Sport
Sport includes all forms of competitive physical activity or games which, through casual or organised participation, aim to use, maintain or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants, in some cases, entertainment for spectators. Hundreds of sports exist, from those between single contestants, through to those with hundreds of simultaneous participants, either in teams or competing as individuals. In certain sports such as racing, many contestants may compete or consecutively, with one winner; some sports allow a "tie" or "draw". A number of contests may be arranged in a tournament producing a champion. Many sports leagues make an annual champion by arranging games in a regular sports season, followed in some cases by playoffs. Sport is recognised as system of activities which are based in physical athleticism or physical dexterity, with the largest major competitions such as the Olympic Games admitting only sports meeting this definition, other organisations such as the Council of Europe using definitions precluding activities without a physical element from classification as sports.
However, a number of competitive, but non-physical, activities claim recognition as mind sports. The International Olympic Committee recognises both chess and bridge as bona fide sports, SportAccord, the international sports federation association, recognises five non-physical sports: bridge, draughts, Go and xiangqi, limits the number of mind games which can be admitted as sports. Sport is governed by a set of rules or customs, which serve to ensure fair competition, allow consistent adjudication of the winner. Winning can be crossing a line first, it can be determined by judges who are scoring elements of the sporting performance, including objective or subjective measures such as technical performance or artistic impression. Records of performance are kept, for popular sports, this information may be announced or reported in sport news. Sport is a major source of entertainment for non-participants, with spectator sport drawing large crowds to sport venues, reaching wider audiences through broadcasting.
Sport betting is in some cases regulated, in some cases is central to the sport. According to A. T. Kearney, a consultancy, the global sporting industry is worth up to $620 billion as of 2013; the world's most accessible and practised sport is running, while association football is its most popular spectator sport. The word "sport" comes from the Old French desport meaning "leisure", with the oldest definition in English from around 1300 being "anything humans find amusing or entertaining". Other meanings include. Roget's defines the noun sport as an "activity engaged in for relaxation and amusement" with synonyms including diversion and recreation; the singular term "sport" is used in most English dialects to describe the overall concept, with "sports" used to describe multiple activities. American English uses "sports" for both terms; the precise definition of what separates a sport from other leisure activities varies between sources. The closest to an international agreement on a definition is provided by SportAccord, the association for all the largest international sports federations, is therefore the de facto representative of international sport.
SportAccord uses the following criteria, determining that a sport should: have an element of competition be in no way harmful to any living creature not rely on equipment provided by a single supplier not rely on any "luck" element designed into the sport. They recognise that sport can be physical mind, predominantly motorised co-ordination, or animal-supported; the inclusion of mind sports within sport definitions has not been universally accepted, leading to legal challenges from governing bodies in regards to being denied funding available to sports. Whilst SportAccord recognises a small number of mind sports, it is not open to admitting any further mind sports. There has been an increase in the application of the term "sport" to a wider set of non-physical challenges such as video games called esports due to the large scale of participation and organised competition, but these are not recognised by mainstream sports organisations. According to Council of Europe, European Sports Charter, article 2.i, "'Sport' means all forms of physical activity which, through casual or organised participation, aim at expressing or improving physical fitness and mental well-being, forming social relationships or obtaining results in competition at all levels."
There are opposing views on the necessity of competition as a defining element of a sport, with all professional sport involving competition, governing bodies requiring competition as a prerequisite of recognition by the International Olympic Committee or SportAccord. Other bodies advocate widening the definition of sport to include all physical activity. For instance, the Council of Eu
Cricket in India
Cricket is the most popular sport in India by far, is played everywhere. The Indian national cricket team won the 1983 Cricket World Cup, the 2007 ICC World Twenty20, the 2011 Cricket World Cup, the 2013 ICC Champions Trophy, shared the 2002 ICC Champions Trophy with Sri Lanka; the domestic competitions include the Ranji Trophy, the Duleep Trophy, the Vijay Hazare Trophy, the Deodhar Trophy, the Irani Trophy and the NKP Salve Challenger Trophy. In addition, the BCCI conducts the Indian Premier League, a Twenty20 competition, one of the biggest sports league in the world and the biggest cricket league in the world; the Indian cricket team is accredited with the honour of winning all the ICC tournaments under M. S. Dhoni's captaincy, a world record. While cricket is by far the most popular sport in the country it is not the country's national sport since India has no national sport. Cricket is an important part of the culture of India; the Indian team shares a rivalry with the Pakistani team, India-Pakistan matches are some of the most anticipated matches, most watched television broadcasts in the country.
