As the jokey Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Raphael once said, before getting smacked in the shell, “To understand a cricket, you have to know what a crumpet is.”
The sight of Casey Jones smashing Rafael with a cricket bat at the cinema in 1990 was all I knew about cricket.
That all changed on a visit across the ocean, when I learned the basics of the centuries-old game and the world’s second-most popular spectator sport from two young British men named Leo and Rex, who were eager to share their expertise and hungry for NBA stats.
The 2024 Cricket World Cup is currently being held in New York and cities around the world.
If you’re interested in watching the game, learning the basics might be “elementary” as the world’s greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes, would say.
How do you play cricket?
A match, played on a cricket field, begins with a coin toss. The team that wins the toss chooses whether to bat first or pitch. Each team is made up of 11 players and either bats or takes to the oval field.
The two batters stand at either end of a dirt track in the center of an oval, called the pitch.
Their job is to defend the wicket (three wooden sticks) from the bowler and score runs. The bowler takes a running start and, with a windmill-like arm rotation (without bending the elbow), throws a hard, white, leather-covered ball, slightly smaller than a baseball, towards the wicket in the hope of it bouncing once past the batsman and getting him out.
How do you get out of this?
If the bowler is successful, the batsman is “bowled out” and dismissed.
Bowling is one of 10 ways a player can be out. The other two common ways should sound familiar: it can result in a caught out, like a fly ball, or a run out, where the ball in play is returned to the stumps before the batsman has a chance to successfully take over.
Bowling is a shared responsibility: bowlers are replaced after six deliveries, called an over. In T-20 cricket, there is a total limit of 20 overs per team, which is equivalent to the average number of deliveries bowled by an MLB starter.
Each bowler can only bowl a maximum of four overs, meaning that teams need at least five bowlers for each match.
How do you score?
Batsmen defend a wicket with a wedge-shaped bat, hit the ball and try to run to the other wicket to score, with one point being scored for each successful batsman change.
If the batsman swings for the fence and the ball hits the boundary line, an automatic score of 4 is awarded. If the ball crosses the boundary line and goes out of play, a score of 6 is awarded. In these two situations, the batsman is not required to run.
How do I win at cricket?
The team batting attempts to score as many runs as they can until the 20-over limit is reached or the umpire has gotten rid of 10 batsmen, whichever comes first, after which the opposing team takes turns trying to surpass the score recorded in the first innings.
What is the difference between regular cricket and T20?
The shortest format of cricket is called Twenty20, in which each team has the right to bat for 20 overs. T20 is similar in duration to an MLB match.
Compare that to Test cricket, where matches last more than seven hours and are played over several days.
If you don’t have that level of focus, T20 might be more appealing.
There’s a bit of a learning curve, but it’s certainly worth learning more about the world’s most popular game.
