According to the British philosopher , it’s a sport where nurture trumps nature:
When it comes to environments … cricket and soccer are like chalk and cheese. Every kid gets plenty of chance to kick a football around. But cricket skills are by no means easily acquired. It’s not just that you need special equipment and facilities: there are deep-rooted habits to overcome. Both batting and bowling are very unnatural, all sideways and no swiping. So you need to be taught young; if you haven’t been initiated before your teenage years, it’s probably too late. … I’d be surprised to find any top-class cricketers without at least one enthusiastic club cricketer somewhere in their family background.
If environments matter more in cricket than in soccer, then this makes cricketing skills look less genetically heritable than footballing ones. In football, most of the differences come from genetic advantages just because there aren’t many environmental differences (if you live in a soccer-mad nation, opportunities to play are everywhere). But in cricket, there would still be a wide range of abilities even if everybody had exactly the same genetic endowment, because only some children would get a proper chance to learn the game. In effect, environmental causes are doing a lot more to spread out the children in cricket than they are in football. To sum up, cricket runs in families precisely because the genetic heritability of cricket skills is relatively low.
(Photo by Alden Chadwick)
The Dish 