With the Google Ngrams I had the honor of looking up the words Cricket, Hurling and Croquet. Since I am a sports fan I had to think of sports that were popular in the 1800’s because there is no way that they had soccer, football and baseball during that time. So I thought back to when I went to Ireland and what type of sports I played with my host family and what they talked about, and that’s how I came up with Cricket, Hurling, and Croquet.
With Cricket it was the highest of them all, I was wondering why and it seemed to be the oldest of them all, being invented in 1300 but it started international play in 1844, so that would make sense into why after 1845 it just kept increasing rather than having an inconsistent like graph.
It was at around 1846 when hurling and cricket were at the same percentage but not even a year later they were back to normal with cricket being very high and hurling back to normal level. Over all hurling stayed constant not moving as much cricket but still moving, the reason I think it is not as popular is because hurling was mainly popular in Ireland not really everywhere around Europe.
Now wit Croquet I have notice from 1860 to 1880 there are a huge peak and then it went back down. It was around 1873 that it was at its highest and that I believe was because only starting in 1867 they started to have matches with it. But when it stated to die down in the late 1870’s that was due to the increase popularity of tennis. Tennis hit a spark in the late 1870’s early 1880’s.
Overall the popularity of each of these sports were due to the popularity and demands of the towns people, such as that when they were fads and when they were not.