Cricket

Cricket is a bat and ball game played between two teams of eleven, in which a bowler delivers the ball toward a batter defending a wicket. The game's earliest known documented reference is a 1598 court case in Guildford, Surrey, in which a witness testified to playing a game called creckett around 1550, which places the game's earliest firm evidence in southeast England in the mid sixteenth century, though it likely existed informally before that as a children's or shepherds' pastime with no surviving record. The Marylebone Cricket Club, founded in 1787, took on the role of custodian of the Laws of Cricket from 1788 onward, and its codification is the basis of the modern game. A batting side scores runs chiefly by running between the wickets after striking the ball, or by hitting a boundary (four runs if the ball reaches the field's edge on the ground, six if it clears the edge without touching the ground); a batter is dismissed, most commonly bowled, caught or leg before wicket, and an all-out or completed innings ends that side's turn to bat. The fielding side's eleven include a wicket-keeper stationed behind the batter's wicket and a rotating bowler, with the rest positioned around the field to catch or stop the ball; the format governs the contest's length far more than in most sports, ranging from a Test match's five days, through a One Day International's fifty overs (six-ball sets) a side, down to Twenty20's twenty overs a side.