I have to say, I enjoyed this.
Displays actually how fast these guys are.
Good advice for ALL sports fans who criticise their team’s players claiming they could do better!
But kudos to Piers for actually accepting the challenge. He’s got more guts than I would facing Brett Lee (or any other bowler over the age of 10 for that matter). 
On at least 4 of the deliveries, Lee was trying actively not to hurt Morgan.
And this was the nets, for a stunt. Imagine facing him for real at 100mph. With him trying to knock your head off,
Yeah, that’s why I mentioned nobody over the U/10 team.
Your mileage might vary, obviously.
News links say that those were 80 mph balls. Still, well done by piers .
What’s that you say? A world-class professional sportsman can easily ridicule an unfit desk-bound middle-aged amateur? Say it ain’t so! :eek:
George Gunn, a waggish England batsman from either side of the Great War, once graciously accepted a single-wicket challenge from a village butcher or some such. By day 3 he was sportingly using the heavy roller as a wicket for all the difference it made. I believe he declared when he had about eight hundred to his name…
Can anyone tell me what it means to “face an over”?
Yes. In cricket, a bowler (“pitcher”) sends down six fair deliveries, plus more for any wides and no-balls (“balls”), from one end of the pitch, before it is someone else’s turn from the other end. That’s an “over”.
In a practice net, clearly deliveries can be from only one end, and at a practice session it’s quite common for bowlers to take their turn to send down one at a time, but there’s no reason why, as here, a bowler can’t bowl a series of deliveries to more closely recreate what would be happening in a game situation.
Note that in an actual game there would be two batsmen in at a time, and if an odd number of runs were scored from any delivery*, it would be the other batsman’s turn to receive the next ball. Where you have two batsmen with contrasting styles, and especially if they are opposite-handed, this can be an important consideration as it means the bowler has to adjust where and how he is bowling.
*because to score a run the two batsmen must change ends.
Thank you (I think. Where’s the head-spinning smilie?). Is it too much to hope that the bit about “trying to take his head off” is merely metaphorical hyperbole?
Since this is sports-related, moved to the Game Room (from MPSIMS).
For sure it’s hyperbole. Lee could have bowled 20% faster than he did if he was trundling them down at a mere 80mph, and if he had wanted to hit Morgan every time then he would surely have done so.
There’s a nice story about a charity side, probably the Lord’s Taverners (q.v.), a pro-celebrity outfit which on the day was featuring Fred Trueman who was fearsomely fast in the 1950s-60s, and TV personality David Frost as wicketkeeper (catcher). 'Keepers stand a certain number of yards back depending on how quick the bowling is and how experienced they are in dealing with it - they do not, like a baseball catcher, crouch within arm’s reach of the batsman unless the bowler is “slow” (a top-flight slowie can still ping them down at 60mph though). Frost hadn’t kept to Trueman before and asked his (professional) slip* fielders for advice. They said that as it was a charity match Trueman wasn’t likely to let himself go and he should stand where he’d normally stand in a club game, about five yards back from the batsman. He watched as the bowler ran in, his arm came over, the ball disappeared from view and buzzed past Frost’s ear with a noise like an enraged hornet and all the way to the boundary. Frost turned, looking like he’d seen a ghost, to find the slips laughing away and leaning on each other a good fifteen yards further back…
*There are no “foul” hits in cricket, and one or more fielders are typically placed a few yards back from the batsman on about his seven o’clock ready to snap up anything he only manages to get the edge of the bat on. They’re called “slips”
You know, I like sports – at least I thought I did – but every time someone tries to explain cricket to me it just sounds like gibberish, and watching it is no help (although admittedly one doesn’t get a lot of chances to watch here in the States). Other sports I pick up no problem.
(For instance, I had no idea it was ok to throw at the batsman. In baseball any pitcher who’s thought to be doing it intentionally is ejected (broadly speaking), and throwing at the head is a *major *taboo, since it can cause serious injury. And cricket helmets don’t seem to be any thicker that baseball helmets, so that in particular seems really weird to me.)
Do cricket fans have trouble making sense of baseball?
It’s against the rules to bowl straight at the batsman’s head without the ball bouncing, and even “bouncers” are restricted to one or two per batsman per over.
I have no trouble following the basics of baseball, although no doubt I miss the nuances. It’s quite similar to rounders, after all, which most British people will have played at some point.
In cricket, throwing is called bowling.
There is 6 deliveries/balls to be bowled in each over. Aiming at head is very common. It is called a bouncer.
Easiest format to learn n appreciate is T20 format. 2 teams 11 players each, each team plays 20 overs, team which makes more runs in those overs wins. If a team loses all its wickets(batsmen) , their batting innings ends before 20 overs.
match gets over in 3 hrs.
Here is some cool fast bowling video .
Shane warne - greatest leg spin bowler
Tendulkar- arguably the greatest modern batsman
Here is his emotional farewell speech
yep, you can aim at the batters head, as long as it bounces first
You should also know that is a very, very hard ball - it gets hit hard, a lot.
There are limits, for example a ball sent at the batsman’s head with out bouncing first (a “beamer”) is illegal, as is excessive dangerous bowling.
Note the comment about “relative ability of the striker”. Even if the umpire does nothing, it is considered bad form to aim to hit a lower order batsman of very limited ability. These are bowlers who may be very poor at batting (like pitchers). Any bowler or team hitting such a player is likely to suffer retribution when it is their turn to bat - just like retaliation for hit batsman in baseball.
No and there is your problem. I did not get baseball either, initially. It was only when realised that I needed to stop looking at it through a cricket coloured lenses and see the sport on its own that I understood and enjoyed it. Americans who do the opposite IME have similar results,
Not to mention that many of the lower order batsman are fast bowlers themselves and they will hit.
There have been a couple of famous occasions when someone forgot the code of conduct, and Frank Tyson (for England against Australia in the 1950s) and Devon Malcolm (for England against South Africa in the 1990s) both got hit by opposing fast bowlers while they were batting, only to pick themselves out of the dust, swear revenge, and give all the opposing line-up, batsmen and bowlers alike, a stiff dose of the same medicine.
Here’s where Devon got hit on the head, and what happened afterwards. It’s worth noting that Dev’s performance was a sustained effort throughout the day interspersed with other bowlers’, not just a five-minute red mist.
As to the difference in ethos between baseball and cricket, I guess it’s a combination of factors: the relative balance between bat and ball in the two games (it’s nothing out of the ordinary for a cricket side to be batting throughout a six-hour playing day, and a single batsman in good form can be in for hours), the fact that a cricket ball has to bounce, that a cricket batsman is normally expecting to have to move his feet albeit rather less than a tennis-player would, and that a cricket bat is an easier implement to defend yourself with than a baseball bat. Tradition probably accounts for most of it, though.
That hasn’t been true for a very long time.
Indeed Australia has dominated the current Ashes series precisely because it has dismissed the Poms’ lower order cheaply through aggressive fast bowling.
Monty Panesar, a genuine bunny, showed substantially more courage than many of his teammates in the face of aggressive short bowling.