World Cup Cricket: Just Like Baseball. Sort of.
An Australian Pro Says Americans Will Love the Game -- if They Just Give It a Chance
What do you get when you take baseball, remove two of the bases, add a bowler and put the whole game inside of a giant grass circle? Cricket.
If it sounds complicated, it is. While cricket has global appeal, captivating fans in more than 100 countries, it has yet to catch on in the United States. Could it be because this complex sport has 42 governing rules?
A quick Internet search for "beginner's guide to cricket" resulted in site after site claiming to "simplify" the game to newcomers. However, you won't find a paragraph on "cricket for idiots." It doesn't exist, but a 20-page document does.
The pinnacle of cricket competition starts today when the International Cricket Council's World Cup kicks off in the West Indies. The event takes place once every four years, and cricket fans all over the world have been eagerly awaiting this day just like Americans long for Super Bowl Sunday.
Just Like Baseball, Except Not
Damien Bown is the general manager of game development at Cricket Australia, the governing board for the sport in Australia. Bown says that cricket gets a bad rap for complexity, but that it isn't that different from baseball.
"It's probably closest to baseball in terms of the American sports," Bown said. "Basically it's a game about hitting a ball and scoring as many runs as you can and trying not to get out in the process, so the basic principles aren't dissimilar."
Except in cricket, you have a bowler instead of a pitcher, a striker instead of a batter and a wicket keeper instead of a catcher.
Replace the strike zone with three wooden pegs in the ground, collectively called a wicket; extend the pitcher's mound to a 22-yard-long box; play the game over a five-day period; and voila, cricket.
Perhaps it's not that easy, but Bown says it just needs to be simplified.
"I think one of the challenges that cricket has is that there is a lot of cricket jargon and it can be complex, but we've just got to keep it simple," he said.
