Okay, But What Happened to the Guys’ Leg?
Now I think I understand the glassy-eyed look I get from non-sports fans when I talk about My Beloved Redskins or the Capitals. I ran across an article in the UK’s Times Online which, I swear to you, is utterly incomprehensible to me. I know it’s recapping a cricket match (game? contest? googly?) and that it turned out badly for England. Beyond that, I’m flummoxed.
Michael Clarke and Marcus North took Australia into a first-innings lead as their fifth-wicket stand moved into three figures, leaving a disappointed Andrew Strauss to draw on his second-string attack before tea after the spin bowlers failed to make the inroads expected on a turning surface.
Any hope that England would build upon their good work with the second new ball in the hour or so before lunch were dented by the strokeplay of Clarke in particular.
Poor England! Maybe they’ll make it up with the third new ball? Or something?
Alas, no.
Ponting and Simon Katich had extended their second-wicket stand to 239 during England’s opening burst, adding 32 from nine overs before the change of ball. But Anderson, with the temperature a little warmer than yesterday, soon generated swing and the bounce of Andrew Flintoff served as a hostile foil at the other end.
Anderson finally made the breakthrough, trapping Katich (122 from 261 balls) leg-before on the full after 326 minutes at the crease.
So is this how the rest of the world feels on the day after the Super Bowl when they bring up ESPN.com? If so, wow, guys. We need to be better educators. Football isn’t nearly as complicated as cricket sounds.
UPDATE: Stacy McCain, as usual, makes a good point. Sports reporting, in general, isn’t very informative if you’re not already a sports fan. I like his rule about putting the final score in the first paragraph. That’s important, and I tried to follow that rule when I was the Sports Editor of my junior college newspaper back in the day. I never assumed that all my readers (and there were, quite literally, tens of them) knew very much about the sports I covered. You can pick up quite a few regular readers who aren’t hard-core sports fans if you keep that keep that principle, and Stacy’s rule, in the front of your mind. Lots of people have some interest in how their local sports teams are doing, if for no other reason than to be able to keep up with the office water-cooler chat. What they don’t want is for you to go all ESPN-geek on them. As the man said, just the facts.
At one time, I actually harbored a dream of being a sports reporter. I love sports (baseball, football, hockey, and soccer especially) and still think, in my idle moments, that being a full-time sportswriter would be a very, very cool job to have. I suspect, though, that the time for that has long passed me by. Though, starting a second blog and writing only about sports? Hmmm…that could be interesting.
Oh, by the way, if you’re a young aspiring journalist, a single male, and you want an interesting beat, try covering your local college’s girls’ volleyball team. Seriously.
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Category: Rampant Geekery
Ha! It's like listening to that Irish announcer on Fox Soccer… his accent is so heavy and he speaks so fast he's impossible to understand.
You're fortunate! I would like to get Fox Soccer, but I can't without paying 16 bucks a month because it's bundled with a rugby channel and some other stuff I don't want. They won't offer it to me by itself.
Our extra sports bundle is $5/month. Got it for the boy for his birthday a while back.
The rugby is hilarious, too. Announcers with unintelligable accents hollarin' about stuff you don't understand. Then watching the play, it looks like how 6 year olds play soccer – bunching up, then the ball squirts out and everybody scatters like ants until they bunch up again.
Who is your provider. I use DirecTV, because they have a great extended basic package. But the sports package has a lot of drek I don't want, alas.
Comcast.
What happened to the guy's leg? He was called out, because he did not hit the thrown ball with his bat; instead it was deflected away from hitting the wicket, when it hit his leg. If you want the closest baseball analogy–in cricket, the rules say that if a batter is hit by a pitch within the strike zone, that's an out.
In this case, that was the end of a long session, as this particular batsman had scored 122 runs–that's the rough equivalent of advancing 122 bases–on 261 pitches.
Cricket isn't that complicated, the trouble is that you don't know any of the jargon that sportscasters use to spice up the story–but I guess that was your point.
I don't mind jargon as a spice, but it doesn't make for a good main ingredient. That story was nearly all-jargon. I'm sure it works for the cricket fan in the know, but for those of us on the outside, it prevents us from getting interested in the sport.
Where'd you pick up this cricket knowledge (by the way, thanks for decoding that)? You've never struck me as much of an organized sports fan (excepting perhaps baseball).
The Internet knows all.
I'm interested all sorts of games and their rules, I'm just not particularly interested in the actual teams and players. Baseball is handy as an analogy for cricket, because the broad concepts are similar, though the details are quite different. (Either game could be described, broadly, as: "One player throws the ball, another hits it; then, the pitcher's team tries to catch the ball, and the batter's team runs.") So it's just a matter of English-to-English translation, to describe the rules of one game in the terms of the other.
Ah. We have to talk football sometime. I think the rules and strategy those rules suggest would interest you.
I think it's interesting how many sports build off similar rule sets. Cricket and baseball work similarly as do soccer and hockey.
To summarise, the Aussies absolutely battered us but we held on through sheer, panic-stricken desperation.
Now I'm not much of a sports fan, but one sport I really do love is cricket – and test match cricket in particular.
The pleasure derived from it comes from the fact that it takes time to understand all its intricacies, subtleties and terms – but if you take that time it becomes an absolute joy.
The best analogy I can think of is that cricket is to sport what Mozart is to music. Simple, catchy jingles might be more popular, but they do not compare to the majesty of a Mozart piece.
I'm assuming that way back in the mists of time cricket and baseball were the same game. Or rather they share the same ancestor.
Maybe this might help (?) – found it over at Arts & Letters.
Cricket explained ….
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 been 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!
Oh, that cleared everything right up. Thanks, Stan!