Most of us, at one time or another, and through no fault of our own, have had a close encounter with the game of cricket. Perhaps your father, partner or son is involved in the game, or maybe you simply turned on the TV to watch “Days of Our Lives” and found your favourite show had been replaced by a live cricket telecast – for the next five days! Most likely these brief flings with cricket did not stir your passions like, say, shopping. Most likely it never will. Still, it’s summer, which means cricket season, which means the game is going to re-enter your life again, at least for a few months.
We’ve prepared a dummies guide to cricket to help you endure – oops, enjoy – the season ahead.
Lesson One: The Game
Cricket is a game played between two teams with 11 players on each side. Regardless of the form of cricket being played – Test cricket, which goes for five days, or One-Day cricket, which goes for, er, one – the object of the game is the same: to score more runs than the other team. Everyone in the team must bat at least once in cricket, and there must always be two players in batting at one time. This means that once 10 men are “out” the batting team’s “innings” is over (because the 11th man has no one to “bat” with). Once that happens the bowling team become the batting team, and vice versa. In Test cricket to “bowl” out the batting team can take days – the highest score ever recorded is 952 – so be prepared and always have a good, thick book at hand. Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” should just about do it.
Lesson Two: Terminology
One of the most likeable aspects of cricket is the quaint – ok, silly – terms used to describe various aspects of play. For example, the man who stands in close to the batsmen to try and catch him out is called a “silly short leg”. A bowler who concedes no runs for six consecutive balls is said to have “bowled a maiden over”. A bowler with not much talent is called a “pie chucker”. A batsman with similar ability is a “bunny”. The list is endless. The good news is that there is just one cricket term you need to remember and that’s “stumps”. It means the game is over and you can return to your normal life.
Lesson Three: The Ashes
You might notice that our televisions, newspapers and radios are dominated with news about something called The Ashes every couple of years. The first thing to do is not panic. The Ashes has nothing to do with bushfires or the Apocalypse. The Ashes is, in fact, a cricket series played between Australia and England. At the end of the series the winning team is presented with a trophy – a six-inch (15 cm) high terracotta urn – called The Ashes. Why? Because it contains the ashes of an item of cricket equipment, possibly a bail, ball or stump (maybe even a bride’s veil, no one knows for sure), meant to symbolise the death of English cricket after Australia beat the team for the first time in a test match in 1882.
For winning teams, and their national supporters, the excitement of an Ashes victory is akin to the feeling a woman might get if she found a pair of Manolo Blahnik’s shoes in an op shop. That is, it’s an excellent feeling.
Lesson Four: Are you a cricket tragic?
The very fact that you are reading this dummies guide suggests that you are not. A cricket tragic is someone who is fascinated, to the point of obsession, about the game of cricket. The term pretty much applies to half of the Australian population (mostly the male half), including former Prime Minister John Howard, who once suggested that the only job in public life more important than his own was that of Australia’s cricket captain.
Lesson Five: Where can I watch a game?
t’s summer. Cricket is being played everywhere: in backyards, suburban parks, in stadiums. To watch the very best cricket, live, the Pura Cup (formerly known as the Sheffield Shield) is the domestic first class cricket competition in Australia. The Queensland team, known as The Bulls , plays regularly in Brisbane throughout the summer. In international cricket Australia will, at various times throughout the summer of 2007/2008, play test and one-day matches against Sri Lanka, India and New Zealand.
