket in his
school?
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, men like
Thomas Arnold, headmaster of the famous Rugby School and founder of the modern
public school system, saw team sport like cricket and rugby not just as outdoor
play, but as an organized way of teaching English boys the discipline, the
importance of hierarchy, the skills, the codes of honor and the
leadership qualities that helped them build and run the British empire.
Victorian empire builders justified the
conquest of other countries as an act of unselfish social service, by which
backward peoples were introduced to the civilizing influence of British law and
Western knowledge.
Cricket helped to confirm this self-image of the English
elite by glorifying the amateur ideal, where cricket was played not for victory
or profit, but for its own sake, in the spirit of fair play.
Q24: What are the real factors that helped Britain to win
Napoleonic wars?
( Battle
of Waterloo )
i)In
actual fact the Napoleonic wars were won because of the economic contribution
of the iron works of Scotland
and Wales , the mills of
Lancashire and the financial houses of the City of London .
ii)It was
the English lead in trade and industry that made Britain the world’s greatest power,
but it suited the English ruling class to believe that it was the superior
character of its young men, built in boarding schools, playing gentlemanly
games like cricket, that helped them to come up.
Q25 : Why did cricket become popular in India and the
West Indies?
i)While
some English team games like hockey and football became international games,
played all over the world, cricket remained a colonial game, limited to
countries that had once been part of the British Empire .
ii)The
pre-industrial oddness of cricket made it a hard game to export. It took root
only in countries that the British conquered and ruled. In these colonies,
white settlers (as in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia, New Zealand
established cricket as a popular sport either the West Indies and Kenya) or by
local elites who wanted to copy the habits of their colonial masters, as in
India.
iii)While
British imperial officials brought the game to the colonies, they made little
effort to spread the game, especially in colonial territories where the
subjects of empire were mainly non-white, such as India
and the West Indies . Here, playing cricket
became a sign of superior social and
racial status, and the Afro-Caribbean population was discouraged from
participating in organized club cricket, which remained dominated by white
plantation owners and their servants.
iv)The
first non-white club in the West Indies was
established towards the end of the
nineteenth century, and even in this case its
members were light-skinned mulattos.
Q26 : Why was the success in cricket considered a measure
of racial equality and political progress in Caribbean countries?
Despite the
exclusiveness of the white cricket elite in the West Indies, the game became
hugely popular in the Caribbean . Success at
cricket became a measure of racial equality and political progress.
At the time of
their independence many of the political leaders of Caribbean
countries like Forbes Burnham and Eric Williams saw in the game a chance for
self respect and international standing.
When the West
Indies won its first Test series against England in1950, it was celebrated
as a national achievement, as a way of demonstrating that West Indians were the
equals of white Englishmen.
Q27 : Why did West Indies celebrate the winning of the
first test series as a national
achievement ?
What were the ironies in it?
When the West
Indies won its first Test series against England in1950, it was celebrated
as a national achievement, as a way of demonstrating that West Indians were the
equals of white Englishmen.
There were two ironies to this great
victory.
One, the West Indian team that won was captained by a
white player. The first time a black player led the West Indies Test team was
in 1960 when Frank Worrell was named captain.
And two, the West Indies
cricket team represented not one nation but several dominions that later
became independent countries.
Q28 : On what grounds do cricket fans take sides?
i)Cricket
fans know that watching a match involves taking sides. In a Ranji Trophy match
when Delhi
plays Mumbai, the loyalty of spectators depends on which city they come from or
support.
ii)When India plays Australia ,
the spectators watching the match on television in Bhopal or Chennai feel involved as Indians –
they are moved by nationalist loyalties.
Q29: Trace the history of cricket in India.
i)Cricket
in colonial India
was organized on the principle of race and religion. The first record we have
of cricket being played in India
is from 1721, an account of recreational cricket played by English sailors in
Cambay.
ii)First
Indian club, the Calcutta Cricket Club, was established in 1792. Through the
eighteenth century, cricket in India
was almost wholly a sport played by British military men and civil servants in
all-white clubs and gymkhanas.
iii)Playing
cricket in the privacy of these clubs was more than just fun: it was also an
escape from the strangeness, discomfort and danger of their stay in India .
Indians were considered to have no talent for the game and certainly not meant
to play it. But they did.
iv)The
origins of Indian cricket, that is, cricket played by Indians are to found in Bombay and the first
Indian community to start playing the game was the small community of
Zoroastrians, the Parsis. Brought into close contact with the British because
of their interest in trade and the first Indian community to westernize, the
Parsis founded the first Indian cricket club, the Oriental Cricket Club in Bombay in 1848. Parsi
clubs were funded and sponsored by Parsi businessmen like the Tatas and the
Wadias.
v)By the
1890s, Hindus and Muslims were busy gathering funds and support for a Hindu
Gymkhana and an Islam Gymkhana.
vi)In the
late nineteenth century, many Indian institutions and movements were organised
around the idea of religious community because the colonial state encouraged
these divisions and was quick to recognise communal institutions.
vii)The teams that played India ’s greatest and most famous
first-class cricket tournament did not represent regions, as teams in today’s
Ranji Trophy currently do, but religious communities. It later became the Pentangular when a fifth
team was added, namely, the Rest, which
comprised all the communities left over, such as the Indian Christians..
