Unfamiliar use of "cricket"

I came across a use of the word cricket today that was new to me. It was in an article written by an American author about his recent trip to Egypt and about the role of the U.S. in the current uprisings in Africa and the Middle East. Here's the quote:

In the 20th century, when Western economies began to run on gasoline, and the naked plunder of natural resources was no longer considered cricket, the great powers established a network of petty monarchs and "strongmen," local warlords they propped up, subverted or seduced—whatever it took to keep the oil flowing.

^{Crowther, Hal. "Arab Spring." The Independent March 2011}

I looked it up and found this at Oxford Online:

not cricket

British informal a thing contrary to traditional standards of fairness or rectitude.

which I assume is the writer's meaning, but it just brought up more questions. He used it in the positive. Is this correct? Is this use of cricket related to the sport? Is it common?

Solution 1:

It’s not uncommon, in my (British) experience, and certainly doesn’t stand out as odd or archaic to me — at the very most, possibly slightly affected, depending on the rest of the writer’s style. The meaning would stay very similar in most cases, to my ear, if cricket were replaced with fair play:

In the 20th century, when […] the naked plunder of natural resources was no longer considered fair play […]

Here, I read it as deliberately contrasting the ideas of fair play, honour, and the like which had at some levels been very important to the gentleman of the 19th-century imperial powers, with their brutally arrogant “plunder of natural resources”.

It sounds somewhat less natural to me in a completely positive context:

?As long as you say something nice, taking candy from a baby is cricket.

but quite reasonable in a context, like yours, where there’s negation or doubt applied to it somehow, even if indirectly:

I’m not sure whether taking candy from a baby is ever quite cricket.

Solution 2:

The phrase "[something] was no longer considered cricket" means it was no longer accepted as it once had been. You could also say it was no longer kosher, tolerated, countenanced, and so on. I'm curious why you think it is used as a positive in this case; surely you saw the "no longer" in that sentence?