You asked for it… :)
(There are countless statements of the rules and so on. Wikipedia has an exhaustive entry here.)
Cricket is in its heart a long game. The most profound and beautiful instantiation of cricket is the five day test match. Yes, it really does take five days. The action can be glacial, and then suddenly break into appalling collapse or stunning victory. It’s like trench warfare or tantric sex during a chess marathon. That said, these days you can actually find pretty rapid cricket matches called 20-20 games. They’re sort of the gateway drug to real cricket, or maybe they are to the real game what Diablo is to World of Warcraft.
Cricket is actually very simple. The target – the wicket – is composed of three upright sticks (“stumps”) with two twigs resting across the tops (“bails”) making a shape like the M from an early digital PDA screen. The batsman stands in front of this, and his job, predictably, is to stop the ball from hitting it. For this purpose he uses a bat made of wood. He is not allowed to catch, spike, shoot, or kick the ball. Those activities belong to other games.
At the other end of the pitch is the bowler. His job is to launch the ball at the wicket and get it around the batsman to hit the stumps. He does not throw the ball as you would for a dog, but bowls it, almost without bending his elbow in the throwing arm. When you’re taught bowling, they tell you the release should be at maximum height possible, and the bowling arm should brush your ear as it goes by.
In backstreets around the world, that’s a cricket game right there: two people, one ball (or a can, or a rock) and some sticks. You’ll see it played from Mumbai to Cape Town.
The formal game has a few more elements. First of all, there’s a second wicket about twenty paces from the first one, and a second batsman lolling around. The bowler bowls from that end, and when he’s had six balls, the attack changes ends, another bowler comes in for six balls, and the batsman at what was the bowler’s end is “on strike”, defending that wicket. The game tick-tocks between the two ends. There are also additional ways for a bowler to achieve his goal of dismissing the batsman. The most obvious is luring him into striking the ball into the air so that one of the other players on the field can catch it. This becomes extremely devious: bowlers will offer up a few loose balls for punishment, then change pace slightly so that the batsman mistimes his strike. There’s a very strong tactical and strategic aspect to it all.
The batsman, meanwhile, has some goals in view beyond merely defending his stumps. He wants to score. He does this by belting the ball when it comes his way and running to the other end of the pitch, trading places with the second batsman. There is, technically, no limit to the number of times they can do this per shot, although in practice the most you see is usually three, with the majority of shots yielding none, one, or two runs. The batsman is at risk while running of being “run out” – caught between wickets when the bails are removed from one end or the other by a member of the opposing team with the ball. Whichever batsman is closer to that set of stumps is dismissed. There are stern protocols between batsmen regarding who initiates a run. Getting your partner “run out” is viewed with a jaundiced eye.
If a batsman really hits the ball hard, it will go over the boundary line around the edge of the field. If it does so without touching the ground first (in which case the batsman may risk being caught, of course) it scores six runs. If it bounces, the tally is reduced to four.
One more serious point which causes great confusion and perturbation even among seasoned watchers of cricket is the Leg Before Wicket rule, or LBW. It’s called a rule, but that’s rather like calling a movie contract a deal memo. LBW is fiendishly tricky and often comes down to the judgment of the umpire on the field. The root of LBW is that the batsman may not use his legs to prevent the ball from striking the stumps; if the ball hits the batsman’s leg and would have hit the wicket, the batsman should be out. Unfortunately, however, that makes the bowler’s task rather too easy: all he has to do is fire a fast ball at the batsman’s legs and assert that it would have hit the stumps. So the LBW rule requires all manner of conditions be met regarding where the ball bounces where it was going, and the fine print seems to change from season to season. It’s best to watch and see what happens. All of which is mechanical; it’s how the game is played, not what the game is.
The reason people love cricket is that it’s cricket. It’s a difficult game, and a physically testing one, and yet cricketers can get wilier and wiser as they get older and maintain their competitiveness. There are cricketers playing now who are in their late thirties and at the top of their game. They have been playing at a high level for nearly two decades, and have become almost legendary. This also means that a kid who grows up admiring a particular player has the chance to play with or against him.
Cricket is a common language which transcends nations. It binds together kids and adults in India, Pakistan, Jamaica and the West Indies, Malaysia, Australia, England, South Africa, New Zealand, and Indonesia. If you go to a cricket match in Bermuda, it’s less like a sporting event and more like the St Patrick’s Day parade.
And beyond that: cricket is a game where top level players make decisions based on sportsmanship as well as on the desire to win. In this last test series between England and India, an England batsman misunderstood the situation on the field and was run out while under the impression that the ball was not in play. Despite the serious disadvantage to his team the Indian captain chose not to claim the dismissal. It was the right choice: the cricketing thing to do. India lost the series – not, fortunately, as a consequence of this sequence of events – and the team will get a hard time for that at home, but no one will question the appropriateness of that decision.
Cricket, ultimately, is just a game. But it is a game which is so layered in history and shared passion, in eccentricity and quirk, that it has to be experienced to be understood. If you want to get the point about cricket, find a bar which is showing the next test and get the crowd to explain what’s going on, who the personalities are, what the hidden currents may be. It’s a soap opera, a dynastic struggle, a terrible conflict and a wonderful marriage. Don’t worry about LBW, that will become clear. Watch for the battle between an off-spinner and a batsman on 49; get the cricketing wise to explain the placement of the fielders, the slips and the silly mid on. It won’t be long before the game sneaks past your defenses and you’re sneaking a peek at the live feed while you make a cup of coffee.
Cricket can do that.
