A Sporting Quiz
Here’s a dozen sports-related terms. Can you identify the sports associated with each one?
Batting average, skier, bowler, chin music, double hat trick, floater, pitch, innings, strike, off sides, pinch hitter and slider.
Your answers probably included baseball, golf, skiing, bowling, hockey, football and perhaps a couple other sports.
Now name the one sport all these terms apply to?
Stumped? Try cricket.
Considered by many Americans to be a completely confusing game that can last for days, it’s still fun to watch….even if you don’t understand all the “laws” (rules)… all 100+ pages of them. I won’t even try to explain the details of game but it’s probably best to initially think of it as a second cousin to baseball.
In both sports, two teams of eleven players compete against each other and attempt to score points (runs) by hitting a ball thrown by the pitcher or bowler to the batter or batsman with a bat, while the other team tries to stop the batting team from scoring by putting batters “out”. The teams swap batting with pitching and fielding after a certain number of batting players are out (innings).
The Washington Cricket League has 27 teams that play matches at parksacross the area, including on The Mall within site of the Washington Memorial. Matches last about 6 hours. Players are mostly foreign-nationals and ex-pats from former British colonies including the Caribbean, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka and are typically between 20 and 40 years old.
According to Sheldon Ellis, the league’s President, for the best views of a match, stand behind the boundary cones, making sure not to block a batsman’s view of the field.
The League plays a “40 over” version of the game. So, 40 is the total number of overs (innings) bowled. Per Sheldon, “at the end of each over, another bowler takes over from the opposite end of the pitch to start a new over. In other words an over consist of 6 pitches after which another bowler/pitcher pitches from the opposite end”. Okay….I think I’ll need to watch a bit more in in order to understand being “in, out and over”.
So toss a blanket and bring a picnic while you learn about this fascinating game that some say is the second most popular sport in the world, right behind soccer. And remember to root for a “sticky wicket” but never do any “sledging” (trash talking) or arguing with an umpire’s ruling. It’s just not cricket.
Washington Cricket League
Various parks across the metro area
Dates and Times - Saturdays and Sundays at 1:00 p.m. with matches are scheduled through the end of August.
Tickets - none needed - free.
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While baseball has “Who’s on First“, cricket has it’s own definition of “What is Cricket?” (from the WCL site):
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 that’s 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 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 given 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!
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2 opinions for A Sporting Quiz
Mary Jo
May 17, 2007 at 12:04 am
I knew this answer!
Jon
May 18, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Show off!!!!
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