So, let’s talk about cricket!

Have you read Calvin and Hobbes? The comic strip? (Yes, we are talking about cricket. Patience. ) Well they play a game called Calvinball, where the rules are incomprehensible and the equipment bizarre. In this way it is a lot like cricket, at least to my mind. Calvinball is this way because there are few set rules, and others can be added or deleted at any time during play by any player. You “win” (keeping score is a whole other topic. Some actual scores include “12 to Q” and “Oogie to Boogie”) by inventing pivotal rules that turn the game in your favor. So it is actually an intellectual game rather than one of athletic skill. Imagination is your best asset.

It could be argued that cricket, by the same token, is also an intellectual sport. From my spot on this side of the pond, English cricket is so steeped in history, tradition and ceremony that it is incomprehensible and bizarre. The rules are such an amalgamation (very little is ever taken out, new rules are merely added) that they border on incomprehensible. Fascinating in the way that Proust’s multivolume examination-of-psychological-themes novel is fascinating. I’m sure many people who adore cricket would disagree with me, as they may find baseball just as ridiculous. They may have a valid point, as there are (I have just learned) 14 legal ways to get out a batter in baseball and only 10 in cricket. However, in defense of baseball, I only learned about most of them by going to the official MLB site. I have understood baseball for my entire life up to this point without any knowledge whatsoever of most of them. They arise is rare circumstances, but there must be a rule for every contingency. Up till now if you’d ask me how to get a batter out I would have listed 3 ways: 3 strikes, out at first, and ball caught on the fly. After that they become a runner. According to aficionados of cricket, of the 10 ways, 5 are quite common, and only 2 are rare. So you still have to know more to understand a regular cricket game, and my original characterization stands.

Here is what televised cricket looks like to a novice: men standing on grass around a dirt path in stark white shirts, sweaters and trousers. A man holding an oddly shaped bat (it is wide and flat, with a little handle) in front of 3 upright sticks with 2 horizontal sticks balanced on top. Another man with a small red ball and his sleeves rolled up. He does a run and hop and stand maneuver that resembles the track and field event called the Triple Jump towards the man with the bat and at the end wildly windmills the arm that holds the ball, which he releases (the ball, not the arm) towards the guy with the bat. The ball hits the ground and bounces past the sticks and the guy with the bat, neither of which have moved at all. One of the other men surrounding the groomed dirt picks up the ball and throws it back to the guy who first had it. This is repeated ad infinitum. Occasionally the guy with the ball begins his run, then stops and goes back without ever releasing it. Or he may release it, and it bounces about a bit and he screams something unintelligible while raising his index finger over his head and looking off to the side. Every so often the guy with the bat hits the ball, but he may or may not move. If he does move, another guy who was not in view of the camera before appears from the bottom and they run back and forth a bit. Then they stop for no discernable reason and it all starts again. There is a little box in the top of the screen that says something like: “4/217 First Innings”. It rarely changes. You can check an hour later and it may say the same thing, or you can go away for a minute and the second number may have gone up by 10. See why someone accustomed to baseball would be confused?

I have read the rules to spare you the agony. Well, I have researched them at least; the actual Laws of Cricket is a tome. I’ll present the basics and more interesting bits here, so when you travel to the Commonwealth as I did and the telly is all about India winning in the first innings by 127 runs you will have some basic understanding. It is actually pretty cool.

Ok, now just enough info to look at a game at not be totally lost. Note that I didn’t say “watch” I said “look at”. There is a difference and “look at” requires fewer facts. Actually, after my primer, you may even be able to listen to someone talk about a cricket match and manage to prevent a look of bewilderment from creeping onto your face. You may not be able to say anything back, but I just don’t have all day, OK? Lots of paragraphs follow from here, as cricket is complicated. Each is fairly self-contained (though the terminology is usually only explained once and then used throughout), so if a paragraph bores you skip to the next and you will get a new topic. Good luck.

