April 25, 1709: First mention of cricket in America

Those baseball-playing Americans. The country where even today cricket is a mystery — a symbol of inscrutable Englishness.

When Raphael, one of the mutant Ninja Turtles, is attacked with a cricket bat, he surrenders exclaiming: “Cricket? Nobody understands cricket! You gotta know what a crumpet is to understand cricket!”

For the American, cricket remains curious, enigmatic and boring.

But then we delve into the history books and find that the first ever international cricket match was held way back in September 1844 in New York, between Canada and the United States.

Yes, the incredible history of the game has various ways of catching us off-guard.

True, a lot of connoisseurs do know that cricket did become a major sport in Philadelphia, with regular tours by English and Australian cricketers; that down the line Bart King became one of the greatest cricketers to have never played Test cricket and perhaps bowled reverse swing. But those were in more recent days, commencing from the latter days of the nineteenth century, when cricket was slowly but surely becoming a major global sport.

But, delving in the obscure pages of the early days, when the game was just about peeping over the horizon of time, we come across another great surprise. Cricket was known and played in the New World during the very, very early days, way before the concept of the ‘United States’ had even been conceived.
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