For whatever reason, some time ago I ran across an article describing a cricket match. I’ve always been sort of curious about cricket, if only because I’m already a huge baseball fan. But I read the article, and it turned out that I could only understand 63% of the words. Which is pretty bad, when you think about it, since it's supposed to be in English. (Seriously. I counted and everything. Here’s the article, you can play along at home.)
So I pulled up my ESPN 360, knowing that they broadcast cricket now and then, and I decided I’d learn how the game worked just by watching. Not reading the rules, not asking anyone, just watching. I always wondered what it was like to watch baseball without knowing anything at all, since I was raised on it and there's never been a time when I didn't know what was going on. I figured this was my best chance of ever knowing what that felt like.
I turned on a match from last fall, between Zimbabwe and Bangladesh. Naturally, the announcers weren’t helping any at first—they were talking to people who knew what in the world they were watching, not to me. But I soldiered on. This was important.
I was surprised to find out, after about ten pitches (sorry, “bowls”), that the Zimbabwean bowlers were “dominating” Bangladesh. As far as I could tell, they had just thrown the ball ten times. (I later asked a friend of mine who follows cricket about this, and he confirmed that if nothing had happened after ten whole bowls, Zimbabwe was, indeed, dominating.) I watched the match for about 45 minutes, and I’m pretty sure only one guy was put out. No one seemed very surprised by this.
I can name three things I learned for sure from watching these 45 minutes of cricket:
1) They play inside a huge circle, not within one large right-angle like in baseball. Maybe I knew this already. I couldn’t say.
2) If a batter hits the ball outside of the circle, his team gets six runs. It could have been four runs. Either way, it didn’t matter that the ball was hit on the ground and went outside the circle. It was still out-of-play and the runs were automatic. Maybe something different happens if it’s hit in the air out of the circle, but I didn’t see that.
3) When a batter hits the ball in the air, and the defense catches the ball without hitting the ground, the batter is out, just like in baseball. The difference here is, in cricket everyone runs around screaming and hollering as if they’d just scored a goal in the World Cup.
And that’s it. That’s what I learned. Honestly, I can’t wait until I have a chance to watch the drama unfold during the other 5 hours and 15 minutes of the match.
Sixty-three percent? Way better than me!
ReplyDeleteHere's the part I did understand: Barely 24 hours earlier, few could have realistically believed that England had even a remote hope of breaking out the champagne.
Fortunately, it was high in the story.
I counted words like "and" and "the" among words that I could understand. Also, people's names. I'll bet if we counted sentences I could understand, I'd be under 5%. Brutal.
ReplyDeleteI am going to start with my feelings after I have read it. To my surprise, I really liked this article.:).Because it seems like, getting to know how does my mother language sounds like in any other languages' native speakers' (non-Bengali speaker) ears.
ReplyDeleteEver since I can remember anything from my childhood, I was raised in the environment of Cricket. However, now I am going to sort out something that might work as a response from me towards that nice,well-spoken and clearly portrayed article in the blog.
~~"batter" is called as "batsman" in the game of Cricket and the guy who throws ball to the batsman is called as "Bowler". The rest of the [players standing around the play ground to catch the balls hit by batsman are called as "Fielders".
~~If a batsman hits the ball outside of the circle, his team gets "Six" if the ball doesn't touch ground before it crosses the circle line (in Cricket Circle line is called as Boundary) . But if the ball dropped on the ground inside the boundary line and then goes outside of the circle, the team of the batsman gets a "Four".
But in the game of Cricket, most of the times it's more strategic than just a mere physical fight to earn points. By the way, Points are called as "Runs" in Cricket,because when the balls are hit by the bats man and batsman runs to score Runs {we can call it spare points which are earned by running from one point of the pitch to the other end} until it gets back to the "Wickets"
Note:Wickets are the 3 sticks/bars made of wood that Batsman stands in front of and batsman will be out if he bowler can break the Wickets by throwing.So apparently batsman always tries to save his wickets.
As I was saying,sometimes strategy matters a lot in Cricket. Like,while deciding captains from each team would test the Pitch and the weather of the day to make decisions for which team is going to Bat and who is going to bowl first. So the game always Starts with a stunning Toss conducting between captains of each team.
"Pitch" is the 22 yard long rectangular shaped space where balls are bowled on and batsman stands in front of the "Wickets".
And, there are three kinds of Cricket they are called,Test Cricket[that usually a five day long cricket which might ends before 5 days],ODI (One Day International)[each team has 50 overs allocated] and Twenty20 Cricket [each team has 20 overs allocated2]
Note:1 Over=6 Bowls.
Each team has 11 players.
11 players make 10 Batsman.Because in the pitch there has to be always 2 batsman running from one end to another end of the Pitch.
Still,I am feeling like I am not done with whatever the Greatness of the game of Cricket is...:)
Comments from Tanvir WSU students from Bangladesh
ksaussiemom, Do you happen to know if international students ever get together to play cricket locally? When? Where? I'd be very curious to see this.
ReplyDeleteYou might not check back on this post to see this comment, which is fine. But if you do, and you wouldn't mind asking around, I'd appreciate it.