Let’s start with the caffeinated short attention span Cliff Notes version, using baseball terminology. There are 2 teams, each with 11 players. One team has the ball and the field, and the other team has bats. The field is big, and the pitcher and batters are in the middle. The fielders are all around the circular field. There are 2 batters, each in front of a carefully balanced pile of sticks. The pitcher is between them and pitches to one of them. If he hits the ball far, the two batters run toward each other till they are at the opposite pile of sticks. They continue running back and forth till the fielders have thrown the ball close to the sticks, then they stop in front whichever pile they are closest to at the time. Physically, I mean, not emotionally. If the fielders ever knock over the sticks with the ball one of the batters is out. This goes on for five days. There now you understand cricket! Continue on for the subtleties and expansions that are actually what make it the beloved game it is today.

First off, one major distinction from baseball: the team that bowls (releases the ball, like the pitching team in baseball) is on the offense, and uses strategy to get out the batsman, who is defending the wicket (that stick assembly behind him, looks like an “m”). Runs are just a byproduct of failing to get the runner out and are inevitable. It is getting the runner out that is the hard bit. In baseball it is reversed. It is the batting team that is on offense, trying to score runs, and the opposing team tries to stop them from doing that. Outs will happen without a predetermined defensive plan. Runs are the hard bit in baseball, which is why a game can be decided by just a couple. Any time a traditional cricket match enters the final play period with less that 50 runs between the two teams it is considered a close match. Scores of 300 runs per side is common. See the difference?

The game is played on a roughly elliptical huge field that is between 120 and 200 meters on the long axis. So it can be 220 yards long, and there is no foul territory. Remember, a football field is 100 yards long. The field at Lord’s in England, the home of modern cricket and regarded as the best cricket venue, is 5.5 acres in size. My point? It is a BIG field.

Most of the action, though, takes place on what they call the “pitch” which is a rectangular bit in the exact center that is about 10 feet by 66 feet. This area is roughly analogous to the pitchers mound/batters box area in baseball. In cricket, the batsman stands on one end of this and defends the wicket. His job (I say “his”; players can actually be any gender, but most if not all in international matches (called Test matches) are men) anyway, his job is to keep the opposing team from messing with the wicket. What makes it interesting is there is another batsman that is not being bowled to defending an identical wicket on the other end. The bowler focuses on the batsman that is hitting, called the striker. The non-striker is there to score runs along with the striker.

Notice that the pitch is in the center of the field, so the fielding team has to cover the area behind the striker too, making it more difficult. The striker can hit the ball (which is red) in any direction. If it goes over the fence, he automatically scores six runs without running any, and if it touches the barrier (which can be a rope on sticks) without going out he scores four. The thing I find cool is that he can hit it away and elect not to run at all. It is entirely his decision. His job, remember, is to defend the wicket, not make runs, so if he doesn’t hit it very far and it would be easy for the fielding team to knock down the wicket if he left, he simply doesn’t go. The ball is dead and the bowler bowls again.

Bowlers are on offense in cricket, so they are changed more often than batsmen get out, as batters (the offensive team) are changed more often than pitchers in baseball. Bowlers only stick around for one over, which is six balls bowled. Now you may be thinking, “But that is like only 2 people in baseball, if they both get out. That’s no time at all!”. Well, see, in cricket, there may be 10 runs scored on one bowl, which take time to run, and you are still left with the same batsmen and bowler. Plus the bowler has a run-up from up to 30 meters behind the pitch every time he bowls and a very complicated over hand locked elbow action (the power comes form the shoulder and wrist, not their arm) to release the ball. Usually he just runs from the other side of the pitch, but still. All of this takes time. The main reason overs are so short, I think, is to give the non-striker a chance to hit. See, the new bowler pitches to them. For the third over often the first bowler will return, and these two bowlers will trade off overs for a bit. Then one of them will be replaced in the line up, and so on.

Runs are different in cricket. For one to be counted BOTH batsmen have to get to the opposite wicket and touch the ground with their bats, which they carry with them as they run. They stop running when they decide that the ball is too close to one or the other of the wickets. If they have run an odd number of times (those of you following along will realize) they have swapped wickets. Since each over is played facing a specific wicket, a new batsman is now the striker. Confused? Good!

