Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries Mitcham was the country home of a number of City and Court notables (indeed Queen Elizabeth stayed in the village on five occasions between 1591 and 1598). It is probably through the patronage of these local notaries that the first organised cricket took place on the Green.

We have it on the authority of E.A.C.Thompson, founder and secretary of the Club Cricket Conference, brought up in Mitcham, that "While my father and I were watching a match on the Green one Saturday afternoon, he talked to an old villager who was nearer 90 than 80. He said that his own grandfather had told him he remembered seeing an old print of a cricket match with the inscription underneath "Crickette on Ye Olde Meecham Green". It was dated 1685. He said that the print was hanging on one of the walls inside a room in one of the cottages surrounding the Green. Alas! it has now disappeared."