Something I wrote on Facebook . . .

Still trying to figure out what to write here, if anything . . . This seemed like it might be amusing for some . . .

This is a meme someone posted, which was an image but I'll transcribe (for my sanity):

The first testicular guard was used in cricket in 1874. And the first helmet was used in 1974. It took 100 years for men to realise that the brain is also important.

Seeing this kind of flipped a switch in my head, and the following was the result (coming in at /just/ under the length limit of a Facebook post) . . .

. . . that's lovely and amusing, but historically it's not a great analysis . . .

First off, a box has basically zero impact on your ability to bat - it doesn't restrict movement, worst case it's a minor irritation. A helmet /does/ impact your ability to bat - it impacts visibility, particularly peripheral vision which is important (ironically) when /avoiding/ being hit on your head. Without checking the stats I'd be willing to make a $10 wager that more people get hit on the head now than in the period before helmets were introduced, and I'd attribute this primarily to those peripheral vision restrictions which make it harder to keep a sense of where the ball is while you're moving to avoid it. Though people have also learned bad habits while avoiding balls going at their head, so they'll often turn away from it and duck rather than sway away while keeping their eyes on it - it's really frustrating watching first class batters do that, when they really should know better.

Second, in 1874 the ball was pretty much /always/ going through somewhere near groin height; in 1974 the same was still true, and it's still true today. The vast majority of deliveries a batter will face present at least a nominal threat of a groin hit, that's just the way that cricket works. By contrast, in 1874 it was really quite hard for a bowler to deliver a ball that would hit the batter on the head - the only reliable way was with a full-toss, pitching it in short so that it bounces up at the batter's head (the way modern bowlers do) wouldn't work well at all. In /1974/ that was /completely/ different - almost any bowler could bowl a bouncer that would threaten the batter's head, and the fastest bowlers could do so at 150km/s or more. This came about through changes in equipment and style of play, primarily through making the pitch /vastly/ smoother, harder and more reliable, which meant that bowlers could get reliable and predictable bounce off the pitch. Also, bowling actions and techniques changed, making it possible to bowl faster and release the ball from a greater height, making short bouncing balls more effective. And the level of skill and fitness and strength of the bowlers increased dramatically as a result of the increasing professionalism and better training regimes. So, a helmet wouldn't make much sense for a batter in 1874, but in 1974 it was becoming a serious proposition (though it didn't become standard practise even against fast bowlers for another decade or more; it's a requirement now even against slow bowlers). The delay between introduction and standardisation was because of the first point I made - the negative impact of helmets on batting.

So, why /did/ helmets come along and eventually become standard equipment? For that you need to look at what fast short bowling actually /does/ in the game.

It's easy to assume that a fast bowler bouncing a ball at the batter's head is just flat out evil and dangerous, but the reality is rather different: a ball aimed at a batter's head is pretty low risk and easy to score off. It's high up, which makes it easy to avoid if you choose to do so; the long distance between the point it bounces and where you hit it gives you lots of time to track the ball and determine how to respond; and the strokes you can make off that kind of ball are some of the most powerful in a batter's repertoire - if they're hit cleanly and well placed they're almost certain to score runs. So, a bouncer that's directly threatening a batter's head is a wasted ball - they'll say thanks for the runs almost every time. What's far more threatening is a bouncer that's aimed at the batter's /body/. It's likely too low to just duck under, it's harder to hit because you have less time off the pitch and you have fewer stroke options, and if you /miss/ it's likely to actually hit you on the body or arm. A well directed fast bouncer at chest height is a genuinely threatening delivery, even for the best batters - and that's /physically/ threatening, not just threatening in a game play sense.

As I noted before, bowling short and fast just wasn't an option in the early days of cricket, because the pitches were too unreliable - the ball could go anywhere and while it /might/ trouble the batter it might also give them an easy scoring opportunity. As pitches improved it became more useful to be able to bowl faster and shorter, and modern fast bowling started to develop, reaching a plateau we're still on in the 1930s - the best fast bowlers from that era would stand well in the modern era. And in the 1930s captains started making use of those fast bowlers and their ability to bowl short, fast and well directed, creating a thing called "leg theory" where the bowler would bowl at the batter's body, and the field would be set so any strokes they could play would be a risk of getting caught out. So the options were to avoid the ball if they could, defend (and risk missing and getting hit), or try and hit it through the field and risk getting out. Leg theory was supremely negative play, and was generally (almost universally) considered unsporting, which is kind of a big thing in cricket. It was also dangerous, because being hit on the body by a cricket ball going at ~150km/h isn't a minor thing, even if it's not likely to be life threatening. After a lot of controversy (this is a whole long story in itself - look up "bodyline" if you're interested) there were changes made to the rules which made classic leg theory illegal, and the broader idea of that style of bowling became unpopular. Fast bowling was still a thing, bouncers were still a thing, but they weren't used in a way that made it particularly risky for the batters - they had ways to respond that neutralised a lot of the risks, so bowlers didn't focus on it.

Then, starting in the 1960s and continuing for the next three decades, the West Indies (the collection of cricket playing Caribbean nations) developed a particular fast bowling tradition, and a style of play built to a significant degree around that. They built their style of play around four out and out fast bowlers, with a couple of other slower bowlers to fill out the numbers - typically a team will have five main bowlers and one or two extras, and it's rare for a team to have so many of one type because having a mix of styles is useful to support different conditions and contexts. So the West Indies were doing things differently, but they had the fast bowling talent to make it work.

This new style of play was very aggressive, with the bowlers bowling fast, moderately short, and using a lot of bouncers to intimidate the batters. Having a ball swishing past the batter's face at 150km/h became /common/, and the risk of being hit in the head increased dramatically. At the same time other cricket playing nations took note of the results the West Indians were getting, and adopted some aspects of their style of play - fast bowling in general took on that particularly aggressive and intimidating style (though it had always been there, it was moderated in the older style of play). And people were actually getting hit on the head, which focused people's minds on the problem, leading to the initial developments (based on motorcycle helmets, though they developed custom designs quite quickly).

So, the reason helmets came along when they did wasn't because people just didn't care about getting hit on the head - it was a fairly minor and generally manageable risk for batters prior to their development, and when the risk /did/ become serious they were introduced reasonably promptly. That said, there were plenty of players who didn't like them, some of them even calling their use "cowardly". But against modern fast bowling they became accepted practise reasonably quickly, because batters /weren't/ idiots and recognised the very real risk they were facing.