I was looking for Imperial units concerning a non-surveying subject when I stumbled across the definition of a chain. One definition was the distance between the two wickets on a cricket pitch. I found that to be pretty amusing! In the game of cricket, the?ÿcricket pitch?ÿconsists of the central strip of the cricket field between the wickets. It is 22?ÿyd (20.12?ÿm) long and 10?ÿft (3.05?ÿm) wide. The surface is flat and is normally covered with extremely short grass, but can be completely dry or dusty soil with barely any grass or, in some circumstances, made from an artificial material. Over the course of a cricket match, the pitch is not repaired or altered other than in special circumstances - meaning that it will change condition. Any grass on the pitch in the game's first over, for example, may have disappeared by the twentieth over due to wear.
Now there's something really useful! Instead of saying that five miles is 14.7 football fields, we can now say that five miles is 80 cricket pitches. That gets rid of that pesky decimal and clears things up enormously.
Cricket, incidentally, predates the Gunter's chain. Official related measures can be found here:?ÿ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1985/72/schedules/2020-06-13?ÿ I used the "find" feature in the browser to get to "chain".
Had American football originated in GB, we would undoubtedly have 11 yards between principal lines instead of 10. Then a first down would likely have been called a half-pitch. Likely, there would have been one yard less between goal lines, but one yard more in each end zone.?ÿ
Heck, we might be using base 11 for computation now instead of base 10.
Yep..... Eleven is the best answer.....
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