What is a soccer field?

So why is a soccer field called a pitch? Michael Quinion of World Wide Words has the very interesting answer:

"The oldest sense of pitch that's immediately relevant is that of thrusting a stake or pole into the ground (as in pitching a tent). The sense of a playing field comes via that, originally from cricket. The act of setting up the playing area by knocking the two sets of stumps into the ground at the ends of the wicket was called pitching the stumps from the end of the seventeenth century on. However, it wasn't until the 1870s that the term was turned into a noun to describe the playing area and it was extended to football only about 1900-surprisingly late in both cases."