Don’t Understand Cricket? This Video Has Got You Covered!
Unlike soccer, which America collectively cares about for a few weeks once every four years — during the World Cup — America doesn’t care about cricket at all, ever, despite the fact that there’s a Cricket World Cup going on right now, according to Slate.
Cricket is the second most popular sport in the world, according to Sporteology, after soccer (or, “football,” as it’s called most everywhere else). It’s hugely popular in England, Australia, Pakistan, India — just about everywhere the British colonial flag has ever flown.
Excluding, that is, the U.S. Perhaps it’s because cricket bears a superficial resemblance to baseball (thrown balls hit with wooden bats), and we already have baseball. Or perhaps it’s because Cricket’s rules are so notoriously complicated. CricInfo explains, with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
“You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side thats been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.
When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay all out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game!”
The video posted above, while deftly avoiding the worst of the complicated parts of the Cricket rules, points out the basics of the sport in a way that makes sense to the average American baseball fan. Mostly, anyway — the rules are still very complex.
Does cricket make more sense to you now that you’ve seen the video?
[Image courtesy of: Getty Images/Adrian Murrell]
