[Symbiote]

Cricket is even more accessible: you need a bat (which could be a piece of wood), but you don't need space. You can compress the game to play in a 1.5m wide alleyway between two buildings.

I think this is why it became so popular in India etc.

[airstrike]

Soccer is still more accessible. You don't even need a ball. As a kid, you'll find yourself kicking around a crushed coke can with friends and trying to score.

[ramblerman]

This is a silly form of no true Scotsman, you don't create a Messi if he had been kicking a coke can around.

[Someone]

Depends on location. Cricket requires a ball that bounces. Football, you can play with a wad of left-over paper tied together with tape or strings.

Cricket puts restrictions on the pitch (ground must be fairly hard and even where the ball bounces) that are easily met in typically dry India but harder to meet in wet England, where they need to nurture/torture grass to get the right conditions (growing it to get long, strongly interleaving roots, but then drying out the ground and cutting the grass very short to not make the bouncing ball slip)

[brudgers]

Cricket also does not require a lot of running and because the defense controls the ball, it fills a lot of time at a slow pace.

Like Baseball, a Sunday afternoon game has a low risk of an injury that prevents work on Monday.

[brigandish]

My mate broke someone's arm bowling at him. Cricket always has an element of danger, for both the fielders and the batters.

[stevekemp]

Getting hit in the face/neck by a cricket ball moving at 150mph can cause serious injuries, even death.

For example

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_Hughes

[sometimes_all]

Minor nit: Fastest ever recorded ball bowled was 100 mph. I believe you were thinking 150 kmph.

Also, if we're talking about street/amateur cricket, or even higher-level cricket a couple of levels removed from international, you are rarely going to have rockets hurled at you. Most will be 120 kmph tops.

[zem]

there is also a ton of grass-roots football in India, with kids kicking a ball around wherever there is a space for it. that doesn't translate to having good national teams simply because there is not much funding to develop the game, unlike with cricket.