Cricket Explained In A Video

Posted on Sun 06/16/2024 by TonyfromOz

By Anton Lang ~

In my bio at this link I write this single short sentence ….. I played Cricket for 25 years at senior grade level, and then lesser grades, moving into coaching junior and senior teams.

All my life I have loved the game of Cricket, firstly as a player when I was younger, and now I’m too old to play, all I have is watching the game in its many forms, and reading about the game, and I have around 30 books on the game. Every morning of my life, one of the first things I do these days when I turn on my computer is to check the overnight scores of any game that was played, especially those matches Australia might have been playing.

Across the whole of the World, only the football game of Soccer has a larger player participation rate than the game of cricket, so Cricket is the second biggest Sport played on the Planet. Cricket is played in more than 120 Countries across the World, by literally hundreds of millions of players, many hundreds of millions. Cricket has been played now for many hundreds of years. The game originated and was developed in England, and has been organised as a sport in England since the early 1600s, but anecdotally, dates back hundreds of years earlier than that. As England expanded, the sport was taken up wherever the English settled in the many Countries around the World, and perhaps one of the first Countries outside of England to start playing the game in an organised sport was here in Australia around the start of the 1800s, so the game has been played here in Australia for more than 200 years now.

As this game of Cricket is not a sport played at senior levels in the U.S. it is not a very well known sport in your Country. Because of that, very few Americans would understand the game, and with that in mind, it then becomes a sport which is difficult to explain, even in the most rudimentary way. It is similar in nature to Baseball, and even then, the only similarity is that it is a game played with ‘bat and ball’.

The first recognised International match was played in March 1877 between Australia and England, the major ‘powerhouses’ of the game at that time, and still the major two powerhouses in this day and age.

Currently, there is a major World Cup Series being played, with the host Countries being USA and The West Indies. This series is the shortest version of the game The T20 World Cup. T2o stands for Twenty Twenty, the number (20) of six ball overs faced by each team in this much shortened version of this wonderful game. There are four Groups, and there are five Countries in Each Group. Each Group has two or three of the major Cricket Countries, and three or two of the Associate Countries, not considered in the Senior Cricket playing Countries. These Associate Countries have played in a number of lead up tournaments to try and win their way into this major tournament, held across five weeks. Each Group as I mentioned has five teams, but only two teams from each Group move through to the second round. This second round has four teams in two groups, and the highest placed teams after playing that second round get to play in the semi finals, and from that, the chance to play in the final.

As with any major World competition like this, there are always upsets, and this tournament has had many of those. Of those senior Cricket playing Nations, four of them have failed to progress out of the Group Stage, and two, maybe even three of those second tier Countries have progressed out of the Group Stage. One of those second tier Countries is in fact the U.S. who have been the surprise packet of this tournament. They beat Canada in the first game of the Series, almost beat the World Cricket Powerhouse India, and in a major upset, they beat perhaps one of the top three Countries in the World Pakistan. Because the U.S. has performed so well, there is now a huge interest in the game across the U.S. so Americans are now trying to find out what this game of Cricket is all about.

So, for me to try and explain this game would be problematic at best, and all but impossible.

Here, there has been a wonderful video made by a Baseball Commentator. I saw the video across at the T20 Cricket World Cup site at this link, and because it was a video also made for You Tube, then I can post that video here at this site. The video does in fact explain the game in quite a good manner really, and is just over seven minutes long. The interesting thing is this. The game is considered to be Australia’s National Sport, so there is tremendous interest here in Australia about this World Cup, and how our team is going. To hear that the sport of cricket is garnering interest in the U.S. is, well, anecdotal, so yeah, I hear that and think that maybe interest is picking up a little. Then I see that this video alone has got more than 130 thousand views. So, there actually is interest in the game.

Enjoy the video. I did, and that surprised me, when I was perhaps a little sceptical that an American could explain the game, but here, it is in fact quite a good explanation.

Anton Lang uses the screen name of TonyfromOz, and he writes at this site, PA Pundits International on topics related to electrical power generation, from all sources, concentrating mainly on Renewable Power, and how the two most favoured methods of renewable power generation, Wind Power and all versions of Solar Power, fail comprehensively to deliver levels of power required to replace traditional power generation. His Bio is at this link.