Flannels on the Sward: History of Cricket in the Americas by Jayesh Patel (review)

Jayesh Patel’s passion for cricket instilled during his boyhood in Calcutta, India, radiates through this self-published volume. As a young man he enjoyed watching matches and playing on school and college teams. After he immigrated to the United States he was surprised and pleased to discover publications on cricket’s history in the United States and Canada because he had thought that “`America’ and `Cricket’ were poles apart” (p. 9).

Flannels on the Sward, a true labor of love, includes detailed narrative accounts of leagues, teams, and prominent players; box scores of featured matches; lengthy quotations from periodicals and memoirs; poems; and dozens of images. Patel could not resist the urge to include every scrap of information. Since he uses a topical scheme of organization the story jumps back and forth in time. This work would have benefited greatly from rigorous copyediting.

Patel begins with wicket, a popular amusement only in colonial New England and poses (but does not answer) the question: why did English settlers not introduce the game elsewhere in colonial America? In lieu of an explanation he states: “Wicket is a microcosm of Cricket; just as Cricket did not find favor America, similarly Wicket did not find favor outside of New England” (p. 37). The next eight chapters recount the origins and growth of cricket in Canada and the United States from the 1700s to the early twentieth century. They cover the international tours of select English, Canadian, American, and Australian teams; biographical sketches of prominent sportswriters, club officials, and celebrated players (especially Henry Chadwick, Harry and George Wright, John Barton King, and “Ranji” Ranjitsinhj); cricket’s brief reign as the premier team sport in the United States; its unsuccessful competition with baseball, its Golden Age among the Philadelphia elite (which peaked around 1905), and the inability of that city’s premier cricket families to transmit their passion for the sport to their youth during the early twentieth century. The work concludes with sketches of the game’s history in Hawai‘i, Mexico, and South America. The book omits the British West Indies, where cricket enjoyed enormous popularity. Patel also does not describe and evaluate the revival of cricket in the United States by immigrants from the West Indies, India, Pakistan, and other lands that were formerly ruled by Great Britain.

Flannels on the Sward is a comprehensive narrative of cricket’s history in North, Central, and South America, but it will disappoint social historians because of Patel’s sketchy treatment of the ethnic, social class, gender, and racial aspects of the sport in those continents. He does not entirely ignore these issues. He notes the critical role of upper- and working-class English immigrants in promoting cricket in the United States and throughout the British Empire. He also reports on female cricketers of the Staten Island Club, at several girls private academies, and at Smith College, where the ladies played by special rules. But Patel does not consider issues that sport historians have raised concerning how participation in sport challenged traditional ideas about gender in Victorian America. His treatment of race is even more limited than his coverage of gender. It consists only of a brief account of a few black cricket players and clubs during the 1860s and the Haverford School’s cancelation of a match against a visiting West Indies team in 1911, when they learned that it might include black players.

Patel devotes one brief chapter to the two central questions of cricket’s history in North America: why did it lose the competition with baseball that determined which game would become the premier team sport in the United States and Canada? Why did it fail to become a mainstream sport in North America? His explanation is disorganized, confused, and incomplete. He does not present a clear summary of the various explanations provided by Tom Melville, Melvin Adelman...