Explaining Cricket

Okay, before I start on this most difficult task, RPOTD:

The vegetarian alternative to a sausage - baguette with cheddar, smothered in onion and real ale chutney.


Okay, now it may seem a little strange that I am writing this post and not Danny, but we decided that since I wasn't quite as deeply embedded in cricket stats and history, maybe I would have a better perspective on how to explain it to people who know nothing about it. My goal is to explain this humorous description that's been hanging in our bathroom for the last 4 years:


Object of the Game:
There are two teams, and the object is to score more runs than the other team. Like most other sports, this is done through a combination of scoring lots of runs, and preventing the other teams from scoring too many. Good so far?

Overall Structure of the Game:
Each team has 11 members. I didn't want to use too many baseball analogies, but I will use this one: imagine a baseball game with only two innings, where one team bats, then the other teams bats, then they each bat one more time, then the game is over. That's cricket.

The Pitch:

A cricket pitch, or field, is a large grass oval, and in the middle there is a thin dirt rectangle, called the wicket. At each end of the wicket there are three wooden posts, with two small pieces of wood bridging the top. These are called the stumps. The main action of the game takes place on the wicket, but there are defensive fielders on the rest of the pitch. Fielding positions are fairly fluid, though there are people who specialize in being far from the wicket, and some who specialize in being close to the batsman.

Central Tension:
The main interactions of the game involves 2 people batting, and 2 people throwing the ball towards them, called bowling. At any given moment, however, there is only one bowler bowling to one batsman - the other bowler and batsman stand to the side of the stumps and watch. The batsmen stands in front of his stumps and swings his bat to prevent the ball from hitting the stumps. By hitting the ball he can also score runs (see below). Each bowler goes 6 times from one end of the wicket (6 balls is called an over), then the other bowler goes 6 times from the other end of the wicket, and they go back and forth, bowling to whichever batsman is on the opposite end of the wicket. Also, the physical act of bowling is quite strange to watch at first, and bowlers must keep their arm straight for the entire bowling motion, and they are often trying to bounce the ball off the ground in funny ways.

Scoring Runs:
Each time the batsman hit the ball, there are several options. If the ball doesn't go very far, he can just stand there and wait for a fielder to throw the ball back in to the bowler. This does not score any runs. This is totally fine and happens a lot. If the ball goes a moderate distance, he and the other runner can each run to the opposite stump, crossing in the middle - this gets them a point. If the ball is still out in the field they can switch again, for another point, and so on. However, if the ball is hit a long way and rolls all the way to the boundary of the pitch, this is an automatic 4 points. If this ball is really given a good whack and clears the boundary in the air, it's a automatic 6 points.

Getting Out:
While the batsmen are hitting balls, trying to run back and forth, the bowlers are trying to get them out, and there are several ways that this can happen. If the batsmen misses and the ball hits the stumps, it is out (bowled). If the batsmen hits it in the air and it is caught, it is out (caught). If the batsmen try to run back and forth and one of the fielders throws it back and hits the stump before the runner gets close to the stump, it is out (run out). If the batsman lets the ball his his leg (which has ample padding), and the umpire determines that the ball would have hit the stumps if it hadn't his the batsman's leg first, it is out (leg before wicket, or LBW). In other works, you can't defend the stumps with your body. These are the main ways you can get out. I should also point out that there is some confusing terminology here. While a wicket describes the middle, getting people out is described as "taking wickets", and getting out is "losing wickets".

Overall Game Play:
Like any good game, it starts with a coin toss. The winner of the toss decides, based on the weather and conditions of the pitch, if they want to field first, or if they want to "have a bat." The fielding team, all 11 of them, go out on the field: 2 bowlers and 9 other fielders in various positions. The batting team has established a batting order, and the first two batsmen put on their kit, or pads, and go out to the wicket. Everyone else on the batting team sits in the clubhouse, watching and eating candy. The first bowler bowls 6 times, then the next bowler goes 6 times, etc, trying to get the batsmen out in one of the 4 ways described above, and the bowlers try not to get out and to score runs. If one of the batsmen gets out, he goes back to the bench to eat candy, and the next batsmen comes in. It continues like this until 10 of the batsmen have gotten out, even though the last person is "not out", because you can't play with just 1 batsmen. Then the teams switch - the team that was batting now goes out into the field, and the team that was in the field puts their first two batsmen onto the wicket. This cycle goes through twice, so each team bats twice and each team fields twice.

And in terms of bowling, any given team has 4 or 5 people who specialize in bowling. They tend to be less good at batting, though there is the occasional all-rounder. So at any given time 2 of these bowlers are taking the position of the bowler, and the other 2 or 3 are just part of the fielding positions. The bowlers can move in and out of the bowling positions fairly fluidly throughout the game.

Duration of the Game:
What's I've described is a multi-day match, which is the traditional form of the game. This can either be 4 or 5 days. So it's an approximation that in a 4 day match, each team will bat for about a day, then field for a day, then bat for a day, then field for a day. But of course this is subject to a huge amount of variation. In today's match, as Danny has discussed, England lost 4 wickets in about 10 minutes, which if you extrapolated suggested that England might only bat for 30 minutes! However, if the batsmen are doing really well, your team could be batting for almost 2 days. There's also a lot of individual variation - today Kevin Pietersen got out on the first ball bowled to him, while Jonathan Trott stood out there and batted ALL DAY. So unlike many other sports, in these multi-day matches it's generally more important to bat for a long time and focus on not getting out than to try an score runs quickly. So the progress of the game is really measured in how many outs have been made.

A Note about Scores:
In these long matches, scores are in the multiple hundreds. The best batsmen are hoping to score 100 runs by themselves, called a century. The record for most runs scored by a single batsmen in one match is by Brian Lara of the West Indies, 400 and not out. The most runs a team has scored in one turn batting is 952 by Sri Lanka in 1997. So the 346 that England scored today, with 7 outs, is very respectable.

Exceptions to these rules:
Way to many too list here, of course. There are some shortened versions of the game, some situations where a team might bat twice in a row, sometimes when getting points quickly is essential, bad weather conditions that truncate the match, etc. But that is the basic premise of the game.

Howzat!?