I Don't like Cricket! (I love it)

This morning I saw that New Zealand Cricket had made a few changes to their squad to meet the touring West Indians and I was hoping that they had not dropped Iain O'Brien, whose excellent blog I had recently discovered. So I went across to his site and left a message. After doing so, I noticed that my message carried my name and a link here to this page. Eeep! I hadn't posted for a while, I thought I'd better get something down for the thousands of Iain O'Brien fans who might end up on this page.

So. Cricket. What a marvelous game! It is absolutely unique, blending talent, courage, intelligence, hand-eye coordination, stamina, power and mental resolution.

At school I hated it.

At the school I went to each boy had to show evidence of having played 4 sports during the week, or be punished, and come Saturday afternoon I would end up wondering down to the cricket fields to see if any cricket team was short in order to escape a beating. Inevitably I ended up fielding at longstop, too far away from the action to be a participant and bored out of my skull.

It was only once I went to university that I would toddle down to the Wanderers with my mates and get to know this great game, sitting in the sun and drinking copious quantities of Castle Lager. After that, I joined a cricket team.

Unfortunately I was never any good. I could not rid myself of the first instinctive movement away from the ball if it were hit towards me, which meant that I was mostly going in the wrong direction if a catch needed to be claimed. My batting was alright, though, having a good eye as a field hockey player and a good straight bat, but I was never able to muster the power to hit sixes and my throwing arm was weak.

Many people, mostly soccer players or Americans scorn cricket as a game. It's boring they say. It lasts too long and there is never a result. It's not a sport because nobody does anything. All the fielders stand around doing nothing all day. You don't need to be fit, any old codger or his granny could stand around on a field and do nothing; cricket does not require skill.

These people are missing out; if they don't have the patience to learn the game they will never know it's rewards.

In soccer, I once saw a free kick taken again against Manchester United in a game against a Portuguese side (Porto?). Anyway the Portuguese player drilled the ball at ankle height straight at the Man U. 'wall' and they all instinctively jumped out of the way leaving the 'keeper no chance. Well, I just couldn't stop laughing. The Man U. supporters were outraged. "Do you know how much a football hurts if it hits you?" they asked. Not as much as a cricket ball bowled into your ribs, I wouldn't mind betting.

Each time a cricketer takes a catch, he knows it's going to hurt his hands. Watch international cricketers, they all have fingers strapped up. Cricket is a game which takes courage.

That it takes talent is now self evident. That is the beauty of the shorter games, the 20-over pops and the 50-over ODIs. To me the shorter the cricket game becomes the moore it's like a lottery, so a side like Zimbabwe has a fair chance of beating what is acknowledged as the best side in the world, Australia in a twenty-twenty match. The shorter games should be considered more as showcases for cricketing talent; in the shorter game you cannot hide players who do not have all facets of their game up to scratch.

That it takes hand-eye coordination is also pretty obvious, for the same reasons.

It takes stamina. Someone like Makhaya Ntini is very valuable in a side because of the workload that he can shoulder. When a bowler starts his 'spell' he is generally fresh. He can be a bit 'loose' and might bowl a few 'loose' deliveries before he gets himself 'into a groove'.

Power: a powerful batsman is normally capable of scoring very quickly. This gives the fielding captain and the bowler a bit of a headache, because such a batsman is capable of beating the fielders or going over the top of fielders to reach the boundary.

But that isn't the only advantage of being powerful.

Cricket has a very strong mental component, with the batsman trying to impose his will on the bowler and the bowler trying to make the batsman lose any desire to stay in the middle. Mind games are frequently played between the fielding side and the batsmen in an attempt to unsettle the opposition and introduce insecurity or perhaps a loss of concentration that will perhaps gain a wicket or see a boundary.

And it's a lot easier to play these mind games if you are six-foot-seven and built like a brick dunny....

So you need to be mentally resolute. As a batsman you know that the fielding side will be happy to see the back of you and that they are very unlikely that they will be welcoming. Even amateur sides get niggly, and, when I was playing I didn't like to let a batsman get the feeling that he was welcome.

Intelligence. As a batsman you need to play every ball on it's merits. You have to work out when a ball needs to be hit or when it needs to be blocked or left alone.

As a bowler or a fielding captain you need to be able to access a batsman's weaknesses and his strengths, and hopefully take advantage of his weaknesses and avoid feeding his strengths. You need a plan for getting a batsman out, or for containing him according to where you are in the game.

And you need to know where you are in the game. Some situations call for attack, others for stolid defence.

The other thing that people complain about as regards cricket is the time taken and the lack of action in that time.

In most sports you can get to the point where one side is dominant, and there is no way back for the trailing side. In cricket, three quick wickets can turn the game on it's head, so you can never really relax, it's always tense.

And just to finish. We were playing a game once and were short, so we managed to get some guy who was passing to play. Well, when his turn to bat came he went in and when the innings was over he said "What a rush." And it's true. When you go out to face your first ball, the attention of both sides and the umpires is on you. The adrenaline starts to pump as you realise that the guy pacing up to his mark is going to be bowling as fast as he can to hit you, hit the wickets or get an edge to 'keeper or slip, and you know that your team depends on you to acquit yourself well.