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Don Bradman played a big role in making Test cricket popular, but how restricted might his impact have been if he had never left the shores of Australia? Which brings us to ships and cricket's long historical association with them.

With the benefit of hindsight and because of the repeated telling of this tale, we can attach a quality of portentous doom to the photo above - of spectators waving goodbye to the Orontes as it set sail from Tilbury, carrying the English cricket team to Australia in September 1932. The smoke, the white handkerchiefs, the two boys, one bigger, resting his weight on the smaller one…

Cricket boards and advertisers aren't the only ones taking advantage of the sport's mass appeal. Big games attract all sorts of enterprising folks looking to cash in on the popularity of the occasion, such as this vendor selling cricket bats on a street corner in Nagpur during the 2011 World Cup.

South Africa are hosting New Zealand for Tests in the winter month of August, which is a good enough reason to talk about sweaters in cricket.

In the photo above, umpire Arthur Fagg ties a player's sweater around him during the 1973 England-West Indies Edgbaston Test. Earlier in the game, Fagg had refused to walk out onto the field, miffed at West Indies' reaction to a not-out decision against Geoff Boycott, before he was persuaded to return.

Watching the Kandy Test interrupted by bad light made me think of the role light, natural and artificial, plays in cricket. And where there is light, there are shadows.

War imagery has always been used to describe sporting contests: "battled on", "assault", "marshall the troops", "lay siege to", "tracer bullet", "shell-shocked". John Buchanan, in fact, is known to have taken more than a page or two out of Sun Tzu's The Art of War during his time as coach of Australia.

The metaphors of conflict help paint a picture of sorts for us spectators, but they begin to feel hollow when we look back at the number of players who had to leave the cricket fields to fight in real battlegrounds and the number of people who still try to lead lives (and sometimes play cricket) in war-torn areas today.

October 1945: World War Two was over but it would take years for Britain to recover from the blitzkrieg bombings. In the picture above, a group of men play cricket in Blackfriars, London, during their lunch hour, with St Paul's Cathedral in the background. According to the BBC, during the 1940 Blitz attacks in London, Winston Churchill asked that St Paul's be protected at all costs to preserve the morale of the people. "Bombs rained down on the cathedral. Volunteer firewatchers patrolled its myriad corridors, armed with sandbags and water pumps to douse the flames… an incendiary device lodged on the roof. As it burned, the lead of the iconic dome began to melt. But luck was on the side of the firewatchers. The bomb dislodged, fell to the floor of the Stone Gallery, and was smothered with a sandbag. St Paul's was saved."

If cricket were a wild animal, it would be a bear: sleepy, lazy, ponderous, prone to hibernating in the winter months, but also powerful, evocative, intelligent, and with a penchant for goofiness. (Clearly you can make this comparison with any animal if you put a few minutes of thought into it, but I'm going to assume you're too lazy to do that as a cricket fan - see what I did there?). Now that we've established the premise, let's get on with the business of looking at some photographs.

Members of the Maasai Cricket Warriors team pose (above) with Sudan, the last male rhino of his sub-species, the Northern white rhino, at the Ol Pejeta conservancy in Kenya to raise awareness about rhino poaching. Sudan, who is now 42, is kept under 24-hours-a-day protection, and his horn has been filed down to lower the risk of attacks from poachers.

Although the limited-overs formats are called white-ball cricket, the colour is best associated with the traditional game.

And who says traditional can't be fashionable? These four women sport very chic whites during a beach cricket session in 1934. But the pads are a bit much for a day by sea, aren't they?

Behind every successful cricketer is a family that helped get him/her get there.