The Depressing Life of a Cricket Fan
The game you love, explaining rules you don’t understand yourself, and watching inexplicable umpires, can make for frustrating and disappointing times.
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The Lords test match ranks alongside Wimbledon in the higher echelons of sporting social calendar. A posh mans sport. It is played in ALL private schools, and not even in a majority of comprehensives. I am not posh. That is fairly obvious just by using the word posh itself. I dislike tradition and could not be a gentlemen if I tried. My regional accent does not suit. But. I defend cricket to the death. I would rate cricket over democracy and freedom of speech any day of the week.
Lords
It takes some defending. A sport, and I am referring in particular to test match cricket, that lasts for five full days, 450 overs, 2,700 individual deliveries and can still result in a draw, a win or a tie. You can follow-on. You can declare. You can collapse. You can form partnerships. You can break them. You can drop the captain, or stump him round the wicket. Its another language, and as a fully committed, watch-it-by-myself-member, I always dread the question…so who’s winning then?
Well, on the third morning of a test match when one side scored 479 all out and the other team is 316-6 it’s very difficult to explain that it’s on a knife-edge, even though a battling draw is the likeliest result.
The challenge becomes mission impossible when both sets of players start walking off the field.
“Why are they walking off mate?”
“Bad light.”
“Of course, its 2pm in the afternoon, it had to be bad light.”
This beautiful sport has many idiosyncrasies. A true understanding allows you to fully appreciate the ‘test’ in a test match. The subtlety. The patience. The skill. The courage. Without putting in the required apprenticeship of cricket knowledge, the game appears to be “jumped-up rounders” or “British baseball”. That’s the most depressing part.
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Comrade, I am wholly with you. Born an American, I was raised in Australia, and my absolute inability to comprehend cricket in my earliest days brought about an unstoppable desire first to play, then to understand, and at last to enjoy the remarkable cultural artifact which is cricket.
At this point, I hold a black belt in ju-jitsu. I have a Bachelor’s in science. I am raising three children and maintaining a fifty-acre rural property. I have published books and stories, had photographic exhibitions, sold my personal recipes to professional restaurateurs — and my greatest regret is that I’ve never played cricket on a serious competitive level.
Cricket is the one and only team sport which is capable of commanding my interest and attention. The fact that a Test match can run for five days and still hang on the very last ball is a matter of purest, most astonishing delight. It is the most unpredictable, most strategic, most intellectually challenging of all sports, and I pity those who have nothing more than soccer, or football, or gridiron or basketball to comfort them.
Yours, sir, until Shane Warne bowls another maiden over.
df
A wonderful article. I often describe test match cricket as a little “mini” festival. You can read the paper, listen the hilarious commentary on your little AM radio, check out the mad fan outfits, taste the strawberry’s and icecream and get smashed for 5 days straight. What’s not to love?
Greatest game in the world (after golf)
Dirk, I have had and developed my love of cricket since a young age, since playing one on one cricket with my cousin. I would bowl, field, umpire, captain and 12th man all by myself, while my cousin racked up 580-2! We got ten lifes, and he always batted first! Maybe that is why I ended up being a wicket keeper with a huge dislike of bowling!
Not sure we are going to see many more maidens off Warnie anymore, what with his IPL involvement! But I just hope test cricket is not left behind, without test cricket, there is no cricket. It is the pinnacle of the sport and should always remain so….
DR Rhodes