The first match of first-class cricket played in India was in 1864, Madras vs Calcutta. Not many records exist from the match, however, it is known that the Man of the match was Praveen Chauhan, he played for Calcutta. Furthermore, the Best fielder was Ashwani Sharma. Just like Chauhan, he was from Panipat as well; the entire history of cricket in India and the sub-continent as a whole is based on the existence and development of the British Raj via the East India Company. India became a member of the'elite club' joining Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and the West Indies in June 1932. India's first match in Lords against England attracted a massive crowd of 24,000 people as well as the King of the United Kingdom; the major and defining event in the history of Indian cricket during this period was the Partition of India following full independence from the British Raj in 1947. An early casualty of change was the Bombay Quadrangular tournament, a focal point of Indian cricket for over 50 years.
The new India had no place for teams based on ethnic origin. As a result, the Ranji Trophy came into its own as the national championship; the last-ever Bombay Pentangular, as it had become, was won by the Hindus in 1945–46. India recorded its first Test victory in 1952, beating England by an innings in Madras. One team dominated Indian cricket in the 1960s; as part of 15 consecutive victories in the Ranji Trophy from 1958–59 to 1972–73, Bombay won the title in all ten seasons of the period under review. Among its players were Farokh Engineer, Dilip Sardesai, Bapu Nadkarni, Ramakant Desai, Baloo Gupte, Ashok Mankad and Ajit Wadekar. In the 1961–1962 season, the Duleep Trophy was inaugurated as a zonal competition, it was named after Kumar Shri Duleepsinhji. With Bombay in its catchment, it is not surprising that the West Zone won six of the first nine titles. Bombay continued to dominate Indian domestic cricket, with only Karnataka, a few other teams able to mount any kind of challenge during this period.
India enjoyed two international highlights. In 1971, they won a Test series in England for the first time surprisingly defeating Ray Illingworth's Ashes winners. In 1983, again in England, India were surprise winners of the 1983 Cricket World Cup under the captaincy of Kapil Dev. During the 1970s, the Indian cricket team began to see success overseas beating New Zealand, holding Australia, South Africa and England to a draw; the backbone of the team were the Indian spin quartet – Bishen Bedi, E. A. S. Prasanna, BS Chandrasekhar and Srinivas Venkataraghavan, giving rise to what would be called the Golden Era of Indian cricket history; this decade saw the emergence of two of India's best batsmen, Sunil Gawaskar and Gundappa Vishwanath responsible for the back-to-back series wins in 1971 in the West Indies and in England, under the captaincy of Ajit Wadekar. The Indian women's team made its test debut in 1976, it made its ODI debut on January 1st, 1978. Several team names and spellings were altered during the 1990s when traditional Indian names were introduced to replace those that were associated with the British Raj.
Most notably, Bombay became the famous venue of Madras became Chennai. During the 1980s, India developed a more attack-focused batting line-up with talented batsmen such as Mohammad Azharuddin, Dilip Vengsarkar and Ravi Shastri prominent during this decade; the 1987 Cricket World Cup was held in India. Since 2000, the Indian team underwent major improvements with the appointment of John Wright, India's first foreign coach; this appointment met success internationally as India maintained their unbeaten home record against Australia in Test series after defeating them in 2001 and won the inaugural ICC World T20 in 2007. India was the first Sub-continental team to win at the WACA in January 2008 against Australia. India's victory against the Australians in 2001 marked the beginning of a dream era for the team under the captainship of Sourav Ganguly, winning Test matches in Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, West Indies and England. India shared a joint victory with Sri Lanka in the ICC Championship, went on to the finals in the 2003 Cricket World Cup only to be beaten by Australia.
