Cricket, American-Style

Cricket, American-Style
by Jeff Lewis

Congratulations to England for its semi-recent recovery of the Ashes after an 18-year absence (this congratulatory note was not quite so belated when I first began it, but a month of late nights spent writing FDA-compliant validation procedures for a biotech’s electronic document management system took priority over an essay on my views on cricket. Sometimes that’s the way the world works). I gather that Australia’s past dominance of the test series was a sore point for England’s supporters and I’m always glad to see a team get the monkey off its back, with the exception of the Chicago Cubs, who I hope will continue their futility through eternity, providing a permanent example that great fans and a lousy team are not mutually exclusive.

While I am in no position to comment on the particulars of this summer’s Ashes—since it was nearly impossible to watch it in California—I can provide a brief overview of cricket for the American sports fan. Here are some salient points that I gleaned from watching the sport for a bit over twenty hours, ten years ago (for a more in-depth description presumably written by people who have better insight than me, see Wikipedia’s cricket entry) :

Cricket is at its best when it takes a long time. A test match is a two-inning affair, stretching over five days and a combined 30 hours; a test series is comprised of five of these matches.
The playing field is a big circle with two wickets in the middle, 22 yards apart. The wickets essentially serve both as a home plate and a strike zone. Since there is a 360 degree playing field, the defensive positioning is more complex than baseball, although there is no equivalent to a double-play so the defensive play in general is not quite as acrobatic as in baseball.
Only one person on defense—the wicket-keeper—gets to wear gloves, so the players need to have nicely calloused hands.
The bowlers are the cricket equivalents to baseball’s pitchers. They get a running start, must throw without breaking their elbows, and have to bounce the ball before it reaches its intended destination (the wicket). As in baseball, there are bowlers who specialize in velocity and ones who dish up junk—called spin bowlers. Vladimir Guerrero and Ichiro would be great speed bowlers; Greg Maddox and David Wells would be great spin bowlers. David Wells has a fat back and head.
The batsmen protect their wicket and hit the ball into play. They get to continue batting until they make an out, which can go on literally for days. However, each player only gets two outs per test match, so precision is critical. Swinging and missing, or popping the ball up typically ends a batsman’s day. Tony Gwynn, Ichiro, Barry Bonds and Albert Pujols, due to their excellent discipline/low strikeouts, would be great cricket batsmen. Power hitters who strike out frequently—like the Man Ram—would not be good batsmen.
Cricket boasts some top-notch jargon, but my favorite is “silly point," a defensive position that is so close to the batsmen that someone would have to be daft to play there.

This moderate cricket knowledge—good for an American, paltry for a cricket fan—may not do the sport justice, but the cricket coverage in the US doesn’t provide much opportunity for viewing matches. I suppose watching cricket over the internet will soon be a viable option, but for now, I’m stuck with slogging through written accounts of matches, which I can understand, eventually. Cricket match accounts are not for the uninitiated, as you can see from this coverage of the recent Super Test Series by Iain Payten:

Hayden survived an historic lbw shout three balls after lunch when a Flintoff appeal was referred to third umpire Darrell Hair for the first time.

Brian Lara’s Impact on The Ministry of Munitions

Living is Sheffield, England, during the summer of 1995, I developed a crush on cricket when I was supposed to be writing my Master’s thesis—I devoted a lot of attention to the England v. West Indies test series—25 days of nearly full immersion into the rules, lingo and history of cricket. It was marvelous, particularly when the West Indies’ Brian Lara was batting. Lara is a superstar batsman who had a strong series; when he batted I would take 15-minute study breaks that would last for hours.

It couldn’t be helped. I have a weakness for games with complex rules that play out slowly, plus my thesis topic was lame. Somehow, I’d gone badly awry part way through and, instead of a cohesive academic tract on the British Ministry of Munitions during WWI, I was stuck with a meandering mess that for some reason wandered off course near the end and started talking about the invention of the tank, Zionism, and corn.

Oh yeah, the test series was also notable for Dominic Cork’s hat trick, the first for England in a test match since 1957. A cricket hat trick is a truly impressive feat—not like the watered down hat tricks in hockey that are a weekly occurrence in the NHL. In cricket you have to record three outs on three consecutive bowled balls, so it’s more like upping the hockey hat trick requirements to three goals on three consecutive shots.

Cricket was an excellent way to both ensure and ignore the thesis’s mediocrity. Thankfully, I earned the degree in the end, although the test series procrastinations did end up as a bit of an embarrassment when my parents arrived for a scheduled vacation through Scotland and Wales. Since I hadn’t finished my thesis yet, I had to send them ahead for a few days while I finished it off.

