Glad to oblige. But my prior post was fairly conversational, just terser. If you want to know what it sounds like for the more in-the-know listener… here’s how Sri Lanka lost this afternoon, an out-by-out description courtesy of Cricinfo.
So you see, I’m not as impenetrable as all that, am I? 
So while browsing the YouTubes, I watched the Underarm Incident.
So let me get this straight. Bowling in a manner as to minimize your opponents chance of winning the game…is “unsportsmanlike?”
No, using a loophole in the rules that should have been closed long before is unsportsmanlike.
Yes. We Commonwealthians realise the concept is, well, foreign to you 
The idea is that the other chap must have a chance.
The manoeuvre was immediately banned.
No one had bowled underarm in an international in living memory - overarm deliveries having displaced underarm bowling sometime back in the early nineteenth century. The batsman facing, Brian McKechnie was New Zealand’s number 10, essentially a non-batsman. The chance of him hitting a six to tie the match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (the largest ground in cricket) was essentially nil anyway. Even the older brother of the Australian captain thought it was unwarranted.
It’s unsportmanlike because it literally breaks the game. Often people use baseball too much to try to understand cricket, but why the underarm delivery was unsportsmanlike is one thing that IS exactly the same. If it one team is unlikely to win, should the winning team be allowed to pitch by rolling the ball along the ground to the catcher, with it being called a strike every time?
There’s a reason why something is “just not cricket” is a known phrase in English.
I thought I would take this convo in a different direction.
An easy way to understand which games are the most complicated and hardest to understand is to look at what games are the most complicated and difficult to officiate…
As a person who has referred and umpired all four major North American sports they all have fairly complicated rule books that take a decent amount of time to understand and memorize, but in my opinion Football is by far the most difficult to officiate. Which is evident when you compare the number of people on a professional level game’s officiating “crew”.
Football = 7
Baseball and Hockey = 4
Basketball = 3
Amateur Baseball, Hockey, and Basketball games can all be competently officiated by a single person, but Football can’t.
Football and Baseball are difficult because of the size of the field and number of players, but they differ in the fact that Baseball is more straight forward with most of the action happening around the ball, whereas football you need eyes on the entire field at all times because fouls can happen far away from the ball.
Hockey and Basketball are both difficult because of the physical nature of the job. Both sports are very fast and require the referee to move and follow the play more than any other sport and are the most physically draining. In professional hockey the referees and linesmen all have to be as skilled a skater as the players and be in top condition to keep up with the play.
So I would have to say that Football is the most mentally difficult to ref, while hockey is the most physically difficult to officiate; but all four require an extensive knowledge of the game in order to have your eyes at the right place at the right time…
However, having said all that…
Being the home plate umpire in Baseball is, BY FAR, the single most difficult and high pressure position of all the officiating jobs in professional North American sports, second only to being a South American Futbol referee during the '80s…
This thread has made me lol a lot being a cricketer and all. Lets not touch on indoor cricket rules or “chucking”
This finally solves the mystery! We were driving across the Hungarian-Romanian border about ten years back and all of a sudden, in the Romanian border town, I see what appeared be a gang of about 20 teenagers or young adults all carrying bats in the middle of a desolate dusty road in front of some railroad tracks. It looked like a scene right out of some dystopian action flick. As we approach the bat-wielding mob, I realized that they were just out there hawking bats to the passing vehicles. This elicited a number of questions: Where did they get the baseball bats, who the hell buys bats from vendors in the middle the road, why would anyone be trusting enough to pull over to buy bats from a bat-wielding mob, and why is there a demand for bats in Romania? Oina at least answers the last question for me.
Finally, one more of my life’s mysteries explained.
Just a question, is is common to use that word to describe football?
I’ve never seen it used before other than in native language reporting or here on this board over the last few weeks.
Americans sometimes use it in a tongue-in-cheek sense.
I used it to accent the joke I was making at the end of my post… I was speaking about the sport in South America so it would be the correct term…
I live in North America, the sport is Soccer here and that is how I would refer to it in general conversation, rather than Football, so as not to confuse people between the North American and Global usage of the word… Although I would use Football, or a poorly accented Futbol, when speaking to actual fans of the game…
It does work well in this thread since there are posts discussing both American Football and regular Football… it makes it easier to distinguish the two with out having to write American Football every time… you can just say Football and Futbol…
aha, I see. Do carry on.
I think some Americans call it “futbol” because they get shouted at by non-Americans when they call it soccer. Without any good reason, because the term “soccer” originated here and is still commonly used as a perfectly acceptable term for the game. For example, one very popular TV show is called Soccer Saturday. I am not aware of viewers complaining that it should be “Football Saturday”. It seems that it is OK for us to use the term, but not Americans.
I think it’s not a problem in Britain, because people there also play two kinds of Rugby football, so calling it “soccer” helps to distinguish. In most of Latin America, there’s only one kind of football, and they call it “fútbol” (or “futebol” in Brazil).
