Today I partook of New Zealand's summer sport, Cricket.
There is a club called 20/20 social cricket which I joined in a fit of enthusiasm and so I went out to the Ilam (pronounced "eye-lam") fields to see what was going on. There was a mix of roughly 50/50 local Kiwis who play regularly and exchange students from the US who are into baseball. I was clearly an odd one in the bunch. Especially as my view of cricket is the one invented by that madcap genius Douglas Adams in which it is an ancient version of a war where white clad robots batted explosive balls at the key to the universe's peace and prosperity, with its three pillars of technology culture and something else I can't remember off the top of my head. Look it up on google if you are curious.
So as you can probably tell, I had no idea what was going on. I had read a short summary of the rules ~1/2 hour before but hadn't even seen a game played.
So it turns out that 20/20 is an apparently very short version of cricket in which each team gets to bowl 20 "overs" or sets of bowls by one bowler at the batters from the other team. Although if one team makes all of the batting team out play might stop then. I'm not really sure about that still. It still took from 1430 to 1745 to finish.
Because we didn't have the necessary 22 people to form two teams of 11 we ended up fielding when we weren't batting and so for the quarter of the game I wasn't even sure which team I was on! Turns out I was on the batting team first and ended up batting 6th (this is about 2 hours in.) I hit the ball once to run back and forth once. Then the ball went wide a bunch of times. Then I hit the ball and it was caught in mid flight, so I was out.
When we switched around I bowled for one over, for the first few times I didn't even realise that I was supposed to be using a straight arm for the bowls. Then by sheer fluke I took out the Kiwi I was bowling against by hitting the wikket. There was much cheering, though I subsequently was unable to even get the ball on target for the remainder of the over.
So that was boring at times, hanging out as a fielder, strangely exciting when batting in a wierd combination of golf and baseball, and finally kind of fun when I finally had figured out how points were being scored.
The next game is next Wednesday, and I will remember to put on sunscreen.
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Oh most excellently amusing! Just wait 'til Dave (cricketeer par excellence) reads this one.
ReplyDeleteSpendid that you hit someone's wicket but have you ever aimed at ANYTHING in your life without a sharp pointy sword in hand? Also bet you enjoying catching with bare hands or did you resort to a single padded fencing glove?
No, I consider myself as notoriously bad at games that involve bats/sticks and balls/rings/pucks so this is a bit of a strange thing to be doing.
ReplyDeleteAnd no, there were no gloves for catching (unless you were the person behind the wicket and brought your own) My hand stung quite a bit after that. Those balls are hard!