AN AMERICAN IN TRAINING
I Spent the Whole Week Trying to Learn the Full Game of Cricket
I don’t have that much skill and patience to learn the full rules of a game I’ve never watched before now
Thinking about the legend, Sachin Tendulkar
I was having a cricket conversation earlier in the week with brilliant The Press Box editor, Gaurav Jain, and we were talking about cricket. He’s very familiar with the sport and the subject of Sachin Tendulkar came up. If you’re American and don’t know who that is, don’t worry, you’re not alone. He’s the best player in the world’s second most popular sport behind football (soccer).
Preeti Ramachandran joined in on the conversation and talked about magical it was as a kid watching Sachin Tendulkar play and also watching the sport in general. Cricket takes a lot of skill and to be at the top in that sport takes an extra amount of that high level of skill. Tendulkar is a legend. The sport is a relatively unknown phenomenon in America but not in many parts of the rest of the world.
Origins of the sport and USA in the T20 World Cup
If you don’t know, the sport actually started in England and was brought over to India during colonial times in 1597. It wasn’t until 1844 that the first international match was played though. Surprisingly, that first match was between the USA and Canada in New York. You wouldn’t really know that looking around the States these days.
The fan base is still very small in the United States even though as the T20 World Cup hosts for 2024, the United States national cricket team was announced as automatic qualifiers. I think that's why I decided to learn about the sport too. Learning the sport and becoming a fan of the sport before all of the excitement and patriotism behind the American cricket team gets to a height, I want to be ready to say that I was a fan before the bandwagon arrived.
Basic understanding of the rules and the different formats
So far, I only have a basic understanding but I think I’ve got enough to at least be introduced to it. Each team consists of 11 players. One player is designated to bowl, similar to a pitcher in baseball. There can also be a 12th player designated for substitutions in case of an injury replacement. There are three different types of matches: T20, One Day, and Test Cricket.
I’ll start with the shortest type of match and explain how it works. The T20, also known as Twenty20, is the shortest match at about 3 hours. The match consists of 20 overs of play with about 80 minutes per team and a half-hour break.
What is an over, over?
In cricket, an over consists of six legal deliveries bowled from one end of a cricket pitch to the player batting at the other end, almost always by a single bowler. No one bowler can pitch consecutive overs and a new bowler comes in for every one over.
In fact, in T20, a bowler can only bowl four overs maximum. In all limited formats, a player can only bat 20% of the total overs in a match.
Longer formats of the game and introduction to the outs
A one-day international match is a game that lasts about 9 hours. There are 50 overs per side. The Cricket World Cup is played in this format. Then there’s the most common format in test format. This format has an unlimited amount of overs per side and the matches are typically about 5 days or more. There once was a test cricket match that lasted 11 days but had to be canceled.
Here are ten ways of getting out in cricket: caught, bowled, LBW, stumped, hit wicket, run out, timed out, handled the ball, obstructing the field, and hit the ball twice. An 11th way is to be retired out. A batsman can retire hurt and return later, but if they choose to stop batting for any other reason, they can’t come back.
How to end the batted inning
The team’s inning ends when ten out of the 11 batters are bowled out. The team would need at least two batters at any given time since teams bat in pairs. I feel like I should explain what some of these outs are.
Caught is obvious. That’s just when I ball is fielded and caught before it hits the ground. Bowled is when the wicket is knocked down by the delivery without being hit by another player or the umpire. It is still out if the ball is a result of the bat tipping the ball into the wicket. LBW is leg before wicket. If a legitimate bowl hits the batter’s leg before the wicket, then the batter is out.
More ways to get people out in cricket
A run-out is when a fielder or the bowler throws the ball through the crease before the runner makes it there. Stumped is if the striker steps in front of the crease to play the ball, leaving no part of his body or the bat on the ground behind the crease, and the wicket-keeper is able to put down the wicket with the ball.
A hit wicket is when the batsman takes out his own stumps with his body or bat, while in the process of taking a shot or beginning his first run. Timed out is referring to the three-minute time limit that it takes the striker to get ready. If the time to receive the first delivery is beyond that, it is a time-out.
Even more ways, like there are so many more than baseball
Handling the ball is when the batsman contacts the ball with the hand, not on the bat other than to prevent injury. Handling the ball is not a common out. Obstructing the field is when the batsman, by action or words, obstructs or distracts the fielding side.
Hitting the ball twice is also an out and is self-explanatory. If the ball is hit twice in the same swing, then it is out. Okay, this game has a lot more rules that I still have yet to learn the intricacies of but getting the basics down at this point will definitely help me gain an advantage over other Americans who want to become casual fans of the world’s second most popular sport.
The thing is that Sachin Tendulkar is long retired but I’m looking forward to learning all of the other names in the sport as I go forward and hope to enjoy the games in the T20 coming up in 2024 as I’ve gained a more thorough understanding now. I will write a follow-up once I’ve solidly gotten the game down.
