128 years later, cricket has its Olympic moment again, but who will be playing?

When cricket made its only ­appearance in the Olympics at Paris in 1900 the tournament consisted of just two teams.

Britain were represented by the Devon & Somerset Wanderers Cricket Club, a touring club side. They played the hosts France, the majority of whom were in fact English expatriates having been chosen from a club formed by workmen who had originally moved across the Channel to help construct the Eiffel Tower.

The Wanderers game against France was their opening encounter of a three-match tour. The two-day event took place at the Vélodrome de Vincennes, where the only spectators in the 20,000-seat banked cycling track were a dozen uninterested gendarmes. Wanderers won the match by 158 runs. The British side were awarded silver medals and both teams received a miniature replica of the Eiffel Tower. The match was not formally recognised as having been part of the Paris Olympics until 1912.

Cricket will return at Los Angeles in 2028 as a vastly different sport. It will feature a Twenty20 competition for men and women. With an estimated 2.5 billion fans worldwide, many in south Asia, it offers a potentially ­huge television audience the International Olympic Committee is keen to tap into.

LA28 chairman Casey Wasserman might be American but he is a ­multi-millionaire businessman thanks to his sports marketing agency, so needed no persuading about the benefits of including cricket, especially having seen the success of the Indian Premier League. “My first IPL match was in 2010 and I never forget how electric it was,” he said.

There were initial suggestions that the tournament could be played 3,000 miles away in New York to ensure a more favourable viewing schedule in India. That idea has been dropped in favour of a temporary arena in Pomona, east of Los Angeles.

Which countries will be playing at the Olympics, though, remains a big debate. Pressure to cap the number of athletes competing at LA28 to 10,500, despite there being a record 36 sports on the programme, means cricket will again be a bijou event. It will be a six-team competition in both the men’s and women’s tournaments, with a total of 90 athlete quota places for each gender, allowing each nation a 15-player squad.

Host country, the United States, will almost certainly be given one of the six places, at least in the men’s event.

“US sports fans really get behind their teams here, especially in the Olympics, which is the biggest event of all, so they have to be involved,” Johnny Grave, chief executive of Major League Cricket, the T20 professional league in America, told The Observer. “The men’s team did really well last year in the T20 World Cup, beating Pakistan and reaching the Super 8s, so I don’t think they are going to let anyone down if they participate.”