I
Database
A database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically from a computer system. Where databases are more complex they are developed using formal design and modeling techniques; the database management system is the software that interacts with end users and the database itself to capture and analyze the data. The DBMS software additionally encompasses; the sum total of the database, the DBMS and the associated applications can be referred to as a "database system". The term "database" is used to loosely refer to any of the DBMS, the database system or an application associated with the database. Computer scientists may classify database-management systems according to the database models that they support. Relational databases became dominant in the 1980s; these model data as rows and columns in a series of tables, the vast majority use SQL for writing and querying data. In the 2000s, non-relational databases became popular, referred to as NoSQL because they use different query languages.
Formally, a "database" refers to the way it is organized. Access to this data is provided by a "database management system" consisting of an integrated set of computer software that allows users to interact with one or more databases and provides access to all of the data contained in the database; the DBMS provides various functions that allow entry and retrieval of large quantities of information and provides ways to manage how that information is organized. Because of the close relationship between them, the term "database" is used casually to refer to both a database and the DBMS used to manipulate it. Outside the world of professional information technology, the term database is used to refer to any collection of related data as size and usage requirements necessitate use of a database management system. Existing DBMSs provide various functions that allow management of a database and its data which can be classified into four main functional groups: Data definition – Creation and removal of definitions that define the organization of the data.
Update – Insertion and deletion of the actual data. Retrieval – Providing information in a form directly usable or for further processing by other applications; the retrieved data may be made available in a form the same as it is stored in the database or in a new form obtained by altering or combining existing data from the database. Administration – Registering and monitoring users, enforcing data security, monitoring performance, maintaining data integrity, dealing with concurrency control, recovering information, corrupted by some event such as an unexpected system failure. Both a database and its DBMS conform to the principles of a particular database model. "Database system" refers collectively to the database model, database management system, database. Physically, database servers are dedicated computers that hold the actual databases and run only the DBMS and related software. Database servers are multiprocessor computers, with generous memory and RAID disk arrays used for stable storage.
RAID is used for recovery of data. Hardware database accelerators, connected to one or more servers via a high-speed channel, are used in large volume transaction processing environments. DBMSs are found at the heart of most database applications. DBMSs may be built around a custom multitasking kernel with built-in networking support, but modern DBMSs rely on a standard operating system to provide these functions. Since DBMSs comprise a significant market and storage vendors take into account DBMS requirements in their own development plans. Databases and DBMSs can be categorized according to the database model that they support, the type of computer they run on, the query language used to access the database, their internal engineering, which affects performance, scalability and security; the sizes and performance of databases and their respective DBMSs have grown in orders of magnitude. These performance increases were enabled by the technology progress in the areas of processors, computer memory, computer storage, computer networks.
The development of database technology can be divided into three eras based on data model or structure: navigational, SQL/relational, post-relational. The two main early navigational data models were the hierarchical model and the CODASYL model The relational model, first proposed in 1970 by Edgar F. Codd, departed from this tradition by insisting that applications should search for data by content, rather than by following links; the relational model employs sets of ledger-style tables, each used for a different type of entity. Only in the mid-1980s did computing hardware become powerful enough to allow the wide deployment of relational systems. By the early 1990s, relational systems dominated in all large-scale data processing applications, as of 2018 they remain dominant: IBM DB2, Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server are the most searched DBMS; the dominant database language, standardised SQL for the relational model, has influenced database languages for other data models. Object databases were developed in the 1980s to overcome the inconvenience of object-relational impedance mismatch, which led to the coining of the term "post-relational" and the development of hybrid object-relational databas
The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company known as Walt Disney or Disney, is an American diversified multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California. It is the world's largest media conglomerate in terms of revenue, ahead of NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia. Disney was founded on October 16, 1923 by brothers Walt and Roy O. Disney as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio; the company established itself as a leader in the American animation industry before diversifying into live-action film production and theme parks. Since the 1980s, Disney has created and acquired corporate divisions in order to market more mature content than is associated with its flagship family-oriented brands; the company is known for its film studio division, Walt Disney Studios, which includes Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures, Blue Sky Studios. Disney's other main divisions are Disney Parks and Products, Disney Media Networks, Walt Disney Direct-to-Consumer and International.