There was a quarrel between the Bombay Gymkhana, a
whites-only club, and Parsi cricketers over the use of a public park. The
Parsis complained that the park was left unfit for cricket because the polo
ponies of the Bombay Gymkhana dug up the surface.
The rivalry between the Parsis and the racist Bombay
Gymkhana had a happy ending for these pioneers of Indian cricket. A Parsi team
beat the Bombay Gymkhana at cricket in 1889.
Q31 : Why did Mahatma Gandhi condemn pentagular
tournament?
Mahatma Gandhi , condemned the Pentangular as a
communally divisive competition that was out of place in a time when
nationalists were trying to unite India ’s diverse population.
The colonial state and its divisive conception of India was the
rock on which the Pentangular was built.
Q32:
Why was India able to play Test cricket even before Independence?
The first Test was played between England and Australia
when Australia
was still a white settler colony, not even a self-governing dominion.
Similarly, the small countries of the Caribbean that together make up the West
Indies team were British colonies till well after the Second
World War.
Q33
: ‘The name of ICC was changed from the Imperial Cricket Conference to
International Cricket Conference’.
Explain.
After Indian independence kick-started the disappearance
of the British Empire. The supremacy of Britain
on Cricket ended later. The regulation
of international cricket remained the business of the Imperial Cricket Conference ICC.
The ICC, renamed the International Cricket Conference as
late as 1965, which was dominated by its foundation members, England and Australia , which retained the right
of veto over its proceedings. But in 1989 there was a demand for equal
membership in ICC.
Q34 : Prove by giving examples that the colonial flavour
of cricket was seen during 1950
to 1960?
The colonial flavour of world cricket during the 1950s
and 1960s can be seen from the fact that England and the other white
commonwealth countries, Australia and New Zealand, continued to play Test
cricket with South Africa, a racist state that practiced a policy of racial segregation which, among other things, barred
non-whites (who made up the majority of South Africa’s population) from
representing that country in Test matches.
Test-playing nations like India ,
Pakistan and the West Indies
boycotted South Africa ,
but they did not have the necessary power in the ICC to debar that country from
Test cricket. That only came to pass
when the political pressure to isolate South Africa applied by the newly
decolonized nations of Asia and Africa combined with liberal feeling in Britain
and forced the English cricket authorities to cancel a tour by South Africa in
1970.
Q35 : How have advances especially television
technology affected the development of
contemporary
cricket?
Kerry Packer, an Australian television tycoon who saw the
moneymaking potential of cricket as a televised sport, signed up fifty-one of
the world’s leading cricketers.
Packer drove home the lesson that cricket was a
marketable game, which could generate huge revenues. Television channels made
money by selling television spots to companies who were happy to pay large sums
of money to telecast commercials for their products to cricket’s captive
television audience.
Television coverage changed cricket. It expanded the
audience for the game by beaming cricket into small towns and villages. It also
broadened cricket’s social base. Children who had never previously had the
chance to watch international cricket because they lived outside the big
cities, where top-level cricket was played, could now watch and learn by
imitating their heroes.
The technology of satellite television and the world wide
reach of multi-national television companies created a global market for
cricket.
Coloured dress, protective helmets,
field restrictions, cricket under lights, became a standard part of the
post-Packer game
Q36 : Why was the ICC headquarters shifted from London
to Dubai?
Since India
had the largest viewership for the game amongst the cricket-playing nations and
the largest market in the cricketing world, the game’s centre of gravity
shifted to South Asia . This shift was
symbolized by the shifting of the ICC headquarters from London
to tax-free Dubai .
A more important sign that the centre of gravity in
cricket has shifted away from the old, Anglo-Australian axis is that
innovations in cricket technique in recent years have mainly come from the
practice of sub continental teams in countries like India ,
Pakistan and Sri Lanka .
In time, it came to be accepted that the laws of cricket
could not continue to be framed for British or Australian conditions of play,
and they became part of the technique of all bowlers, everywhere in the world.
Q37 : Why were the Indian institutions and movements
organized around the idea of
religion Communities in the Nineteenth century? OR How was cricket
organized on communal lines in
India?
The origins of Indian cricket, that is, cricket played by
Indians are to found in Bombay
and the first Indian community to start playing the game was the small
community of Zoroastrians, the Parsis. Parsi clubs were funded and sponsored by
Parsi businessmen like the Tatas and the Wadias.
By the 1890s, Hindus and Muslims were busy gathering
funds and support for a Hindu Gymkhana and an Islam Gymkhana.
In the late
nineteenth century, many Indian institutions and movements were organised
around the idea of religious community because the colonial state encouraged
these divisions and was quick to recognize communal institutions.
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