You may have seen a couple of my posts where I am participating in a cricket match. This was for a tournament that is being played at my place of employment. I just wanted to briefly describe my experience.

Cricket, as you probably know, is a sport originating in England and played around the world, and is reminiscent of American baseball. As in baseball, someone hurls a ball at a batter who is then obligated to hit the ball, assuming that the throw isn’t way off or otherwise disqualified. In baseball the throwing is called “pitching,” but in cricket it is called “bowling” and the bowler is actually allowed one bounce off the ground (but only one). The bowler can also run for a bit to add more speed to the thrown ball.

Without going into too much detail, another huge difference is that the bowler and batter are in the center of the field, and are surrounded by the other fielding team members, so the batter can hit the ball in any direction. To the side, behind him, whatever. Also, there are two batters, one at each end of the pitch (the center bit) and they run back and forth, switching places, between the two creases (the ends of the pitch). And also there’s a wicket in each crease, which is a set of three wobbly poles, and it is bad for the batting team if the ball touches a wicket when a batter isn’t in the crease defending said wicket. Whew!

It’s all very complicated and I’m sure I haven’t explained it very well, despite the fact that I went to a training class and watched a couple of instructional videos. I joined my group’s team in the spirit of participation and camaraderie with my coworkers, and also because it is fun to learn new things. And also because of peer pressure, because the team needed me for this reason: in the tournament format, each team is required to have a certain number of “novice” players.

A “novice” player is defined as one who is from a “non-cricket-playing nation.” In practice, this means someone who is not from India. So the language of the rules dances around this kind of racial prejudice, which might seem justified by the fact that no one at work who is not from India has any effin’ idea how to play cricket. Oh, and each team also has to have at least one woman player, who can be from a cricket-playing nation (that is, India), and who is treated like a novice player, so there is some sexism added into the format to boot.

What it means to be treated like a novice player is that the bowler has to bowl softly when a novice is batting. This makes it easy to hit the ball, especially considering that it is a tennis ball instead of the real thing. I imagine this is for liability reasons. Hitting the ball is one thing, though; scoring is a bit harder, because if you don’t hit a good grounder, you won’t have the time to run to the other end of the pitch before the fielders make a play for your wicket. It’s the same as trying to reach first base in baseball.

Our team played two games, winning the first and then losing the second. A game consists of each team batting once (so sort of like one inning in baseball). The score that the first team to bat achieves then becomes the target for the other team to beat, and if the other team does beat the target then the game ends immediately. A batting team gets twelve “overs,” each of which consists of six balls – not counting “dead balls” or “no balls” – well, it was way too much for me to keep track of, and I basically had no idea what was going on.

Suffice it to say that I had fun, got sunburned, and though I did not contribute much to my team, I did gain an appreciation for cricket which I’m sure will come to good use the next time I see a game on the telly at the local pub. 🙂