:smack: I haven’t played in 15 years and now my terminology is running together.
…so little interest. 
There was a famous instance in 2009, Australia v England, First Test ended in a draw when Monty Panesar, a notoriously poor batsman, clung on for forty minutes to earn England a vital draw. Had he not done so, it is most unlikely that England would have won the Ashes that year as they needed to win - not draw - the series to do so (as Australia were the title holders).
And the tied Test between Australia and West Indies is hailed as one of the most exciting finishes of all time, with all four results still possible up to the last minute of play.
burn the heretic!
Some of the most exciting cricket ever seen has been seeing a team trying to save a test match on the last day while the other side tries to win it. And add a chance for the batting team to win; and you have a classic.
The bidding in bridge. To an observer not familiar with it, it would be incomprehensible.
(And no, I don’t agree with bridge having been recognized as a sport, but it has.)
I don’t disagree. The problem is the four days of boredom before the fifth day, which might not even come with a payoff.
I remember watching the highlights of Brian Lara’s 501-run innings against Durham, and even that was kind of boring (though totally worth it).
This is definitely a tough one. They use different terms for everything (hand-balling = pass, mark = catch). There are a lot of fouls that are pretty indistinguishable from normal play for a novice watcher. The refs whistle during play but it doesn’t mean play is stopped like in other sports. You can kick the ball, sometimes. You can tackle, sometimes. etc.
I’m not sure if it’s tougher than American Football, but knowing American Football doesn’t really seem to help at all.
Cricket, OTOH, I think is fairly easy to follow during play, but pretty difficult to tell the “game state”. Like a dedicated cricket watcher will know when a game is out of reach, where a novice will have no idea.
Even then, rarely, things can bite you in the ass. Headingley 1981, and England are batting, seven out in the second innings and still 92 runs from making Australia bat again - for context, England had made only 174 between them in their first innings. Tail-ender Graham Dilley walks in to join Ian Botham, and with nothing at all to lose the pair go apeshit for an hour or so. Dilley makes 56, his highest Test score; Chris Old carries on where he left off; Botham flays the Australians for 149 not out. By the time Australia batted they needed 130, but Bob Willis, already 32 and considered over the hill, proceeded to bowl as though stung by a hornet and Australia were blown away for 111. The bookmakers who had offered 500-1 against England lived to regret it.
Umm…thanks for the explanation.But you leave one question unanswered:
Why the hell would anybody want to watch a game that takes DAYS to finish?
We Yanks wanna see a clock moving , with the seconds ticking down. 
Yeah! Like in baseball.
That’s part of it’s appeal, it’s a slow-burning game. Myslef I only have time for test cricket rather than one-day cricket or the even shorter 20-20 version.
I’ll also agree with whatothers have said,it’s very difficult to judge who’s winning or losing a game of test cricket.
Ahem… what? In English, please.
If one was ever needed, we have yet another demonstration that we are people separated by a common language.
But then if you were to describe a similar baseball game with full-on jargon I’m sure those unfamiliar with that game would be equally lost.
I can’t translate into baseball, if that’s what you mean by English. In the game cited:
Australia batted first and scored 400 - sometimes a par score, often a good one, depending on the conditions; on that occasion it was rated extremely good.
England batted and scored 174. Because the difference was over 200, Australia told England to take their second-and-final innings at once.
In a cricket innings, two men go in to bat and they stay in until one is put out, when he is replaced by the next man up. As there are 11 men in the side, once ten are out the last man has no-one to be in with him, so the innings is over at the 10th out. England reached 7 out in the second innings while still 92 runs behind. Normally, if your seven best batsmen have managed only 130-odd between them, you don’t expect the last three to redeem the situation. Everyone bats, but not everyone’s an expert; usually, four men are in the side mainly to bowl.
Dilley, a bowler with no real batting pretensions, hit wildly at everything within reach; so did Botham. Usually this is just a recipe for glorious failure but they managed not to miss and to keep the ball out of the fielders’ hands. Runs came quickly.
When Dilley was out for an unusually high score (for him), Old took over with similar success. Although last man Willis was soon out (37 were scored while he was in, of which Willis managed 2), England now had a lead, at least; Botham, Dilley, Old and Willis had added about 220 runs, far more than the seven before them and also far more than the whole side managed first time.
Australia still needed only a third as many runs to win as they had managed in the first innings. They scored 50 with only one man out. Then Willis, a hard-working fast bowler who was getting on in years and whose knees were getting creaky, suddenly found he was troubling the Australian batsmen to an unexpected extent. Encouraged by the roars of the crowd to keep bowling for “just one more” over at a time Willis blasted his way through eight of the remaining nine batsmen - Old accounted for the other - and Australia lost by just eighteen runs in a match where England had been dead and buried.
Thank you. That made much more sense.
I do understand that sports have their own peculiar lexicon, but using it in a situation where the sport in question is already incomprehensible just makes it all the more so.
I should be the foremost authority on this, having almost no interest in any sports, having played only one on a team as a kid for barely a year (soccer, so it doesn’t count), attending fewer than 5 sporting events live, and now only understanding American Football because of extensive research, including some threads posted here, and being exposed to my roommates playing madden for 3 hours a day.
American Football, is, by far, the one that’s the hardest to understand. Baseball’s pretty quick to pick up and is pretty intuitive once your learn the basics (which are easy to remember.) Football’s a bitch because of the multiple ways in which to score points, the first (and following) downs, the myriad amounts of plays, including running and passing plays…I could go on. There is so god damn much there that, for me at least, made it almost impossible to even understand what was happening, and once I did, even retaining that information. I only recently finally “got it” and of course, there’s still a ton of intricacies I don’t understand.
See, I perfectly understood this. If you just assume the reader needs it explained in simple English, it’s not that hard to get across.
On the cricket theme.
England are playing Sri Lanka as we speak. The first innings were SL - 400, Eng 496.
With only 4 or so hours of play left on the last day and another full innings each to get through surely this game is headed for a tedious draw right?..right?
wrong!..maybe.
If England bowl SL out for less than 96 then they will have won.
As we speak SL have 8 wickets down and only 56 runs on the board. They have another couple of hours to go and only two more wickets in hand. They may well lose this and that is the beauty of test cricket. It all seems like we are ambling to a draw but a quick burst of wickets and it is game on!
aaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnnnd…bosh!
England have won!..Jurassic Park!