The Green Baize Cloth was in the original accessories range and remained pretty unchanged until the game was withdrawn.
Originally unprinted and needing to be marked up with chalk as per the instructions, the flat era product was described as: “Set 12 consists of material which has been specially selected as being the ideal surface on which to play the Subbuteo Table Cricket game. The marked out pitch is a very handsome article.” Who could disagree!
Pitches came with a small, square instruction flier advising that it should be placed on top of an ordinary thick table cover and smoothed out “to remove any creases incurred in transport.”
In the 00 range the pitch became item TC-J. Sold in bags the design varied slightly, changing from just the crease and boundary markings, to featuring one Subbuteo logo and eventually four. All variants are quite common.
Like football, baize was replaced by nylon in the final years. These are commonly found in all the last box sets. The middle pair of images below show the difference between the baize (left) and nylon versions.
The nylon pitch seemed to be harder to remove any creases from and wore more noticeably more quickly. It also seemed to play a little slower and offer less ball movement (probably my imagination!). Given the choice I’d go for baize every time.
Subbuteo Cricket 