But cricket can go on forever, or at least as long as quidditch does.
Limited overs cricket is exactly that, limited overs, with an endpoint defined by the number of balls bowled. Even test cricket has a defined end point: two innings total, with ten outs per side per innings. Yes, test cricket can last for up to five days, but it still has a defined endpoint and win condition, and it is perfectly legitimate for the batting team to end their innings early if they think or know they don’t need to score any more runs.
The end condition for quidditch is so unpredictable and so disconnected from the rest of the game it simply cannot work. Saying “look at baseball, look at cricket, look at college football overtime” doesn’t work as a comparison because everyone knows well ahead of time the conditions for when the end condition will be completed.
Are you thinking of timeless Tests? It’s been done, but, if you read the beginning of the article, you see that e.g. the 1939 test described still ended up a draw, even after nine days of play, because one team had to go home. The idea may not be completely unreasonable, though.
Current five-day tests result in about, say, 25% draws? Maybe that is OK. Why must every single game have a definite winner?
I would LOVE to see someone introduce a Golden Snitch to professional football (the American kind; not the Everywhere-else-in-the-world kind). It would be a self-propelled ball, maybe the size of a golf ball; it would be controlled by a remote-controlled signal sent from a computerized random number generator; only one designated player on each team would be legally allowed to pick it up (the punishment for touching it by an unauthorized player would be a 1000-yard penalty); it would keep moving between plays; when your team’s Seeker catches it, they have to present it to a referee; at this point, the game is considered ended.
And the Snitch is worth ONE point for the side that catches it.
They also get to keep their regular clock, so regular football games are theoretically possible.
BTW, in Harry’s second match in Prisoner of Azkaban, he brings his wand with him just in case he needs to cast Expecto Patronum on some Dementors. Is that even legal? What’s to stop some fourth-year Slytherin from pulling out a wand and yelling "Accio Snitch!"
Since AFAIK we never see any instance of game-related wandwork in a Quidditch match, I’m guessing that casting spells to influence the course of play is illegal. Harry’s anti-dementor spell, on the other hand, was self-defense against attempts at sabotage and possibly serious endangerment by rule-breaking spectators.
Same thing as if, e.g., a baseball player used his bat to defend himself from being hit by objects thrown at him from the stands. The important rules violation is on the part of the aggressive spectators, not on the part of the player trying to defend himself from said aggression.
7-1 is half the Quidditch World Cup score. 55-10 about the same. There are blowouts and then there’s this Quidditch BLOWOUT.
Why does everyone keep saying that the Quidditch World cup score was a blowout? The final score was 170 to 160. The Chasers were outclassed but presumably Krum got the team all the way to the world cup. He knew he had to get the Snitch before the point disparity reached 160 and once he failed, it was too late and he might as well just catch it anyway.
He was also bleeding all over the place at the time.
The game would make perfect sense, INCLUDING the Snitch & Seeker’s ending of the game, if the Snitch is a bit more intelligent.
If the snitch starts off very energetic, and slowly loses energy over the span of the game, then it works as a balancing force.
Very early snitch catches should be almost impossible.
Very late snitch catches would be enormously unlikely, as the snitch would eventually barely hover over the pitch.
Unfortunately, JK did not keep this sort of balancing in mind, hence the silliness of Quidditch games ranging from 3.5 SECONDS up to “more than three MONTHS”
The thing about real world sports is that the rules have been modified over decades of serious competitive play to retain the basic concept of the sport, ensure that the outcome of the game rewards skillful play, and is interesting for spectators.
Real world sports are not inherently illogical, the rules form an artificial framework under which people can compete. If the rules didn’t work to create a functioning framework, the sport wouldn’t last. That’s not to say that every rule is perfect, but they do try to strike a balance between creating a game that is exciting to watch, fun to play, rewards skillful play, and is safe to participate in. Certainly many of the rules are ‘arbitrary’ in the sense that there is no perfect game to create and different rules are what make different sports.
Quidditch has the bones of a reasonable game, with the bulk of the action being 3 hooped Basketball/Soccer on flying brooms. The bludgers are problematic because getting attacked by flying iron balls is generally not fun or safe, but you can overlook that in a work of fiction. The snitch becomes a problem because the team that catches the snitch almost always wins the game. This devalues the one part of the game that resembles a reasonable sport, and places the chance of victory on the shoulders of someone NOT playing that game, but chasing a tiny golden ball.
About as plausible as in baseball, hitting a home run scores 15 regardless of the runners on base and immediately ends the game.
The most obvious being the introduction of the NBA shot clock.
My FiL played professional basketball in the pre-shot clock era. Final scores were often in the 16-14 range. When a team got the lead, they would just sit on the ball. You can imagine how boring that would have been to watch (or play!).
The shot clock saved basketball. Quiddich is stuck in the ancient era, and what else could we expect from a culture that is change averse.
Heck, you still see the issues with the lack of a shot clock in high school basketball. If one team is much better than the other, it gets boring quickly. For that matter, there continues to be talk about the NCAA adopting the NBA clock to increase the pace of the game.
Test cricket has a hard endpoint - stumps on the fifth day, unless victory occurs before then. And watching a team struggling to hold on until then can be great entertainment.
What’s objectionable is that if they had to keep playing, there might be opportunity of a turnover, which if the score is within one scoring play, might lead to a different outcome, the way a come from behind possession can. But taking a knee and using the play clock to run time cuts off that possibility. However, I’m not hard up on it.
If time only counted when the ball was in play, the games would be like 8-9 hours long. I suppose you could chop the clock from 15 minute quarters to like 4 minute quarters, but it would really change strategy and be a different game.