Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

62 After a sluggish start in the first third of the century, the game began to take root with increasing urbanisation, as evidenced by the formation of the St George’s Cricket Club in 1840, and New York CC in 1844. No longer was it considered a pastime only suitable for children, and it became organised to the extent that St George’s was employing no less than six professionals by 1848. The press began to show an interest, and the public flocked in their thousands to games such as the world’s first international contest, against Canada at Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1844. The ground at Hoboken, known as the Elysian Fields, is also claimed by its supporters as the venue of the first organised baseball match in America in 1846. Thereafter, it was a fight to the death between the two major bat-and-ball sports, and the Civil War left cricket bloodied if, for the moment, unbowed. There had always been a suggestion that cricket was a snobbish occupation, especially in the hands of the St George’s Club, whose members tended to be exclusively English, and therefore, at least in the view of some of the press, resistant to the spread of the game amongst native-born Americans. The idea that cricket was failing to thrive because of nationalistic sentiments was fuelled by newspapers like the New York Clipper , which also highlighted the difference in pace of the two games: now-a-days, with the popular National Game to contend against, very few can be induced to witness a game which takes as many days to decide as it does hours to play a game of base ball. On the face of it, this might give hope to those seeking to market Twenty20 as a viable format in the USA, but, in truth, it is increasingly clear at this distance in time that cricket could never supplant baseball in the national psyche because its structure was already well-established when it arrived on American shores, whereas baseball was still at an embryonic stage, and therefore ripe for change through trial and error. Thus, it became a game that not only suited the American attention span, but also, in the words of the New York Times , promoted ‘the manly attributes of pluck, courage, endurance, activity and judgment.’ Despite the onward march of baseball, the St George’s Club was determined to keep its end up, and, having lost its lease on the Elysian Fields and failed to secure a pitch in Central Park itself, it set about finding new headquarters. On 20April 1867, the Clipper announced: This Club recently effected the purchase of a new ground Captain of England