Do you love the game of cricket?
Well then, you must have often wondered where cricket got its name from. Some people say that the name comes from the old French word ‘criquet’, which means a kind of club. Some say that there was a game called ‘creag etalios ludos’, played during the time of the English King Edward I.
The origin of the name is sometimes traced to the word ‘krickstoel’ which was a three-legged stool used in Flanders. Perhaps it refers to the three wickets used in cricket? Or perhaps the word ‘cricket’ comes from ‘wicket’ itself?
There is a theory that cricket was first played by shepherds on grazing fields. One shepherd would defend one of the wickets – gates in a paddock fence from being hit by stones thrown by another shepherd, using his crook to hit the stones away, and so ‘wicket’ became ‘cricket’!
