Dressage has to be up there. Barring a major foul-up, all of the riders do almost exactly the same thing, and it’s the little differences that matter. To an uneducated observer, it looks completely arbitrary.
Most of the other cricket stuff has been answered.
The reason he wipes the ball is to polish it, and the crotch is just a handy spot to do it. The reason for the polishing is to generate ‘swing’. When one side of the ball is highly polished and the other side is left to deteriaote and roughen over the course of the game, the difference in the air flow over the surfaces when the ball is bowled (pitched) causes the ball to move in the air, ie swing away from a straight path. This hopefully deceives the batsmen.
And just in regard to NFL, if you are passingly familiar with some form of football, it’s relatively easy to get a basic understanding of the sport. the ideas of downs and turn overs is very simliar to sets of tackles in league.
Other than the batter being able to run whever he wants, that made perfect sense to me. (American)
Tip-and-run i.e. having to run when hitting the ball, is a staple of backyard cricket.
Baseball is utterly incomprehensible. Ditto American Football.
I think the concept of downs would click pretty easily once you saw a 3rd and 1 play with a measurement. You’d see the scoreboard indicate 3rd down, you’d see them bring out the chains, and then measure, and if you’d been paying attention, you’d see that if they made it, it was 1st down again, and if not, 4th, and they’d likely punt.
The basic concepts of football wouldn’t be hard to pick up, but some of the more common nuances would be pretty bizarre- I’d think the college/pro rule differences would stymie many a budding fan who would be confused between Saturday and Sunday football-watching.
A counter-point to people who find Cricket confusing. I think any advanced sport would be just hard to understand if you don’t grow up watching/playing it (by ‘advanced’ I mean complicated rules, position names, acronyms and strategies - American Football, Baseball, Cricket would fall under these, Soccer, Basketball wouldn’t, Rugby would be on the fence IMHO).
As someone who loves American Football and Cricket, but detests Baseball (because it’s boring - go figure), I can attest to the fact that American Football is completely incomprehensible to the casual observer. If I hadn’t been explained the rules and strategy involved in the game, it would probably have been too complicated to hold my interest long enough to understand the complexities from the commentary alone.
On the other hand, I have never liked baseball and don’t understand the rules or the acronyms (and the commentators never bother explaining them) even after a decade in America. I have watched games off and on and even been to a couple of minor league games, but I still haven’t got the hang of it.
It depends a bit on whether we’re talking about playing or watching. Cricket’s not hard to play. I can take a complete novice and stick him somewhere on the pitch, and say “catch the ball if it comes near you”, and he’ll be alright. I can take a complete novice, hand him a bat, and say “stand like this, don’t let anything hit the sticks behind you, and try to hit the ball a long way so you can run over there” and he’ll be alright as a batsman*. I can instruct a bowler in more or less the same way.
On the other hand, if I tell some guy to run away from a cornerback and catch the ball if it comes to him, he’ll be hopeless. If I tell some guy to run as far as he can if somebody gives him the ball, he might do alright as a rusher, but he’s not going to be much use blocking or catching passes. I can’t even imagine how I’d teach a guy to play quarterback in less than an hour. Defense is obviously a bit easier, but you still have to lean some absolutely nonsensical rules (“5 yard jam” rule, anyone?)
On the other hand, I learned to watch American Football by playing Joe Montana Football on Sega Mega Drive. Once I realized that the names of the plays weren’t telling me much (who the hell thought “play action” was a descriptive term?) I caught on quick.
*In fact, that’s the traditional way of learning to bat in English public schools. You put on some pads and a cup, and a man with a beard says “don’t be scared of the ball”, and sends you out to be killed.
Yep, me too. I was in New Zealand once, and watched a Black Caps (NZ national cricket team) game against India. I didn’t have a whole lot of trouble understanding the basic concept.
A few years later, I had a Barbadian coworker explain it to me, and as I listened, I realized that it was almost the same game as baseball - even the strategies and types of players (a slow bowler = a control pitcher, a fast bowler = a power pitcher).
The only significant fundamental difference I see between cricket and baseball is that the dominant player in cricket is the batsman; in baseball, the pitcher.
I’m an American, by the way.
Quidditch, followed by cricket.
I will. Basic schema:
Team A bats until it is all out.
Team B bats until it is all out.
Team A again bats until it is all out.
Team B again bats until either it is all out or its aggregate score exceeds Team A’s. In the former case Team B loses; in the latter, it wins. If neither has occurred by the end of the allotted number of days, the match is a draw.
In the very rare case that Team B is all out with the aggregate scores level, the result is a tie - distinct from a draw. Only two Tests have ended that way and Australia featured in both.
Why not play on until it’s all over? Tests were once played that way. They could get very dull with no time limit and batsmen content to grind the bowlers into the dust, and on two famous occasions supposedly “timeless” Tests had to be abandoned anyway so the touring team could catch the ship home. :eek:
Given that very small children play football, I’m not sure I buy this. If a seven year old can understand it it can’t be that complex. What’s any harder about catching a football as opposed to playing cricket?
Cultural familiarity is what imprints this stuff into us to a lage extent.
Hopefully, for his safety’s sake the umpire will say “Son, you can’t stand on the pitch, go and stand somewhere else on the field.” Elsewise the first ball he catches will be in the back if the head. 
It’s longer, and goes more in depth (including how to read a scorecard and stuff) than the one already linked, but this is the guide to cricket I’ve always linked my American friends to. The feedback I’ve been given is that the game makes a lot more sense to them now.
http://static.espncricinfo.com/db/ABOUT_CRICKET/EXPLANATION/CRICKET_EXPLAINED_AMERICAN.html
I’d have to say American Footbal (and Canadian). The endless stopping, the infrecuent kick, the running and then passing, the arcane penalties, the fact you keep the ball after going out-of-bounds.
That’s miles better than the one I linked to. Bookmarked.
For myself, my father always tried to get me interested in (American) football, but I always found it incomprehensible from trying to watch it on TV. (I even played on a flag football team for a full season in 4th grade and still never figured out the rules.) I never figured out how it was supposed to work until years later when I went on a date with a woman whose son was on a high school team in the state playoffs, and I went on Wikipedia to read up on it so I wouldn’t be completely in the dark.
He doesn’t address the multiple meanings of the word “wicket”, though. Anyone going on that guide alone would be confused by a typical cricket commentary, in which “wicket” is very often used to mean the pitch (the strip of finely-cut grass between the two batsmen; this is the meaning in such phrases as “sticky wicket”), or the dismissal of a batsman regardless of whether the dismissal involves dislodging the physical wicket (analagous to an “out” in baseball), or the partnership between two batsmen. In fact commentators very often use the word “stumps” rather than “wicket” to refer to the actual wooden structure.
… whilst also using “stumps” as a measure of time, i.e. the end of a days play.
Weeeeeelllllll, sort of, but not exactly. 
In limited overs cricket, the amount of runs you get is the important thing and it perhaps favours the batter who can score (as opposed to a batter who can defend)
In test cricket though, in order to actually win the damn game you have to be able to bowl the other team out. You might have accumulated 500 runs more than the other team but if you can’t dismiss all of their batsmen, you can’t win.
But then, as others have mentioned, sometimes a draw is good enough as test matches are played as a series. The ashes are specifically “best of five” and over the years their have been excruciatingly exciting drawn games, with the tail-end batsmen holding off the fast pace bowlers until the end of play.
Naturally, the above does’t begin to capture the ebb and flow of the game over the course of the 5 days, so many variables, so many different sub-battles and stories…lovely stuff.