The expression first appeared literally in cricket reports during the late nineteenth century, with newspapers describing teams struggling to score runs on rain-soaked pitches.
The expression “a sticky wicket” means a difficult, awkward, or delicate situation that requires careful handling. It is used to describe circumstances in which there is no easy solution and where a wrong move can make matters worse. Although the phrase is widely understood throughout the English-speaking world today,
Soccer inherited the term from the sporting vocabulary that developed in Britain during the nineteenth century.
The term “pitch” for a soccer field is one of those words that seems puzzling unless you know a little about the history of British sports. To most Americans, a soccer game is played on a field, while baseball is played on a diamond and football is played on a field or gridiron. In Britain, however, the word “pitch” has long been used for the prepared playing area of several sports, especially cricket, rugby, and association football (soccer).
