Croquet

People say cricket is the quintessential English game. Those people are wrong. Cricket may have a longer pedigree, but it’s too boring, too democratic and too honourable to qualify: croquet is the game that truly captures what it is to be English. As any pub quizzer will tell you, Wimbledon started its life in 1868 as the All England Croquet Club, only developing its vulgar sideline in lawn tennis late in the following decade. Its reputation has yet to recover.
 
Just like cricket, where the game as played on the village green differs from the international game, the echt English croquet is the one played, ideally slightly drunk, in the echt Englishman’s garden. Its idiosyncrasies are what makes it special. For me, the only true croquet lawn in the world will always be the threadbare triangle of grass in the middle of Weston’s Yard in Eton.
 
A perfect croquet lawn — should such a thing exist — would make the game a cousin of billiards; a thing of unforgivingly precise geometry, governed by the Newtonian rules of particle mechanics.