The Eccentricities of Cricket, first in a many-part series: Ian Bell's broken foot

England batsman Ian Bell broke his foot fielding in Saturday's Saturday's one-day international against Bangladesh.  It's a tough injury for a player who has spent almost two years out of England's one-day team.  Bell's set to have a cast for over a month, which means he'll almost certainly miss the entire Test series against Pakistan.  For England, Bell's injury left them a batsman short in Saturday's game - they ended up five runs short in their chase of Bangladesh's total and lost to the Tigers for the first time in international cricket.

Mundane details, I know.  So rather than bore you with more details about England's prospects for the rest of the summer, I'll share two key elements about cricket that Bell's injury (or, more precisely, his return to the field following his injury) reveals.  For those of you who weren't following at home, Bell, left foot newly-ensconced in a cast, limped out to the middle to join Jonathan Trott for the 50th (i.e. final) over of England's innings (don't worry about the terminology or apparently incorrect use of plurals... you'll pick it up as we move along.  I promise.).  So what do Bell's last-minute would-be heroics tell us about cricket?

First, cricket games last a long time.  Bell hurt his foot in the 10th over of Bangladesh's innings.  Given that the match started around 11am, his injury took place no later than noon.  When he came out to bat at the end of England's innings, almost 90 overs of play had occurred.  Throw in a lunch break, and you're looking at least 7 hours.  In the meantime, Bell went off to hospital, got an x-ray, and got a cast put on his foot.  And probably had a substantial tea, just for good measure.

So, Bell was out of commission for almost a full working day but arrived back at the ground in time to play in the same game that was going on that morning.  Cricket is famous, of course, for the length of its games, but the funny thing here is that this was actually one of the short versions of the game, approximately one-fifth as long as five-day Test matches.

I've given a lot of thought of what draws me to cricket, and I've come to the conclusion that the length of its matches is one of its real charms.  You might think the length would just lead to boredom.  And, to be fair, there's lots of time in many matches where it doesn't seem as if much is happening.  But what cricket (especially first-class (i.e. multi-day) cricket) rewards is not just skill.  You might be able to hit a cricket ball farther than anyone else in the world, but if you're just as likely to swing and miss as you are to make solid contact, you won't last long as a batsman.  Cricket rewards consistency and concentration, the ability to toil and grind your way along to victory.  Again, "toil" and "grind" aren't words likely to attract the uninitiated.  But at the end of a Test match, you can almost always be sure that the better team won.  And there's something rewarding about that.  I suspect that my assessment of own athletic ability (I see myself, on a good day, as ploddingly competent) has something to do with why I like cricket as much as I do.

Second, cricket has no substitutions.*  You may well have wondered why on earth Ian Bell would have to bat with a broken foot.  Well, in cricket, the eleven players on the team sheet are the eleven players who decide the outcome of the match.  There's something comfortingly symmetric about each side deciding on its best players and those players battling it over several hours (or several days).

One of the most important consequences of the lack of substitutions is that all the bowlers (the equivalent of baseball pitchers) have to bat, and all the batsman could, in theory, be called upon to bowl at any time in the match.  While specialization in batting or bowling takes place, it's not nearly to the degree that it does, say, in baseball.  There are some bowlers who are comically inept at batting, but there are also plenty of others who make real contributions with both bat and ball.  If you're an NL fan who detests the DH because of the imbalance it creates (DHs who never pickup a glove, pitchers who take batting practice half a dozen times a year), I think you'll see the point I'm getting at here.

So the larger point I'm getting at here is a rather simple one: cricket sets one team of 11 players against another team of 11 players, with the better team nearly always winning.  There's a purity to it that's lacking in other sports.

Just to show that I'm doing more here in England than musing about cricket, here's a picture taken yesterday in Waterlow Park.  So, now I've written about cricket and taken some cricket photos.  Now I just need get myself into a game, right?

*Yes, there are exceptions.  There was the ill-advised experiment with supersubs in one-day matches a few years ago.  And there are provisions for substitute fielders, as Ricky Ponting knows well.