By now you are probably starting to realize why cricket takes about five days. It is hard to get a batter out, and the innings continues (“innings” is singular and plural in cricket. Don’t ask.) until there are no batters to take the place of the out batter. Since there are 11 players on a team, and they all bat, that means that 10 outs are required to end the innings. In Test matches, there is a 3 sessions of play a day, each one lasting 2 hours. The players take 40 minutes for lunch after the first one and 20 minutes for tea after the second one. You know how important teatime is to the British! 10-minute drink breaks are scattered throughout at the umpire’s discretion, so total time from beginning to end can easily surpass 7 hours per day. You’re beginning to understand why this sport was considered a gentleman’s endeavor – you had to be independently wealthy to afford to go to a game! Perhaps most serious spectators now are retired, or only attend one day on the weekend or something. So yeah, an innings can take a long time. That’s why there are usually only 1 or 2 per team per match. They count what baseball terms the “bottom” and “top” of an inning each as separate innings. An innings is when one team is bowling, and the next is when the other bowls. Just to be clear.

So how do you get a batter out? Well, the fielding team either breaks the wicket by knocking off one of the sticks on top (called a “bail”), or the ball is caught on the full (“fly” in baseball”) or the striker uses his body to block a ball that would have hit the wicket. In the final instance the umpire must determine if this is the case, and only does so if the bowler screams “Howzat?!”, thus demanding he examine the situation. The two remaining common ways are if the wicket-keeper (like the catcher in baseball), the only fielder with a glove, gathers up the ball and breaks the wicket, or if the wicket is broken while the batsmen are running and unable to defend it. In either case the batter nearest the broken wicket (always the striker in the first case, but could be either in the second) is out. When some one gets out it is said “the wicket has fallen”. The bowling team has “taken a wicket” and the fielding team has “lost a wicket”.

Now about bowling: it is not pitching. In fact, the ball is bounced off the ground on purpose, because that makes it hard to hit due to the unpredictable interactions between the seam on the ball and the ground. Besides, the wicket is close to the ground, so why bowl too high? You never “throw” the ball in cricket, you “bowl”. Like I said, the elbow is locked, and the bowl is overhand. There is no “strike zone” and therefore no “balls” or “walks” and the bowler can theoretically aim the ball wherever he wants. In reality, though, he aims for the wicket, though indirectly, by calculating where on the ground to bounce it to get it to hit the wicket. He decides how fast to bowl (slow can be as good as fast) and how to arrange the seam in his hand. In cricket, the ball is a sphere with one straight seam running around the equator. One side is usually polished on the bowler’s trouser leg before each bowl, and this can also change the trajectory. One final rule: the bowler can’t hit the striker on purpose. On the third violation the bowler is thrown out of the game.

That’s about all you need to know of the mechanics of the game to understand it. The spirit is more, though. One thing that I like about cricket is the elastic nature of it. The fielders can stand wherever they want on the field, for instance. There are no set positions like “right field” or whatever. The bowler can start his run from wherever he likes – no “pitcher’s mound” confines him. A striker can run 4 runs and still be the striker, run 3 on another ball and not be, then later run 8 and become the striker again. Meanwhile the bowler may have changed. Or maybe not. Isn’t that fun? The field can be any size and shape, technically, because there is nothing in the Laws of Cricket as kept by Lord’s (the traditional birthplace and keeper of modern cricket) to specify its size. Anything other than an oval or circle is “frowned upon” and generally people want it big or it isn’t fun and those 6 automatic runs happen all the time. But it isn’t codified. The batting and bowling orders are not written down and can change at anytime during the match. Batters can’t repeat in an innings, of course. Also, the batting team's captain can declare an innings over at any time simply by saying so. Maybe they feel they already have enough runs, or they want to save a batter for another innings, I don’t know. This isn’t the final innings necessarily either, though I imagine that is when they would use it most. If they were already winning by 100 and didn’t want to embarrass the opposing team further. Gentleman’s game, you know.

There are also several rules forbidding “wasting time” by either side. This includes “polishing the ball excessively”. I find this fascinating. The game takes 5 days (did I mention that?) so you’d think a few more minutes wouldn’t matter. But a guess each moment of those 7 hours for 5 days is vital and filled with purpose such that all distractions are rude. Or at least Lord’s feels that way. And as Lord’s goes, so goes the world.

