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If you don’t take the point you’d better take cover By Willy Trolove Mon 28 February 2005 First published in the New Zealand Herald
There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who love cricket and those who don’t understand it. If you know what a deep backward square is and can decipher Billy Bowden’s 1970s dance moves, then it’s quite clear that you love cricket. But if you go to a match and find yourself irretrievably lost in a hopeless state of unrelenting bewilderment, then it is fair to say that you don’t understand the game. It doesn’t have to be this way. You too can grow to love cricket. All it takes is several weeks in front of the television and a willingness to learn the impenetrable rules and baffling phrases involved. Let me help you out. Cricket requires a large flat playing surface called a rugby field. Any rugby field will do provided that it isn’t in Hamilton and hasn’t been booked out for the Super 12. It helps if at least some effort has been made to fill in last winter’s sprig marks. A cricket match needs two opposing teams of eleven players, a couple of umpires, a number of spectators (preferably drunk), and one or more streakers. Under the old rules, several Indian bookmakers were also required but these have been phased out, and it’s only the traditionalists who view this change as a bad one. The players are either batsmen, bowlers, wicketkeepers, fielders, or retired All Blacks. The bowlers bowl the ball to the batsmen, the batsmen hit the ball to the fielders, the fielders throw the ball at the wicketkeeper, and the retired All Blacks do interviews and boost the television ratings. There are six balls in each over, but the bowler must bowl each over with only one ball. More bafflingly, when a bowler’s over is over, he is not allowed to bowl another over until another bowler’s over is over. The bowler bowls to the batsman on the rectangular patch of carefully-prepared ground called the pitch. In Hamilton the pitch is known as the Valley of Death. Elsewhere, the pitch is sometimes called the wicket or the strip. The strip also refers to the clothes that the players wear. The New Zealand strip, for example, is sometimes black, sometimes white and, just occasionally, beige, which is a polite way of saying dung brown. A “good strip” can therefore refer to the quality of the pitch, the attractiveness of the player’s clothes, or the proficiency with which a streaker gets naked before running onto the field. The aim of the bowler, the fielders and the wicketkeeper is to get the batsman out. The aim of the batsman is to stay in. The batsman can therefore be either in or out, although, confusingly, he can also be not out, or not in yet. There are a number of ways that the batsman can be out. Several of these are regulated in a more or less haphazard fashion by the umpires. There are two umpires on the field and a third umpire off the field. Due to an unfortunate birth defect, the third umpire is shaped like a box. There is also a box in the batsmen’s underpants, and another box where the commentators sit. These boxes should not be confused. When the commentators say that the batsman’s shot was “one out of the box” nobody is quite sure which box they are referring to. At each end of the wicket there are wickets. Even though there are only two wickets, a team needs to get ten wickets to win a game. Somehow they have to do this without breaking any of the laws of mathematics. A bowler takes a wicket when he gets a batsman out, but he doesn’t take it anywhere in particular. He just leaves the wicket where it is and then tries to take another one. The wickets aren’t actually wickets, they are stumps and bails. Similarly, the crease is not a crease, it is a white line, the 30m circle is not a circle, it is more like an oval, and a leg glance doesn’t mean that you are admiring someone’s thighs. The batsman can cut without a knife and drive without a licence. The bowler can appeal without being particularly well liked. And the umpire can signal byes without having any intention of leaving. But all of this is easy to understand compared with the fielding positions. There is, for example, a cover, a short cover, a deep cover and an extra cover. None of these are any use when it rains. There is a third man but no first or second man. There is also a twelfth man, but he isn’t on the field. And finally, there is a point, although I’m not sure what this is, and a silly point which, conveniently, is where this column usually ends.
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