"Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera and the dance."
For some reason, I end up writing about cricket once every 5 years. The last time I did this, I had several slides that relied heavily on the inherent homoeroticism of the sport to explain the rules1 but I figure a written primer might be a bit more useful for the next five years or so.
Here’s everything you need to know about cricket:
It’s a very easy to understand game
That seems more complicated than it is because everyone uses a lot of very silly words to describe what’s going on in front of you2.
Here are the terms you DON’T need to know:
Here’s all the terms that may help you:
One team bats and another team fields. The bowler (from the fielding team) runs up and throws the ball to the batter who tries to hit it away. Depending on the type of cricket game, the game probably has a fixed number of overs3. Each over is made up six balls. An innings is complete when one team has finished batting (either by running out of balls or by all the batters getting out. The winner is the team with the most runs (points) after two innings4.
The batting team can score runs (points) by5:
After hitting the ball, the batter and the non-striking batter run to the opposite wicket. Each time they trade positions, it counts as one run.
The batter hits the ball, it bounces at least once, and then goes to or beyond the boundary line. This is 4 runs.
The batter hits the ball and it doesn’t bounce at all before it goes beyond the boundary line. This is 6 runs.
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The team that’s fielding is trying to minimise the number of runs scored and also trying to get all the players on the batting side out. The main ways they can get someone out are6:
Catching a ball before it hits the ground (caught out)
Breaking the wickets while the batters are still running/haven’t made it back behind the line (run out)
Breaking the wickets while bowling (bowled out)
Hitting a part of the batter’s body while bowling, and the umpire deciding that it would have hit the wicket for a bowled out if they hadn’t been in the way (leg before wicket/lbw).
You can tell when one of these things have happened because the bowler and the fielding team will start screaming ‘HOWZZAT’ at the umpire with a single hand up in the air.
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Here’s how to read a cricket score:
India has 235 runs and 4 batters are out. Their batters have played 20 overs (i.e.: they’ve faced 120 balls). Australia has faced 5.1 overs (i.e.: they’ve faced 31 balls) and have scored 47 runs and have 2 batters out.
I think Australia lost that one, which leads me to the very last thing you need to know about the sport: we never, ever root for the Australians7.
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The title is from CLR James’ Beyond a Boundary, one of the greatest sports books ever written. Every cricket match is dramatic, but I don’t know if anything will compare to the 1999 World Cup semi-final where Allan Donald (who I have much in common with because neither of us will forgive or forget him for this) got run out in the final over because he was too busy watching the ball and didn’t notice Klusener telling him to run. Australia went on to trounce Pakistan in the finals. Here’s the entire last over if you want to experience the agony yourself.
I’m not sure how this worked out for anyone listening to this presentation. I assume the slide on Zampa and Stoinis really cleared up spin balls and yorkers, though.
Gatekeep, gaslight, googly.
We’re not going into test cricket.
I’m really, really not going into test cricket.
You can also earn runs because the bowling team have done something that earns them a penalty but that involves less hitting balls with bats so we’re ignoring those for now.
The caveat here is for the rules lawyers.
You might be asking: oh but what happens if England is playing Australia? What happens if Australia is playing Modi’s lauded 2023 India team? The answer in both these cases: we’re rooting for everyone to lose.