I once asked my parish priest (who is Indian), “Fr. James, you’re Indian. Please explain cricket to me.” He said there wasn’t enough time to explain it all, with strategy and rules. And our parish has a bocce team, but no cricket team.
StG
I’m from a non-cricketing nation, and I just love the game. I watched my first matches in a guest house in Pakistan where I was stuck in my room due to a bad case of food poisoning. The only thing on tv was a Pakistan vs. India match, and after watching for a few days I was sold. I suppose I like it so much because I discovered it on the sub-continent, where everybody is absolutely mad about cricket. Mad enough, even, to play it on their roof-top terraces. By now I love it to the extent that I will follow the scores online for a full day. Truly a great game.
Try to watch a match (maybe a limited-overs one as others have suggested) with someone who knows the game. A pub would be a great place to do it. For information about the game try Wikipedia or Cricinfo - the latter has all and any information and statistic about cricket you could possibly dream about. Also, the first 20/20 cricket world cup has just started in South Africa today. I am not fond of this very short format myself, but it has action and it might be an easy start if the 5-day version seems a bit too much for you.
Thank you, everyone, for the responses. I’ll take a look at some of the links and see if there are any locals who are into the sport. LA being the international community that it is, I would be very surprised if there weren’t some place a guy could get a worthwhile cricket initiation.
I’m not sure what to make of the whole five-day thing, though. Most Americans can barely tolerate a baseball game that lasts three hours. We shall see!
See, what you do is, you stand out in a field in the hot sun, and then don’t do anything for about six hours, then you go and sit in the shade of the stadium for about five hours until it’s your turn to hit the ball, where you then miss it completely, it hits the stumps, and you go and sit down in the shade again.
And that’s cricket.
cricket is another sport that I love, I think you should try, i am sure you will like it
Talking of CricInfo, they have a very well-written, if at times a little simplistic, article entitled Cricket Explained (An American Viewpoint). Definitely worth a read.
Like black licorice or vegimite, you just have to grow up with it or you wont like it. No sense wasting time trying it.
Also from what I understand of the baseball culture (admittedly little), there is one thing that translates directly across the two games, and that is the love of statistics. And the statistics are what fill the gaps in the game on television. That, and the cameramen zooming in on female spectators’ tits.
I love cricket.
And a part of the joy of cricket is the commentary. It’s a thing you can have on in the background as you go about your business, and for me just the tones of the voices is a deep comfort zone, right back from childhood. All is right with the world when the cricket’s on.
To see what I mean, listen to the classic “leg over” broadcast. (.MP3 file)
Or at the Twenty 20 World Cup zooming in on the dancers who performed everytime a boundary was scored - and there were a lot of 4s and 6s in yesterday’s West Indies v South Africa match 