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Cricketers

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players each on a field at the centre of which is a 22-yard pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. Cricket is one of many games in the "club ball" sphere that basically involve hitting a ball with a hand-held implement; others include baseball (which shares many similarities with cricket, both belonging in the more specific bat-and-ball games category), golf, hockey, tennis, squash, badminton and table tennis.In cricket's case, a key difference is the existence of a solid target structure, the wicket (originally, it is thought, a "wicket gate" through which sheep were herded), that the batter must defend. The cricket historian Harry Altham identified three "groups" of "club ball".