Backyard cricket

Backyard cricket, also known as bat ball, street cricket, beach cricket, corridor cricket, garden cricket, gully cricket (on the Indian subcontinent) and box cricket (in instances of shorter grounds), is an informal variant of cricket. It is typically played in various non-traditional venues such as gardens, backyards, streets, parks, carparks, beaches, and any area not specifically designed for the sport.
Backyard cricket has connections to the pastimes of Australian, South African and New Zealand and English children who frequently lived on properties with large backyards, providing the facility to play this informal game of sport often with friends, family and neighbors. In South Asia, backyard cricket is very popular.
Though loosely based upon the game of cricket, many aspects are improvised: the playing ground, the rules, the teams, and the equipment. Quite often there are no teams at all; the players take turns at batting and there is often no emphasis on actually scoring runs.
Equipment and field:
Games with relatively few players typically forgo the teams and innings format of professional cricket, opting instead for a batters-vs-everyone format.
Garden/backyard cricket in South Africa and Australia is considered by many to be the pinnacle event of social and sporting excellence in the summer period. Many games are paired with a barbecue which often has a carnival atmosphere. It is historically very popular on Australia Day.
As a generally informal contest, the rules are flexible but usually agreed upon by the players prior to playing it. Below are listed some of the most common rules.
Backyard cricket allows for rules to be changed, and the rules being played by will depend on the context and physical environment of the game, and the traditions and experience of the players. However, some rules are relatively common:
If the game is not played individually, the person who owns the bat and ball may choose to bat first.
Play on an actual beach can be achieved either by using the flat strip of hard-packed sand along the surf line as the pitch, or by only "bowling" gentle full tosses to avoid the problem of the ball not bouncing off loose sand. If there are no true stumps available, then a bin, deckchair, boogie board or cool box may be used. Tennis balls are often used in place of cricket balls as they float in the water and don't get bogged in the sand as easily.
In beach cricket the creases and the boundary are normally drawn in the sand in a line which extends well past the side of the agreed pitch to prevent them becoming obliterated in the first over. The batters will frequently redraw the line. Sometimes, play is shifted along the beach to a new pitch as the packed sand of the original pitch is turned up, thus reducing the standard of or even completely disabling bowling. The tide plays a big part in the standard of the pitch in beach cricket. During low tide, the pitch tends to be on the semi-wet sand, and is deemed superior than cricket played in high tide (when the pitch is on dryer, looser sand). In particularly long matches, the play will shift up and down the beach depending on the tide.
A major element of contemporary street cricket is the use of a tennis ball; in Pakistan, tennis balls began to be covered in tape in the late 20th century and turned into a "tape ball". Tape ball cricket is played to the greatest extent in Pakistan, where it likely originated.
Several street variants of cricket exist in Latin America, such as bete-ombro and plaquita. In nearby Suriname, there is a game called "bat-en-bal" which is likely derived from cricket; in bat-en-bal, one end of the pitch has a set of stumps.
In March 2024, the first season of the Indian Street Premier League (ISPL) took place, which featured several elements of Indian street cricket such as the use of a tennis ball. The ISPL's goal is to prioritize the advancement of poorer cricket players and support the growth of tennis ball cricket.
Cricket on board HMS Gibraltar circa 1900 [1]