What I love about cricket

Cricket is a game played in only a handful of nations. And even amongst those handful, only 5 or 6 of them can claim to play it with a high degree of quality. Test cricket, the purest form of cricket, is a uniquely weird form of sport. Two teams play the game over 5 days and chances are that even after 5 gruelling days, you won't get a result. I can think of no other game which is based on such an inexplicable concept. Now let's just imagine yourself explaining the game of cricket to a person who doesn't know anything about it. First of all, you would need a few days just to explain all the rules. And there is no guarantee that even after all your efforts, you would succeed in doing a very good job. Secondly, even if your unsuspecting victim has been able to grasp the rules, in all probability, he would proclaim the game of cricket to be singularly boring. And in all fairness, he would be absolutely right.

Just think. At the start of an over, the captain takes a couple of minutes to tell his fielders where to place themselves. Then there would be a general search for the ball. After it is found being juggled around by some playful fielder, the captain would rack his brains as to who he should call on to deliver the ball. This dilemma once solved, the bowler walks back a fair distance from the pitch, reluctantly accepts the ball and starts preparing to hurl the ball at the batsman. His preparations take some time too, as he first flails his arms around like a chimpanzee on hash, then practises by throwing the ball to the fielder at cover a couple of times and then carefully marks the point from where he should start his run up by shovelling away the grass at the point with his spikes. He then finally starts running towards the bowling crease to deliver the ball. And all of this is in vain if the bowler fails to release the ball from within the bowling crease. In such a case, the umpire signals that the bowler is an idiot and that his delivery was so worthless that he has do it all over again. The bowler, most surprisingly, agrees with the umpire and walks back to the top of his run-up without a word of protest. And his labours start once more from scratch. Even if the bowler manages to bowl a legitimate delivery, the batsman more often than not decides that he wants to have nothing to do with the ball and lets the poor man behind the stumps collect the ball instead. This entire process goes on and on 540 times in a day and 2700 times over 5 days (at least that many times). Sounds mind-numbing, doesn't it?

So why is it that we love about cricket? I would say that it is this very leisurely pace at which the game is played which makes it so interesting. Here, I would like to categorically state that the game of test cricket is strictly for intellectuals.

A game of football, tennis or hockey motors along at a frenetic pace. There is no time to contemplate on the game either for the players or for the viewers. And this is precisely where cricket scores over most other games. It gives everyone involved ample time for contemplation. The commentators also feed up our hunger for contemplation. Commentators narrate entire anecdotes during a match without having to take their attention away from a single ball. Viewers can think about what should happen, what can happen and what is bound to happen on every single ball in a match. And after the ball is bowled, the viewer can again analyse what actually happened and why it happened. A true cricket lover thinks up entire tomes in the duration of a match. To enjoy Test cricket, you have to be a born thinker, a true intellectual.

It would not be fallacious to assume that cricket is the most-analyzed game of all. Cricket is a great game because it gives us the leisure to analyze. And I am thankful that there are more thinkers in the world than I would have dared to hope.