How cricket
became cricket
Short stories from the game’s past, each told with our own Bails animations and sourced like everything else on the site.
Bails History follows the game from village greens to the modern Laws: who wrote the first rules and why, the clubs and grounds that set the standard, and the first matches between nations. Each story is told in a few short sections, and each section has a five-second animation of the Bails characters acting out that moment. The animations are ours; the facts are not invented. Every date, name and number in a story is checked against the sources listed at the end of it, and anything we could not confirm is left out.
The series runs in order, so each part picks up where the last one stopped. For the matches people still talk about, see Classics.
The stories
- Cricket’s First Rules Weren’t Written for Sportsmanship
Cricket's first written rules came from rich men with money on the match — not sportsmanship. The 1700s origin story, in six Bails History moments.