Disney owns and operates the ABC broadcast network. The company has been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1991. Cartoon character Mickey Mouse, created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, is one of the world's most recognizable characters, serves as the company's official mascot. In early 1923, Kansas City, animator Walt Disney created a short film entitled Alice's Wonderland, which featured child actress Virginia Davis interacting with animated characters. After the bankruptcy in 1923 of his previous firm, Laugh-O-Gram Studio, Disney moved to Hollywood to join his brother, Roy O. Disney. Film distributor Margaret J. Winkler of M. J. Winkler Productions contacted Disney with plans to distribute a whole series of Alice Comedies purchased for $1,500 per reel with Disney as a production partner. Walt and Roy Disney formed Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio that same year. More animated films followed after Alice. In January 1926, with the completion of the Disney studio on Hyperion Street, the Disney Brothers Studio's name was changed to the Walt Disney Studio.
After the demise of the Alice comedies, Disney developed an all-cartoon series starring his first original character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, distributed by Winkler Pictures through Universal Pictures. The distributor owned Oswald, so Disney only made a few hundred dollars. Disney completed 26 Oswald shorts before losing the contract in February 1928, due to a legal loophole, when Winkler's husband Charles Mintz took over their distribution company. After failing to take over the Disney Studio, Mintz hired away four of Disney's primary animators to start his own animation studio, Snappy Comedies. In 1928, to recover from the loss of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Disney came up with the idea of a mouse character named Mortimer while on a train headed to California, drawing up a few simple drawings; the mouse was renamed Mickey Mouse and starred in several Disney produced films. Ub Iwerks refined Disney's initial design of Mickey Mouse. Disney's first sound film Steamboat Willie, a cartoon starring Mickey, was released on November 18, 1928 through Pat Powers' distribution company.
It was the first Mickey Mouse sound cartoon released, but the third to be created, behind Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho. Steamboat Willie was an immediate smash hit, its initial success was attributed not just to Mickey's appeal as a character, but to the fact that it was the first cartoon to feature synchronized sound. Disney used Pat Powers' Cinephone system, created by Powers using Lee de Forest's Phonofilm system. Steamboat Willie premiered at B. S. Moss's Colony Theater in New York City, now The Broadway Theatre. Disney's Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho were retrofitted with synchronized sound tracks and re-released in 1929. Disney continued to produce cartoons with Mickey Mouse and other characters, began the Silly Symphony series with Columbia Pictures signing on as Symphonies distributor in August 1929. In September 1929, theater manager Harry Woodin requested permission to start a Mickey Mouse Club which Walt approved. In November, test comics strips were sent to King Features, who requested additional samples to show to the publisher, William Randolph Hearst.
On December 16, the Walt Disney Studios partnership was reorganized as a corporation with the name of Walt Disney Productions, Limited with a merchandising division, Walt Disney Enterprises, two subsidiaries, Disney Film Recording Company and Liled Realty and Investment Company for real estate holdings. Walt and his wife held Roy owned 40 % of WD Productions. On December 30, King Features signed its first newspaper, New York Mirror, to publish the Mickey Mouse comic strip with Walt's permission. In 1932, Disney signed an exclusive contract with Technicolor to produce cartoons in color, beginning with Flowers and Trees. Disney released cartoons through Powers' Celebrity Pictures, Columbia Pictures, United Artists; the popularity of the Mickey Mouse series allowed Disney to plan for his first feature-length animation. The feature film Walt
ESPN FC
ESPN FC was a website owned by ESPN Inc. which covered association football. Established in 1995 as SoccerNet, the website was acquired by ESPN in 1999. Regardless of the status of its main page, however, ESPN FC still publishes news on its website. Titled SoccerNet, the website was established by Greg Hadfield and his then-teenage son Tom in 1995 providing live score updates and news articles. Greg, at that time, worked for the Daily Mail and in order to gain capital rescinded ownership of the site to his bosses in return for £40,000 and a revenue sharing scheme. In 1999, Buena Vista Internet Group acquired a controlling interest of 60 percent in SoccerNet from the Daily Mail and General Trust for £15M. ESPN launched a U. S. television studio program on ESPNews, ESPN2, ESPN UK dedicated to Soccer known as ESPN FC. The program aired on weekday evenings at 6 PM, with a weekly recap show airs on Sunday nights; the program is hosted by Dan Thomas. Regular contributors include Craig Burley, Shaka Hislop, Alejandro Moreno, Steve Nicol, Paul Mariner, Raphael Honigstein, Gabriele Marcotti, Brian McBride, Taylor Twellman, Ian Darke, Kasey Keller, Frank LeBoeuf, Stewart Robson, Sid Lowe, Julien Laurens, Uli Hesse, Nilton Batata and Santiago Solari.
