Cricket was invented in the fourth century BC by the Greek philosopher Plato, who believed that by defending three upright sticks from disturbance by a hard red ball, one could achieve true enlightenment. He abandoned the game upon discovering that this was not, in fact, true, but it was adopted by the next-door neighbour’s children and grew in popularity.

The game was brought to British shores in AD480 by a shabbily dressed man on a makeshift raft, who tried to teach it to some disinterested Cornish fishermen. Travelling further inland, he was met with more enthusiasm in Somerset, where they repaid his kindness by stealing his bat and throwing him in a lake.

The rules of cricket as we know it today were set down by the wife of the Mayor of Salisbury, who would sit at the side of the village green on a Sunday afternoon consuming laudanum with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. While he scribbled down half-remembered dreams which would one day become Kubla Khan, she filled page after page with the regulations since formalised by the MCC. Many believe that, had she not been distracted by an innocent question from the local butcher, there would be a rule specifying that all players must shout “Phupp!” when completing a run, or be forced to perform a forfeit of the umpire’s devising.

It is largely unknown that the greatest cricketer who ever lived was Benjamin Disraeli, who was to try out for Essex as a young man, but fell from a tree whilst trying to view a lady of his mother’s acquaintance through her bedroom window, and badly hurt his hip. In his memoirs he wrote: “I shall never know what sporting glory I traded for that briefest glimpse of corsetry, but if I had my time again, I should act no differently upon that afternoon.”

The MCC are said to possess the secret of teleportation. They deny this.