The New Road

Cricket

For months now I have been watching the Sunday Cricket team as I came back from getting bagels. I wanted to take pictures but I never had my camera, or I had Gee in the car and it would have been too tough. But today I had the chance, so I got my camera and went out to take a few snaps.

Here is a bowl from the bowlers perspective:

The bowler runs up towards the pitch and uses an overarm throw to send the ball hitting the ground about two yards ahead of the batsman. The batsman stands in front of three wickets. If the wickets get struck during the play the batsman is out. If he hits it then the two batsmen run between the two sets of wickets scoring runs until they stop or one is thrown out. Whoever is at the pitching wicket ends up taking the swing.

Here is the pitch for the batsman's perspective:

The idea here is to defend your wickets by slamming the ball out into the large circular field. If someone catches it you are out. So generally the idea is to keep it low and far. If the ball reaches the boundary of the field on the ground it's automatically four runs. If it flies over then it's six runs.

Here are two sequences of guys taking a swing at the ball:

In this second series the ball went high which makes the batsman swing in a way that looks a lot like baseball. Generally though the ball is very low and the swing is more akin to the golf style swing we see in this previous set.

These guys were really just out for some fun. It turns out that the league season (April-October) is over, so this was just a fun way to keep in shape. Though for just having fun these guys were taking it pretty seriously as you can see.

It's funny how Cricket is perceived in America as a kind of sissy game for ivy-leaguers. It's not that at all. In the rest of the world this is as down home as baseball, people play it with slabs of wood and tennis balls the way we play stickball.

I had a chat with one of the guys on the way out. He had been organizing and playing Cricket in the Bay Area for twenty-two years. I gave him my name and number and I'll probably try a few of these casual games just for an hour of weekend fun now and again. It would be good to get some air and to meet some nice people.

It's great to see Cricket again. I miss it from when we were in Australia especially, but there was also a big group in Miami in Kendall near my mom's place. Here it's mainly Indians. In Miami it was mainly Jamaicans. Both India and Jamaica field some of the best Cricket teams in the world. Australia is also world class. The other Cricket super-power is Britain, as you would expect, but they actually perennially lose to the Australians in a series called The Ashes.

According to the coordinator the league play is all one-dayers. In Cricket there are two types of official games. A 'one day' match, which has a set number of 'overs' (i.e. innings) which pretty much takes up a day. And a 'test match' which can last up to five days.

Anyway, more on this later as I actually try and get together with these guys to bat a few balls around the pitch.