In April 2018, the program moved to the supplemental subscription service ESPN+. A favorable story about Qatar's preparations for the 2022 FIFA World Cup on the site was met with backlash for author Phil Ball's dismissal of allegations of abuses toward migrant workers by the Qatari government. ESPN apologized and removed the story from the website, saying that it did not meet their "journalistic standards". Official website Buena Vista Acquires, Relaunches SoccerNet
Sony
Sony Corporation is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Kōnan, Tokyo. Its diversified business includes consumer and professional electronics, gaming and financial services; the company owns the largest music entertainment business in the world, the largest video game console business and one of the largest video game publishing businesses, is one of the leading manufacturers of electronic products for the consumer and professional markets, a leading player in the film and television entertainment industry. Sony was ranked 97th on the 2018 Fortune Global 500 list. Sony Corporation is the electronics business unit and the parent company of the Sony Group, engaged in business through its four operating components: electronics, motion pictures and financial services; these make Sony one of the most comprehensive entertainment companies in the world. The group consists of Sony Corporation, Sony Pictures, Sony Mobile, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Music, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Sony Financial Holdings, others.
Sony is among the semiconductor sales leaders and since 2015, the fifth-largest television manufacturer in the world after Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, TCL and Hisense. The company's current slogan is Be Moved, their former slogans were The One and Only, It's like.no.other and make.believe. Sony has a weak tie to the Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group corporate group, the successor to the Mitsui group. Sony began in the wake of World War II. In 1946, Masaru Ibuka started an electronics shop in a department store building in Tokyo; the company started with a total of eight employees. In May 1946, Ibuka was joined by Akio Morita to establish a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo; the company built Japan's first tape recorder, called the Type-G. In 1958, the company changed its name to "Sony"; when Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo was looking for a romanized name to use to market themselves, they considered using their initials, TTK. The primary reason they did not is that the railway company Tokyo Kyuko was known as TTK.
The company used the acronym "Totsuko" in Japan, but during his visit to the United States, Morita discovered that Americans had trouble pronouncing that name. Another early name, tried out for a while was "Tokyo Teletech" until Akio Morita discovered that there was an American company using Teletech as a brand name; the name "Sony" was chosen for the brand as a mix of two words: one was the Latin word "sonus", the root of sonic and sound, the other was "sonny", a common slang term used in 1950s America to call a young boy. In 1950s Japan, "sonny boys" was a loan word in Japanese, which connoted smart and presentable young men, which Sony founders Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka considered themselves to be; the first Sony-branded product, the TR-55 transistor radio, appeared in 1955 but the company name did not change to Sony until January 1958. At the time of the change, it was unusual for a Japanese company to use Roman letters to spell its name instead of writing it in kanji; the move was not without opposition: TTK's principal bank at the time, had strong feelings about the name.
They pushed for a name such as Sony Teletech. Akio Morita was firm, however. Both Ibuka and Mitsui Bank's chairman gave their approval. According to Schiffer, Sony's TR-63 radio "cracked open the U. S. market and launched the new industry of consumer microelectronics." By the mid-1950s, American teens had begun buying portable transistor radios in huge numbers, helping to propel the fledgling industry from an estimated 100,000 units in 1955 to 5 million units by the end of 1968. Sony co-founder Akio Morita founded Sony Corporation of America in 1960. In the process, he was struck by the mobility of employees between American companies, unheard of in Japan at that time; when he returned to Japan, he encouraged experienced, middle-aged employees of other companies to reevaluate their careers and consider joining Sony. The company filled many positions in this manner, inspired other Japanese companies to do the same. Moreover, Sony played a major role in the development of Japan as a powerful exporter during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
It helped to improve American perceptions of "made in Japan" products. Known for its production quality, Sony was able to charge above-market prices for its consumer electronics and resisted lowering prices. In 1971, Masaru Ibuka handed the position of president over to his co-founder Akio Morita. Sony began a life insurance company in one of its many peripheral businesses. Amid a global recession in the early 1980s, electronics sales dropped and the company was forced to cut prices. Sony's profits fell sharply. "It's over for Sony," one analyst concluded. "The company's best days are behind it." Around that time, Norio Ohga took up the role of president. He encouraged the development of the Compact Disc in the 1970s and 1980s, of the PlayStation in the early 1990s. Ohga went on to purchase CBS Records in 1988 and Columbia Pictures in 1989 expanding Sony's media presence. Ohga would succeed Morita as chief executive officer in 1989. Under the vision of co-founder Akio Morita and his successors, the company had aggressively expanded in
Cricket
Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of, a 20-metre pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The batting side scores runs by striking the ball bowled at the wicket with the bat, while the bowling and fielding side tries to prevent this and dismiss each player. Means of dismissal include being bowled, when the ball hits the stumps and dislodges the bails, by the fielding side catching the ball after it is hit by the bat, but before it hits the ground; when ten players have been dismissed, the innings ends and the teams swap roles. The game is adjudicated by two umpires, aided by a third umpire and match referee in international matches, they communicate with two off-field scorers. There are various formats ranging from Twenty20, played over a few hours with each team batting for a single innings of 20 overs, to Test matches, played over five days with unlimited overs and the teams each batting for two innings of unlimited length.
