Still all those poor Indians decided to try and watch that television on that day, which happened to be showing the cricket game. That says something. And besides, India may be poor, but by virtue of its numbers has one of the larger professional and middle classes in the world, though it be a small part of the whole population. I’m sure that translates into a very significant audience for cricket.
Most matches these days are the limited-overs one-day internationals (commonly called ODIs or LOIs), with the 50-over limit that I talked about. Test matches (the five-day version), since they take much longer, aren’t played as frequently, but are considered more prestigious.
The only rule about the number of overs in test cricket that I can remember is that each team is required to bowl a minimum of 90 overs in a day (weather permitting). If those 90 overs haven’t been bowled, the hours of play can be extended until they have (and the bowling team can be penalised for having a tardy over-rate). However, it is entirely possible that more than 90 overs can be bowled in a day - in a Test between England v Australia in 1953 105 ½ overs were bowled per day. Most modern cricket remains at the 90-over per day mark, though.
Is this just getting more confusing by the minute? 
No, I’ve just come to the conclusion that you’re all insane. Steps should probably be taken to make sure it doesn’t spread over here… 
The Daniel Day Lewis movie was called The Boxer.
Raging Bull
Breaking Away
Bang the Drum Slowly
Eight Men Out
Fear Strikes Out
Million Dollar Baby
Murderball
Hoop Dreams
Field Of Dreams
The Hurricane
He Got Game
Ali
All are American films the defy the sports movie cliche. There are others, of course. Bend it Like Beckham, on the other hand, was pretty much standard Hollywood product with an accent.
Heh. I think the approach in India (where I’m from, incidentally) has always been to approach cricket more as a religion than anything else. It’s long been my belief that strange religious practices always look like insanity to outsiders.
I will admit, however, that the rules of cricket (commonly called the Laws) are more complicated and involved than those of any other sport that I’m aware of. The strange thing is that kids in India seem to absorb them by a sort of osmosis; I never really learned how to play cricket, and I’m horrible at it to this day, but I can still argue for hours about whether that particular leg-before-wicket decision was valid or not, and whether having a third slip against Ganguly is an effective tactic.
That’s the other thing about cricket, incidentally; it’s full of unique and quaint terminology - in what other sport would you find terms like these?
Silly mid-wicket - fielding position
Deep fine leg - fielding position
Baggy Green - cap worn by Australian cricketers
Agricultural Shot - anything not played from the book
Chinaman - type of bowling
Googly - type of bowling
Silly Point - fielding position
Golden Duck - getting out on the first ball faced
Leg Cutter - type of bowling
Nightwatchman - poor batsman sent to protect better ones
I don’t have time to look up links to the individual terms, but you’ll find most of them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cricket_terms.
Then of course there’s the famous story about the man who ran into a female spectator and was fined for bowling a maiden over…
This has bothered me ever since the GD thread where we discussed this issue, and I just now realized the flaw in the argument. (Thanks to an unrelated debate I had with Omni in another thread.)
You have to go by spectator rate stats, not season aggregate spectator totals. Otherwise, highschool football would likely be bigger than any pro sport. (How many highschools have football games? Thousands? That’s tens of thousands of games…) If that example falls short, then surely NCAA basketball wins the aggregate spectator measure over any of the pro sports.
Unfortunately, this puts NASCAR squarely into MLB territory. But it also has the added bonus of putting the NFL into the stratosphere as the biggest sport in the US, which is clearly correct. When was the last time 90 million people watched a baseball game?
I’ll concede that countless people listen to MLB games on the radio, but I would need a hard sell to convince me that more people spectate the average MLB game than the average NFL game when all methods are counted. (Tickets, television, radio, internet.)
Of course, this probably puts cricket way ahead of baseball, but I’d imagine soccer, baseball, and American football all fall far short of soccer.
You’re absolutely right to argue that season aggregates aren’t a good measure. But I’m not sure what you mean by ‘spectator rate stats’. What I hope it means, because I think it a good measure for a ‘routine’ sport (i.e. one that takes place week-in week-out, which unfortunatly eliminates test cricket), is an average of the total audience, for any game in a given sport, across multiple weeks. So sports with a large number of participating teams and relatively small individual audiences (including broadcast) can compete fairly in the statistics against those which have a few big names, and a few big stadiums, and a big TV deal.
But NFL games are of course far less frequent. If you’re the fan of an NFL team, you only have to watch 16 games, almost all of them on Sunday afternoons, to have watched the entire schedule. A basketball or hockey fan, by comparison, would have to watch 82 games; a baseball fan would have to watch a staggering 162 games, pretty much every day for 26 weeks.
Defining what the most popular sport is in the United States is simply not an easy task, because there’s no one clear measurement. Total attendance? Capacity attendance? Attendance per event? Money spent on attendance? Television viewership - total, per game, by rating? Radio listeners? Books purchased?
And what about PARTICIPATION? I am amazed by the number of people who say they love a sport, but don’t ever try to play it. It seems to me that gauging the interest in a sport without gauging participation is insane. Truth be told, soccer is vastly more popular in the United States than a lot of people realize, but it’s popular as a participation sport, not a spectator sport. The former’s just as valid, if not more so, than the latter.
This call isn’t hard for every country - the most popular sport in Canada, by a mile, is hockey. The most popular sport in a lot fo countries is soccer. The most popular sport in Japan is certainly baseball.
But the USA really has no clear winner.
If you’re going to drag spectator stats in, and children playing the game, let me tell you unequivocably: baseball wins in this neck o’ the woods.
I used to work at a trophy shop. We made trophies for every damn type of sport played in the local area: football, hockey, motocross, basketball, tennis, soccer, you name it. We made dart trophies and golf trophies and trophies for the occasional horseshoe or cribbage tournament. We had pig and chicken trophies for 4-H clubs. We made trophies for local colleges, high schools, junior high, elementary, church leagues, and private parties.
Nothing, nothing beat baseball.
The baseball season for Little League was a month-long rush where we had to hire extra people and stack boxes and boxes of trophy parts in the aisles of the workshop because there was no room for them in storage. Where we might have had 20-30 orders for football trophies over the fall, we’d have 150 orders for baseball trophies in the spring.
I expect other parts of the United States would find different statistics for which sports outsold, but for amateur sports here in the Northwest, baseball was bigger than the next three sports combined.