Cross about lacrosse

A bad day for Bugbrooke on Saturday: they lost 5-1 to St Neots in the Eagle Bitter United Counties League. Rather better for Castleton Gabriels, 1-0 victors over Chadderton in the North West Counties League, second division; also for Wraysbury and Deportivo Galicia, who shared the points in a 0-0 draw in the Select Appointments Middlesex League. Meanwhile, in the AMP Pearl Peterborough League, it ended: Pinchbeck 2, Eye 3. All of which, and a whole lot more, was faithfully chronicled in the sports pages of the national press on Sunday and Monday.

Elsewhere in our newspapers, small print is on the retreat, or parked, like the detail of opinion polls, on the internet. Yet the sports pages still find room for matches that I guess are attended by no more than 14 men and two dogs: Garswood United Reserves against Linotype Reserves, for instance, in the Bass WP Mid-Cheshire division 2 (a 0-0 draw). Or Tenterden Tigers Reserves versus Kennington Reserves, in the British Energy Kent County League: though that got called off.

And it isn't just football, either. Here, too, in their fine profusion, are results from Australian rules football, the RJ Temple WIBC WIB bowls championships from Belfast, boxing at Gdansk and cycling at Catford, the Women's European Artistic Gymnastics from Patras, Greece, ice hockey from North America, Workington versus the Isle of Wight in speedway and the J&B Odense Open Squash tournament from Denmark. There is curling, too, a sport which has been grabbing more space since the winter Olympics, this time from Bismarck, North Dakota, where Scotland's men lost 8-6 to Norway and its women 9-5 to Switzerland. And yet, in all these acres of newsprint, there is one well-established sport that never seems to get mentioned. Week after week, we readers of London newspapers get to hear nothing about lacrosse.

Lacrosse is a game I have never seen, let alone played. Few reference books in my house have anything useful to say about it, and the ones that do tend to make it sound like a cross between hockey and fishing. The basic equipment consists of a spongy rubber ball that you smite with a stick, much like a hockey stick except that there's a net on the end. You trap the ball in your net, and either flip it on to a colleague, who nets it in turn, or thump it past the opposing goalkeeper.

Though now rather out of date, Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia has a useful chart listing the playing positions, which include defensive stations called point, cover point and third man. If the referee calls "stand", this source tells us, all players must instantly come to a standstill. So there's something in common here, too, with games like Statues and Grandfather's Footsteps. There is also a rule, it says here, that if one side loses a player through injury, the other must cut its numbers accordingly. If the Nationwide Football League adopted that practice instead of allowing substitutes it might save the clubs quite a lot of money at this difficult time.

The game began among American Indians; it arrived here from Canada. Two touring sides came to Britain in 1883 - a team of white amateurs and one of Iroquois pros. ("Though they were not quite as good as the gentlemen," one observer recorded afterwards, "they proved to be worthy antagonists.") The goalkeeping skills of Cleghorn and White Eagle roused spectators from Inverness to Canterbury; there was also a match at Lord's. But while the passion lived on in some parts of England, it seems to have died elsewhere.

When I joined this newspaper back in the 60s, it used still to carry not just lacrosse results but even match reports. Most of the London staff in those days had done time in Manchester. Some must have watched the game, and a few may even have played it. "Bit of a vicious game, lacrosse," I remember one scarred old-stager telling me - which makes it all the more intriguing to find it's still played in upmarket girls' schools.

The Guardian's attention then reflected its regional roots. When you read the names of the clubs from which the players called up for world championship training come, the reason for the game's present media neglect becomes clear. Heaton Mersey, Cheadle, Stockport, Mellor, Timperley, Wilmslow, Old Waconians - they nearly all hail from Cheshire, or else, like the Old Waconians, from the Cheshire end of Manchester. Yes, there are teams in the south, but they don't seem to be as good. And even then they tend to be clustered: Purley, Beckenham, Croydon, but, Hampstead apart, not so much north of the river.

Is Cheshire perhaps in some sense the Canada of the UK? Is there something that enhances the taste for lacrosse in the air or the water? Or are Stockport, Heaton Mersey and Cheadle disproportionately peopled by expatriate Canadians or descendants of Iroquois? I would like to see the burgeoning army of sports psychologists breaking off from their studies of testosterone levels in footballers to probe these much more enticing questions.

d.mckie@guardian.co.uk