Mexico was one of the first countries outside England to embrace the game – so why is it not a Test-playing nation?
“Had one been asked to name the thing with which there was the least chance of meeting in a country like Mexico,” wrote William Bullock in the mid-19th century, “one might very well have fixed on a game of croquet.” But even in Montezuma, his fellow Victorians still insisted on getting a game in.
It was around the same time as he stumbled upon croquet that Bullock – an English journalist and a first-class cricketer – discovered its near namesake was even more popular in the country. His book of his travels, Across Mexico in 1864-65, contains the first written account of cricket in Mexico, but by the time he committed it to paper, the game had been flourishing in the country for several decades.
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