I know baseball, but can you quickly explain cricket as played in this World Cup?
It’s difficult, but I’ll try.
With the caveat that there are some oversimplifications, here is the gist:
The cricket field is a large circle, and the fielding team spreads out around it. Two batsmen at the center of the circle take turns trying to hit balls from the fielding team’s bowlers.
When a batsman does hit the ball, he and his fellow batsman may elect to run between two low posts, called wickets. Each time they do, they get a run. If a batsman hits the ball out of the circle on the bounce, it’s four runs. On the fly, it is six runs.
One stark difference from baseball is that the bowler takes a running start and, most of the time, bounces the ball to the batsman. Another is that the batsmen may hit the ball in any direction, even backward; there is no foul territory.
The batsmen can be put out in a number of ways, including having a ball they hit get caught on the fly, or having the ball from the bowler knock over one of the wickets.
In this format of the game, a batting team is finished when 10 of its 11 batsmen are out, or if it faces 120 balls, whichever comes first. By then, the team will most likely have scored at least 125 runs, and sometimes 200 or more.
Then after a break, the other team bats and tries to top the first team’s score.
You’ve convinced me that cricket is a fun sport. But can it be more than that?
Take it from the Trinidadian Marxist thinker C.L.R. James, who said in his 1963 cricket memoir “Beyond a Boundary”: “Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theater, ballet, opera and the dance.”
Over the next six weeks, if a match is close, a fast bowler is charging toward a star batter and the crowd is on its feet, for a lot of fans, the game will rise to art indeed.
