Cricket

An absurdity enjoyed

I cannot remember the day when I first saw cricket being played but I recall that it looked like baseball which at that time had already been classified as deadly boring and not worth my time - an opinion which I incidently still adhere to.

I can however exactly remember the first time I asked someone for an explanation. They threw dozens of strange words at me - some of them existing ( duck, golden duck, floater, nelson, yorker, ) and some made up purely for the joy of confusing the uninitiated (diamond, shred, blow-out). As I have not been one for sports most of my life this mockery was enough to make me turn my back on the game. I cannot remember for sure but I might have considered learning more about it on the odd occasion during the rest of my exchange year but I usually gave up again for some valid reason.

I mean, come on. There is a souvenir tea towel called The Cricket Story that must have been printed by the fathers of those bastards that pulled my leg at school. I will not even try to get the exact wording right but it went along the lines of:

One team is in and one team is out
The team that is in has two people in
If one of the team who is in is out
he is out and another one comes in
If all the people who are in are out
that team is out and the other team is in.

That was just about all it took to reinforce my judgment of lunacy for all those who managed to make any sense out of the game. Embarassinlgy enough today I have to admit that every single sentence on that bloody tea towel is absolutely accurate despite being incomprehensible to me at the time.

I also came to the conclusion that in addition to being incomprehensible the game was utterly boring, too, and it was beyond my furthest reach how a whole nation could possibly spend days on end watching the same two teams playing each other again and again. In a test series you will have the two same teams playing five test matches - each of which can last up to five days with something around six to eight hours of play on each day. Watching paint dry suddenly had an unprecedented appeal! I might have been able to grasp the concept if anything had happened on the playfield. But there were a few blokes throwing and batting a small ball while eleven others were just standing around all day. Every once in a while one of the fellows standing around would get to catch a ball that somehow found its way in his direction and would then throw it back. If he managed to drop the one ball he was supposed to catch on that day the audience would roar angrily and banish him forever from their favour. What kind of warped mind would it take to enjoy standing in the sun for hours and becoming the idiot of the day due to a few seconds' inattention at the wrong time.

I am sure you can understand how I felt about cricket after my first year's exposure to it. I regarded it with all the scorn I could muster for a senseless game played by countries that have close to no relevance in any sport that is known and played in Europe. (Ok, I negelcted the pommies but despite the fact that they seem to know soccer pretty well they are the ones who invented cricket and spread the absurdity all over the world).

As uncertain as I am about my first contact with cricket as certain I am about the moment I had it finally had explained to me properly. I do have to admit that I cannot think of any reason why I really bothered asking. It might have had something to do with an inane need to prove to myself that I was open enough to try again already knowing that it would still be as hopeless as it used to.

To my utter surprise my hostdad managed to run me through the basic rules in just about twenty minutes and I had to admit that it sounded fairly straight forward if you did away with all the fancy words for a start. As the West Indies were being whipped by the Australians at the time test match after test match I had ample time to put my grasp of the rules to the test and slowly learned the finer points. Time and time again I was sure to have spotted a weakness in the rules, a flaw in the basic concept of the game, a special case no one had thought of before but unsurprisingly enough cricket lets one dive to arbitrary depths of complexity without conceeding a sinlge point to its critics.

Would you believe that I - who has never in his life found any attraction in watching a sport being played - was willing, nay, eager to attend the fifth day of the third test match? Fate must have felt as incredulous as you and decided to let me suffer for my earlier mis-apreciation of the game by letting the Australians win on the fourth day.

But having come so close I was not going to give up. Visiting Melbourne a few weeks later I was not only going to watch cricket I was going to do it right by watching it at the G. If you have paid any attention to my rantings above you will be flabbergasted to imagine me sitting among 80'000 lunatics actually enjoying an eight hour day-night match. In fact I liked it so much I watched another one in Hobart less than a month later. And had I had any chance to get the time off work I would have made a pilgrimage to England to see the Australians take the Ashes off the poms the summer after.

What did it take to make me turn the full 180°?

I do not know. But just think of any other sport that would lead someone to the ecstasy of writing the following:

But let me tell you about one of the most amazing pieces of fielding I have seen for a long time. Last Sunday, Australia played South Africa. A South African batsman cracked the ball hard with a cover drive and it zoomed along the ground towards the boundary at a million miles per hour. Andrew Symonds raced towards the ball, which had passed him and was beating him to the boundary. Symonds dived through the air and slid about 4 metres towards the ball, actually passing the ball as he slid. He knocked it back with his hand before it hit the boundary, jumped to his feet and then did a very flat 80 metre throw direct to the wicket keeper!

Actually, on second thought, I think I do know. It is the variety. Sitting there endlessly while nothing much happens and yet quivering with suspense over the question of when the next wicket is going to fall. Seeing the calm serenity with which the fielders seem to stand on their spot unmoving only to suddenly leap into motion to catch that fateful ball that will send the batsman out. The quiet routine with which a batsman will bat zero after zero only to score a smashing six point boundary when he sees the chance. The different ways a bowler can launch the ball in that impossible looking overarm throw. It is the suspense of knowing how many runs still need to be chased and how few overs or wickets are left to do it with. It is the sly strategy with which the captains decide the order of bowlers and batsmen and their fielding positions.

Coming to think of it, spreading cricket is probably the only excuse I am likely to accept as an excuse for the centuries of English colonialisation. It is - after all - a bloody good one.

Howzat?

Urs Beeli, Zürich, 2002-01-22

Duck	When a batsman who scored no runs is dismissed.
Golden Duck	Out for a Duck on the very first ball of the innings.
Floater	A leg spin by an off spinner with the similar action as of off break (called such by Ramiz Raja)
Nelson	111 runs
Yorker	The ball pitches near the feet of the batsman or between his feet and the wicket.