Violence is also strictly forbidden. There are no bench-clearing brawls, like in baseball. If any player even advances towards another player in a threatening manner they are warned. If it happens several times they can get thrown out. If a team is disrespectful to an umpire they are reported to the governing body of the sport and that club can be expelled. Anything that could “bring the game of cricket into disrepute” can result in disciplinary action. Even pitching short and fast (that is, a fast pitch with no warning run up) is illegal, and the distance at which it becomes illegal depends on the umpire’s discretion and the ability of the striker. A bad striker would need an even bigger run-up, you see. No tricks allowed.

One rule I really like is what I call the Imaginary Wicket Rule. If it rains, they may or may not suspend play for the day, depending on how heavy the precipitation. However, if it is windy, so windy that the bails keep falling off the stumps (that is, the wicket keeps breaking on its own), they don’t call the match. Instead they remove the bails and set them aside, leaving only the upright stumps that are pounded into the ground as always. From then on, the goal is simply to hit the stumps, and the umpire decides if it was accomplished with enough force to knock off the bails, had they been there. And no one argues. I love that! Like mailing chess moves back and forth and trusting the other person not to just move a million different pieces, see the problem, and move it back before finally deciding on one to send you. So honorable.

Oh, and an over in which no runs are scored is called a maiden. Unspoiled, I suppose.

Some highlights from cricket history for you. Cricket has been around forever; so long that no one knows why it is called “cricket”. “Wicket” comes from the wicket gates in sheep paddocks, and the shepherds would play a game of defending them with their crooks while other shepherds threw stones at it. The first true cricket game was a match in Kent in 1646. Yup, it has a REALLY long and illustrious history. Modern cricket began in 1787 with Thomas Lord and the founding of the Marylebone Cricket Club. Lord and his buddies were aristocrats and formed the club and field mainly to get away from the prying eyes of the lower classes who came to watch the games. Soon Lord bought some land (he had leased a different site before-all of this is in and near London) and created a dedicated cricket field. After his death it was renamed Lord’s, and is the Carnegie Hall of cricket fields. Several pivotal scenes in one of the later Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books occur at Lord’s, which shows it has become essential to the English psyche.

The first international cricket match took place in 1844. Contrary to what you might expect it didn’t involve England at all. It was actually played in New York, at the St. George’s club. The two teams came from Canada and New York and Canada won. A team from New York had actually beaten a Toronto team several years earlier, but it was like the New York Mets of baseball beating the Toronto Blue Jays – not representative of either nation necessarily.

Like I said, Test cricket is international cricket. The most important, certainly the most famous, Test series is The Ashes. This is a series played every two years between England and Australia. The name comes from the trophy, which is an urn containing the ashes of a set of bails (though recent scientific investigation indicate it may actually be the ashes of a ball) used at a match between Australia and England in 1882. It was the final match of the series and Australia won, beating England for the first time. The two had paired off once before but the series ended in a draw. This time Australia won in a nail biting finish featuring about 8 maiden overs in a row to win the game. An ad appeared in the paper declaring The Death of English Cricket and saying it would be cremated. The most famous Test cricket Series is The Ashes, played every two years between Australia and England. Later, England went to Australia to try to “reclaim the ashes” and so this traditional Test series was born. Right now Australia has the ashes, though they actually remain in England in the museum at Lord’s because the urn is too delicate to be moved. The whole thing reminds me of the Berkeley versus Stanford football match that is played every year, with the trophy being a short axe mounted on a plaque. I forget why, but it also has an obscure historical reason. Cool.

So that is all I have to say about cricket. Golly, it was a lot! If you got this far and actually read it all post a comment letting me know so I can congratulate you personally. Now that I am not traveling and don’t have to pay for the internet by the minute I get more verbose. Well, nice to get it all out, anyway. Did you make it CUJ? You’re one I think might. Hi Aunt Jean too!

Let’s see what tomorrow will bring.

note: a category for this is "Scotland" but that is just because that is the closest I got to England, which is the name of the Test team.

Sources:

my own experience on my trip

http://www.dangermouse.net/cricket/

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/hosking/cricket/explanation.htm

http://www.solitaryway.com/calvin/cb_rules.htm

http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/official_info/official_rules/batter_6.jsp

http://www.lords.org/cricket/laws.asp