Cricket: The Sport of Gentlemen With a Day to Blow

It was bound to happen. Eventually I’d have to learn cricket. It’s not only the national sport in India, it’s the ONLY sport in India. Seriously. They don’t play anything else. And right now India’s hosting the Cricket World Cup, AND they’re favored to win it. So this place has cricket fever, and unlike polio, I did not get any booster shots against that. So I’m starting to come down with it. Kinda.

At its heart, cricket is very similar to baseball, and not just in the bat + ball department. It’s a sport anybody can play, it’s steeped in history, and it bridges blue and white collars. It is, however, even more repetitive than baseball, it lacks the complex managerial strategies of baseball, and each match takes about 7 hours. 7. Freaking. Hours. Seriously. And for the World Cup they use a shortened version of the game. The real deal takes up to 5 days, and is often played in a best-of-five series to boot.

I’ll write a brief post later about the one good cricket match I saw (the rest have sucked), but for now, I’ve had so many requests to explain cricket that I’m going to give it a go here.

Concept: Cricket is best compared to a home run derby, rather than a real baseball game. You get a whole bunch of at-bats, and you try to rack up as many points as you can. One team takes its whole turn at bat, sets a score, and then the other team goes and "chases" that score.

Batting Flow: You have 10 people in your lineup. The lead-off guy starts and takes pitches until he gets out, then the next guy takes pitches until he’s out. This continues until either all ten people get out or you go through 300 pitches, whichever comes first. Batters can last hundreds of pitches (this takes hours) if they’re consistent and strong, or they can get out immediately if they suck. I’ve seen both.

Scoring: After you hit the ball, you run back and forth between home plate and the single base. If you get to the base, you score one run. If you get there and back, it’s two, and so forth. If the ball makes it all the way to the outfield wall, it’s worth four runs, and if it’s a home run, it’s worth six. You can choose not to run at all (see getting out, below). To do that, you just stay at home plate after you hit, and you score zero for that pitch.

Getting Out: There are two easy basebally ways of getting out. First is the pop-out. Any time you touch the ball with the bat and it’s caught before it hits the ground, you’re out. The second is the force-out. If you’re caught between bases when the ball gets back, you’re out. There’s no such thing as a strike-out. If you whiff, you just score a zero on that at-bat. However, if you whiff AND the ball hits the stumps, you’re out. When you’re batting, you’re basically protecting the stumps, and the pitcher is trying to hit them. If he hits them, you’re done. These stumps are actually the home plate equivalent. To get forced out, a fielder has to touch the ball to the stumps before you cross the safe line. This can be done by throwing the ball straight into the stumps or manually touching the ball to the stumps. Note, then, that you aren't really running to a base--you're running a shuttle between two lines, and you're safe once you pass the line, even if you overrun it. The final meaningful way of getting out is called "leg before wickets." This is basically where you use your legs to protect the stumps, rather than your bat (because you whiffed and it hit your legs). If the umpire determines that the ball would have hit the stumps had it not hit your legs first, you can be called out. They have a really neat review system for this called "Hawkeye" that’s very similar to tennis–it predicts where the ball would have gone based on its trajectory when it hit you.

A Nuance to Batting: To throw a wrench in things, there are actually two batters on the field at a time. One starts at first base, running the shuttle between bases opposite the batter. You only score when both players reach their base, and you can register the out by getting either runner out. These two batters form a "partnership" and actually trade off their at-bats. Every time the batter scores an odd number of runs, the other partner takes his place at bat. To illustrate: I hit a single and run to first while you run home. Now you’re the one at home plate, and you start batting again. I’m still in the game, not out, and will bat again as soon as you hit a single (or a triple). If my partner gets out, I stay in the game with the new guy and we form a new partnership. One consequence of this is that you try to have a right and left-handed batter in at the same time, forcing the pitcher to mix things up whenever the two switch places. Another consequence is that there are actually 11 people in your lineup (I lied earlier... sorry) because you have to have an extra guy to form the last partnership, otherwise you’d have only one guy on the field after 9 outs. That 11th guy usually REALLY sucks at batting.

A Nuance to Game Flow: Like I said, you bat until 10 outs or 300 pitches, whichever comes first. In fact, the game is divided into 50 "overs" of 6 pitches each, rather than just 300 pitches. After each over there’s a very short break and the fielding team is allowed to change pitchers/bowlers. "Runs per over" is the key statistic during a match. 6 is good (300 runs per game). 7 is very good (350). 5 is weakish. 4 or below is very weak.

Pitching/Bowling: The first thing you’d notice watching a game is that the pitches bounce before they reach the plate, meaning that spin becomes huge, and resulting in a wide variety of pitch types. Each bowler is allowed to pitch 10 overs, and they can only be switched between overs (you finish the over you start). The team captain picks who’s going to bowl each over, and there winds up being a lot of strategy in this, as every bowler is different.

Fielding: Everyone fields. All 11 of your guys are in the field at once. There’re like 100 different positions that fielders can assume, and you do a lot of shifting based on the batter. When you switch bowlers, you bring someone in from the field, and the old bowler goes back to his position, and people swap positions more to accommodate the switch. People, therefore, can typically play more than one position.

Lineup Composition: We’re getting more technical here. I think you could watch a match without really knowing this. You’ve got 11 guys in your lineup and in the field. Each bowler can only bowl 10 overs, so you need a minimum 5 who can bowl, and really you want six. So you wind up with 5 people who just bat, plus a couple who can bat and bowl, plus a few who’re bowling specialists but also have to bat. The major consequence here is that outs are really important, even if you don’t go all-out and don’t get to use up all 50 overs. In the first games I saw, I’d thought "Who cares that this guy’s out? He’ll get replaced by someone fresh, and there’s no chance of ending things because of the 10 outs–you’re pitching all 50 overs anyway." Outs are important because you want to get past the great batters at the top of the order. If you can spend your last 10 overs pitching to the schlub bowling specialists at the bottom of the order, you’re likely to give up far fewer runs, even if they don’t get out. The game may be about runs, not outs, but getting the right people out leads to less run production ability. Also, though, you do tend to mow these batters down. That is, once you get to the part of the lineup of mostly bowlers, they can start dropping like flies, and you can bring the game to a rapid conclusion.


I really think that if you read this and watch 15 minutes of cricket, you’ll have it down. I can’t say I particularly LIKE the sport, as it has severe limitations when it’s 7 hours long. It’s also, like I mentioned earlier, repetitive over those 7 hours and doesn't have baseball's managerial complexity. Further, while outs are important, they tend to come out of nowhere. All of a sudden, someone's out. Like a goal in soccer, but without the gradual buildup of tension before it. But while I’m here, cricket’s all I’ve got. Plus, the Indians have a really good chance of winning this thing. With the way the Illini are playing, I think this is my only hope.


Epilogue/HuffPo Dish: Are you wondering "how to watch cricket?" It's a common search query, as are "cricket how to," "cricket rules," "cricket for dummies," and "what are the rules of cricket?" It's easily answered, too: my blog post answers all of these queries.

This is Search Enginge Optimization, something that Content Farms like the Huffington Post do to attract people to their mass-produced, extremely low-grade writing. My writing, though, is impeccable :)