Croquet

Players call their own faults, and call an official over when they would rather not.

Croquet is self-officiated in ordinary play, and the reason is practical: most faults are visible only to the person committing them. Whether a mallet pushed rather than struck the ball, whether contact was momentary or sustained, whether both balls moved in a croquet stroke — these happen at the striker's feet and nobody else can see them.

So the laws place the obligation on the striker, and croquet's culture around that is strict. Calling a fault against yourself in a match you are winning is expected rather than admirable.

Referees exist and are requested. A player may call one to watch a difficult stroke before playing it — a hampered shot near a hoop, or a croquet stroke where a fault is likely — which is an unusual arrangement: the official is summoned in advance to observe a specific act, rather than positioned to watch everything.

Contested strokes and questions of law go to a referee or, in tournaments, to a tournament referee whose ruling stands.

That structure puts croquet alongside ultimate, orienteering and boules on this site: sports where the competitor is trusted with the adjudication, for different reasons. Ultimate made it a principle, orienteering replaced it with an electronic record, boules can settle its central question with a ruler, and croquet does it because nobody else has the angle.

The old English-speaking clubs, and Egypt.

England, Australia, New Zealand and the United States are croquet's historic competitive nations, and the MacRobertson Shield — contested between those four — remains the most prestigious event in association croquet. Club structures in all four are long-established, well organised and, in most places, ageing.

Egypt is the outlier and the most interesting thing in the sport's modern geography. Egyptian players dominate golf croquet at world level, from a deep domestic structure centred on Cairo clubs, and they arrived in the code the traditional powers had regarded as the simpler one. It is the same shape of story this site records for Colombia in ultimate, finswimming and roller speed skating: a country concentrating on a sport nobody else was funding, and winning it.

Beyond those, croquet is played in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Canada, South Africa, Japan, Spain, Italy and Latvia, generally in small club numbers.

The constraint is the lawn. Croquet needs level, closely mown grass maintained to a consistent speed, which is a groundskeeping commitment rather than a purchase — so the sport exists where a club owns and maintains ground, and almost nowhere else.

Gateball, the Japanese team derivative from the 1940s, has a participation base across East Asia far larger than croquet's worldwide, and is governed entirely separately.

Croquet's founding club became Wimbledon, and tennis took the lawns.

The game arrived in England in the 1850s, probably from Ireland, and spread with extraordinary speed — a lawn game that could be played by men and women together, in ordinary clothes, on a garden lawn, at a moment when very little else could. Manufacturers sold sets by the hundred thousand.

Competition followed quickly. The first championship was held at Moreton-in-Marsh in 1867, and the All England Croquet Club was founded in 1868 at Wimbledon to run the sport properly.

Nine years later that club added lawn tennis to its name and held the first Wimbledon championship on its croquet lawns. Tennis was faster, more physical and more appealing to the club's younger members, and it displaced croquet so completely that the club dropped croquet from its title within a few years — later restoring it as a courtesy. The most famous tennis venue in the world is a croquet club that was taken over by a sport it let in.

Croquet was contested at the 1900 Paris Olympics, almost entirely by French entrants, with women among the competitors — it is one of the first Olympic sports in which women took part. It has never been contested since, and the tournament is best remembered for having reportedly drawn a single paying spectator.

The World Croquet Federation was formed in 1986, and in 1996 established a world championship for golf croquet — a code that removes the break entirely, and which has since become the larger game.

A mallet, four balls, six hoops and a peg — and the hoops are the part that became a precision instrument.

The hoops are where croquet's difficulty lives. A garden set has hoops comfortably wider than the ball, and running one is a formality. A championship hoop is set with a clearance measured in fractions of a millimetre, firmly in ground prepared so it will not move, and running one from any distance or angle is a genuine shot.

That single specification is most of the difference between the game people have played at a party and the sport. It is the same relationship this site records between a pub pool table and a competition snooker table, or a recreational bowling lane and a sport oil pattern: the equipment has been tightened until the activity is hard.

The mallet moved from wood to composite shafts with heads of dense materials, and it is struck with either face. Head length, weight and balance are personal in the way a putter is.

The balls are milled and matched, and the sport's regulation of them is about consistency rather than performance: four balls that behave identically matter enormously in a game where you are using three of them as tools.

The lawn is the largest piece of equipment and the real barrier. It must be level and mown to a consistent speed, which is a groundskeeping problem rather than a purchase, and it is why croquet exists where clubs exist and almost nowhere else.

A federation formed in 1986 for a sport that had already lost its century, now governing two codes of which the newer one is winning.

The World Croquet Federation exists to hold world championships and to coordinate national associations, principally in England, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and — increasingly and decisively — Egypt. It has no Olympic ambition worth the name; croquet was contested once, in 1900, and nothing about the sport's scale suggests a route back.

Its interesting institutional question is internal. Association croquet is the historic championship code and it is difficult: the break means a good player can finish the game without the opponent playing, which is thrilling to watch if you understand it and dispiriting to be on the wrong end of. Golf croquet removed the break and guarantees both players a stroke, and it has grown into the larger game worldwide.

Egypt is the clearest evidence. Egyptian players dominate golf croquet at world level, from a national structure with real depth, and their strength is in the code the English clubs regarded as the lesser one.

So the federation is in the position several bodies on this site occupy: the form it was built around is not the form that is growing. Roller sports had it with skateboarding, water ski with cable riding, and croquet has it with a code that succeeded by subtracting the sport's most distinctive feature.

There is no professional structure in either code anywhere in the world.

The break, and what it does to the opponent. Croquet's founding problem. Once a player can construct a break, the other player may sit out most of the game, and the sport becomes an exhibition rather than a contest. Every structural response croquet has made comes from this — the bisque handicap, the time limit, and eventually a whole second code.

The bisque. The handicap answer, and unusually powerful because the recipient chooses when to spend it. It is the reason croquet clubs can run competitive tournaments across enormous ability ranges, and it means a handicap result and a level result are different kinds of statement.

Losing the lawns. Not a rule change and the most consequential thing that ever happened to the sport. The club founded for croquet at Wimbledon took up lawn tennis in 1877 and was taken over by it, and croquet's competitive constituency in England went with the grass.

Golf croquet. A code created by removing the break, given a world championship in 1996, and now larger than the code it was derived from. Whether that is croquet's salvation or its dilution is argued in club bars and settled by participation numbers.

Hoop tolerance. Championship hoops are set with a clearance over the ball measured in fractions of a millimetre, and exactly how tight they should be is a recurring dispute — tighter hoops reward precision and lengthen games, looser ones do the reverse.

Recorded as unsettled.

Which code is croquet. Association croquet is the historic championship game and golf croquet is the larger one. The federation runs both, the growth is in the simpler code, and the traditional powers are strongest in the harder one while Egypt dominates the other. Nobody proposes choosing, and the question keeps answering itself.

Whether the break is a feature. It is what makes association croquet distinctive and what makes it hard to watch, hard to learn and dispiriting to lose to. The sport's entire structural apparatus — bisques, time limits, a second code — exists because of it.

Hoop tolerance. How tight a championship hoop should be is argued continually, and it directly sets how long games last and how much precision beats tactics.

An ageing membership. Club croquet's participation is old in most of its strongholds, and golf croquet is the main recruitment tool precisely because it is immediately playable.

Self-officiation under pressure. The laws depend on players calling faults only they can see. It works, and it works because the sport is small and amateur, and nobody has tested what would happen if there were money in it.

The lawns. Croquet needs maintained grass and clubs that own it. Where a club folds the sport does not relocate, because there is nowhere to relocate to.