I served in the United States Air Force in England during the 1960s. I lived in a small village in East Anglia and played on the local cricket team. My baseball background helped with fielding and throwing, but I had to re-learn batsmanship.
The Big Question: cricket, Sambit Bal explains, combines intellect with sensory appeal, and to follow it is to be a student of life…
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine July/August 2012
VERY FEW THINGS, certainly no other sport, can engage the senses like Test cricket, the subtlest, most poetic, most varied and intellectual of spectator sports. Harold Pinter memorably described it as “the greatest thing God created on earth—certainly greater than sex”, and I know what he meant. To those who get it, cricket counts among life’s highest pleasures.
The beauty of a Test match is that it can be enjoyed in several ways: in its majestic fullness, over five long days; in a short session; in a duel between batsman and bowler; or in the action of a second. The experience is unlike any other, at once meditative and exhilarating.
On one level, cricket is a grand, winding narrative that runs languidly enough for the souls of players to be bared, but making so many startling turns that nothing can ever be taken for granted. On another, it is a game of moments, each invested with match-altering potential. The central action, the delivery of the ball by the bowler and the batsman’s response to it, lasts only a second or two, and for the batsman every ball is a matter of life and death. Because the game goes to the edge hundreds of times a day, the anticipation, between balls, between overs, between sessions and between days, creates a unique pleasure. “Each thing that happens”, Pinter said, “is dramatic.”
Cricket has all the best attributes of sport, as well as some of the worst—the scope for cheating and fixing, the occasional longueur. It contains multiple skills and styles. For sensory appeal, watching Shane Warne bowl (search on YouTube for “best wicket in cricket history”) or Brian Lara bat (“Lara’s batting style”) is a feast by itself, but watching them take on each other (“Lara vs Warne”) is a joy without parallel. All wrists, all poetry, and each deploying a distinct craft. Baseball is the only other game where two such different skills clash, and cricket, by allowing the ball to hit the surface before it reaches the batsman, by letting the elements—sun, clouds, dust, wind—play a part, and by making scoring possible all around the ground, finds room for variations that baseball can only dream of.
It calls for light feet and deft hands. There’s balance, poise and grace when Sachin Tendulkar, an all-time great still playing today, caresses a boundary: speed, ferocity and athleticism when a fast bowler like Dale Steyn is in full flight. It demands lightning reflexes and saintly patience. It can be both subtle and brutal. And it is the only sport where a stalemate can be heart-stoppingly thrilling.
And then it has something possessed by only one other game, chess, which has none of the adrenalin. Cricket calls for so many decisions that it is a game of the mind as much as of the body: just ask Mike Brearley, who was a philosopher before he became England captain and has been a psychotherapist since. All games reveal character, but cricket reveals so much that it has long since been a study of life. How can any other sport compete?
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Sambit Bal edits Cricinfo.com. He is a former editor of Wisden Asia Cricket andGentleman magazine
Photograph Getty
Richard, I guess I never “got” cricket! To me it was just standing there on the cold edge of a big East Anglian field in a biting wind, waiting for a ball to come my way. Now, Rugby – that was something else again. Or sailing a dinghy up and down an estuary with 6 knot tides and 10,000 ton freighters competing for the channel, all in a “Mad March gale” – THAT needed strategy and lots of split-second decisions!
But then, I have never “got” baseball, either.
John
I’m a total cricket fan… played womens cricket for years when I was younger. And now that they have 20/20 games, which are fast and furious.. the game is better than ever. Baseball I don’t “get”… but hey… I’m an Aussie. I’m an Aussie who is married to an American, who recently lost her husband for two weeks after he flew to the USA just to attend Spring Training… that SUCKED!!
I understand why people who haven’t grown up in a cricket environment find it boring, but the more you understand the game the more engrossing it becomes. Test matches which last 5 days are especially like this, people ask me how I can watch a sports game that last 5 days but I actually prefer it to the shorter versions, because the complexity and nuances of the game come out more in the 5 day version.
One of my favourite sporting stories involves cricket – it happened in the 1950s, a New Zealand player whose fiancee had just died in a railway disaster fought against the odds after his teammates had all been injured or defeated. Its a great tale of emotion and character I think, and you don’t have to like cricket to like the story. There’s a writeup about it here: http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/380889.html if anyone is interested!
I am sorry but for me, BASEBALL offers the best of all spectator sports. Baseball has the fast-paced, explosive action, speed and power of football, the tangible momentum swings and tension build up of soccer, the etiquette and heritage of golf, and the technique and individual flair of the NBA. It’s not hard to agree that all of the above factors are pretty awesome. It is the greatest game!