My Cricket Career, The Early Years

I returned to the US at the end of my master’s course with two cricket balls, a rather silly looking cricket sweater with puffy cuffs that, for a couple of years, I mistakenly thought was cool, a book on cricket technique, and a bat, all jammed into my suitcase. Incidentally, on the day I bought these items, I also felt compelled to buy a size large girl’s Brownie shirt, because I thought my friend Ned needed one. He did not.

Back in the US, I didn’t have much opportunity to try out my bat and balls until I talked my youngest brother into batting off me in the driveway (I did occasionally wear the sweater, which some people had the nerve to call a tennis sweater; someone even called it preppie). He’d never seen cricket, so I explained the gist of the game and some batting strategy. I didn’t really stress the fact that I’d never actually played cricket myself, or that I wasn’t quite sure how to bowl. Since we were playing on asphalt, rather than the traditional grass, I decided to use a rubber pinkie bouncy ball, so I wouldn’t ruin one of my precious real balls, and I put a heavy coating of duct tape on the end of the bat. It just wouldn’t do to scuff it up on its maiden appearance.

My first ball bounced high off the asphalt, over our wood shed—also a somewhat unconventional feature in a cricket pitch—and down a hill about 200 yards into a canyon that is considered off-limits real estate in the Lewis compound due to its poison oak patch. After a long break while I looked for the ball, and assessed whether it should be touched, I bowled for a second time. My shoulder popped out of socket—end of bowling career.

Since then, I can’t claim to have had much of a run as a batsman, either. I did play once in Martell’s living room with a bat made out of a collapsed packing box taped to a wiffleball bat. If I remember correctly, the ball was the ammo from a Nerf gun and while I was demonstrating batting technique—trying to mimic Brian Lara—I hit myself in the foot, causing more pain than I thought could be delivered by a yellow piece of plastic wrapped in cardboard.

Pakistan v. India

While in England, I’d heard cricket fans marvel at the intensity of India/Pakistan matches, possibly the greatest rivalry in all of sports. Due to ill-temper at matches, the sides were only allowed to meet on neutral soil for a while, so I considered it a blessing when I found out that they were playing a one-day match in Toronto when I was in town visiting a friend. I took the underground out to the suburbs and walked a few miles to get to the pitch, bought a seat in the stands and settled in for what, quite frankly, was a rather boring afternoon spent watching a bunch of people that I’d never heard of play a sport that largely amounts to a lot of standing around.

I needed a renowned cricket announcer with a Yorkshire accent, on loan from the BBE, to explain the nuances to me. Instead, I sat in the pleasant August sun getting drowsy, watching people run around in white pants, and then committed the sports fan’s greatest faux paux: snoring, without even a whiff of alcohol to provide me with an excuse. When I snapped out of it, I gave apologetic looks to my neighbors and quickly left the pitch, full of shame.

The Second Bat

I felt obligated to give up on cricket after that. I briefly considered joining a local pub’s team, but based on my track record, I new nothing good could come of it, so for about five years all thoughts of cricket vanished. The Second Bat changed that.

When my friend Erik brought me a bat back, unsolicited, from India in 2001—he got a very good deal on it—the number of bats in my collection exactly equaled the number of times I had attempted to play cricket (if you consider my first two attempts cricket). Apart from the time when I owned three surf boards, but couldn’t surf, I have never had such an underutilized segment of sporting goods in my closet (although, come to think of it, I do own four sets of golf clubs and five tennis rackets—sports that I played a combined six times last year).

Well, I felt compelled to figure out a way to get enough friends together to play a match, which, due to the exodus of my friends from the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 00’s, took an extreme measure. The result, in large part, was the first Weekend O’ Fun (those of you not familiar with the Weekend O’ Fun can visit the site for the most recent WOF for a general overview).

I figured that if I could get 25 people together for an absurd three-day competition, I could get a few people, at least, to partake in some cricket. It wasn’t the traditional form, mind you—we used a melon-sized bouncy playground ball and played on a blacktop schoolyard—but the game more or less resembled cricket.

I didn’t account for the fact, however, that Americans don’t know the rules of cricket and, since I only knew about ¾ of the rules, things didn’t go as smoothly as they do at Lords. Still, it was mostly fun, partially a success, and a good opportunity for me to quit the cricket game on a day that didn’t involve poison oak, dislocated shoulders, public snoozes or puffy cuffs, all of which are decidedly not cricket.

Jeff can be reached at jeff@babblog.com.