Traditionally cricketers play in all-white kit, but in limited overs cricket they wear club or team colours. In addition to the basic kit, some players wear protective gear to prevent injury caused by the ball, a hard, solid spheroid made of compressed leather with a raised sewn seam enclosing a cork core, layered with wound string. Cricket's origins are uncertain and the earliest definite reference is in south-east England in the middle of the 16th century, it spread globally with the expansion of the British Empire, leading to the first international matches in the second half of the 19th century. The game's governing body is the International Cricket Council, which has over 100 members, twelve of which are full members who play Test matches; the game's rules are held in a code called the Laws of Cricket, owned and maintained by Marylebone Cricket Club in London. The sport is followed in the Indian subcontinent, the United Kingdom, southern Africa and the West Indies, its globalisation occurring during the expansion of the British Empire and remaining popular into the 21st century.
Women's cricket, organised and played separately, has achieved international standard. The most successful side playing international cricket is Australia, having won seven One Day International trophies, including five World Cups, more than any other country, having been the top-rated Test side more than any other country. Cricket is one of many games in the "club ball" sphere that involve hitting a ball with a hand-held implement. In cricket's case, a key difference is the existence of a solid target structure, the wicket, that the batsman must defend; the cricket historian Harry Altham identified three "groups" of "club ball" games: the "hockey group", in which the ball is driven to and fro between two targets. It is believed that cricket originated as a children's game in the south-eastern counties of England, sometime during the medieval period. Although there are claims for prior dates, the earliest definite reference to cricket being played comes from evidence given at a court case in Guildford on Monday, 17 January 1597.
The case concerned ownership of a certain plot of land and the court heard the testimony of a 59-year-old coroner, John Derrick, who gave witness that: "Being a scholler in the ffree schoole of Guldeford hee and diverse of his fellows did runne and play there at creckett and other plaies". Given Derrick's age, it was about half a century earlier when he was at school and so it is certain that cricket was being played c. 1550 by boys in Surrey. The view that it was a children's game is reinforced by Randle Cotgrave's 1611 English-French dictionary in which he defined the noun "crosse" as "the crooked staff wherewith boys play at cricket" and the verb form "crosser" as "to play at cricket". One possible source for the sport's name is the Old English word "cryce" meaning a staff. In Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, he derived cricket from "cryce, Saxon, a stick". In Old French, the word "criquet" seems to have meant a kind of stick. Given the strong medieval trade connections between south-east England and the County of Flanders when the latter belonged to the Duchy of Burgundy, the name may have been derived from the Middle Dutch "krick", meaning a stick.
Another possible source is the Middle Dutch word "krickstoel", meaning a long low stool used for kneeling in church and which resembled the long low wicket with two stumps used in early cricket. According to Heiner Gillmeister, a European language expert of Bonn University, "cricket" derives from the Middle Dutch phrase for hockey, met de sen. Gillmeister has suggested that not only the name but the sport itself may be of Flemish origin. Although the main object of the game has always been to score the most runs, the early form of cricket differed from the modern game in certain key technical aspects; the ball was bowled underarm by the bowler and all along the ground towards a batsman armed with a bat that, in shape, resembled a hockey stick.
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