[Tutor] What is a cricket match?

[Liam Clarke]

Hi all,

Cricket is big in New Zealand, my place of residence. Well, it was
big, until our national team kept losing repeatedly, even to Zimbabwe.

My theory is that cricket was designed by the British to punish
countries that sought to leave the British Empire - it's played in
summer, and while standing in an open field for a day may be alright
in a British 'summer', in an African/Indian/Australian/West Indies/New
Zealand summer, it is somewhat inadvisable. Yet they still do it.

Mad dogs, Englishmen, and cricket teams...

As for the actual game mechanics - 
There is an oval shaped large piece of flat grass, and in the centre
is where the batting and bowling occur. This is where the action
usually occurs. There are two teams, with 11 people from each team
taking part.

So,

This is a top down view....you have two wickets as such, about 5 metres apart -


|                           |


And two batsmen (x's), (and there must always be 2)


|x1                     x2|

And a bowler, who bowls from one end i.e. -


|x1                       x2|     <-----B

So, the bowler, B, runs up to roughly where batter x2 is, and throws
the ball at the batsman, in this case x1.

(Although he doesn't throw it, he 'bowls' it, which involves bouncing
it on the ground first.)

So, 

|x1     <--o             x2|B   (the 'o' is the ball, which is
travelling at a ludicrous speed)

Now, the bowler is trying to get the batsman 'out'. When 10 out of the
11 batters are out, then the other teams takes it's turn batting. Why
only 10 out of 11? Because there must always be 2 batters. I don't
know why, cricket was the prototype for Calvinball.

You can be 'out' as a batter in two ways - 
You can hit the ball, and a member of the opposing team can catch it
'on the full', i.e. before it hits the ground.

And then there's the wicket....


A wicket looks like this (front on view) batsman stands in front of wicket- 

 [----][---][----]
  ==  ==  ==
  ==  ==  ==
  ==  ==  ==

The == parts are 3 wooden cylindrical poles, about 1 m high called
stumps,  and the [---] are solid cylinders of wood,  They rest in
grooves on top of the stumps.

For a hit on the wicket to put you 'out', the hit has to knock a bail off.  

Now... the batsman doesn't actually stand in front of the wicket, he
stands slightly offset, with his bat in front of the wicket.

Enlarged bird's eye view - (0's are stumps, The single line is the
bat, and the B is the batsman.

0
0 |
0 |
  BB
  BB 

The bat is held like a golf club, and it looks like this (front on view)- 

  []
  []
[    ]
[    ]
[    ]
[    ]
[__ ]


You can be also out if you are 'leg before wicket'. A cricket batsman
wears padding in certain areas for safety, as those balls have been
clocked at 120km/hr, and they're hard.
A batsman has padding on the front of his legs, from his ankles to
just above his knees. If the ball hits this padding, and the umpire
determines that the ball would have hit the wicket if your leg hadn't
been in the way, then you are out, leg before wicket.

The batsman always stands a certain distance in front of the wicket.
There is usually a line marked here. This is called the 'crease'.

When a batsman has the bottom of his bat behind the 'crease', then he
is safe from the third kind of 'out', which is -

When the batsman is not on or behind his crease(see below for why he
wouldn't be), any member of the opposing team can throw or touch the
wickets with the ball, and if a stump is knocked off, the batsman is
out.

So basically, the bowler is trying to hit the wicket, and you are
trying to stop him by hitting the ball, and if possible, scoring some
points by getting 'runs'.

Runs?

Well, let's step back a bit to 

|x1     <--o             x2|B 

The bowler (B) has just bowled the ball to batter x1. Now that we know
what happens if x1 misses the ball, let's see what happens if he hits
it.

A run is scored liked this -

|x1-->                          <--x2|

|x2                                  x1|

So one run is scored, when the batters swap ends. Now, they can do
this for as long as they like after the ball has been hit, and each
successful swap is a run scored.

But, once they leave their 'crease' to run to the other wicket (they
both have creases), both of them are vulnerable to being made 'out'.

They don't have to run; the batter can hit the ball, and choose
whether or not to attempt to score a run. Obviously if the ball rolled
straight to a nearby fielder, it would be silly to leave your crease.

And that's how you score runs.
Hit the ball, run backwards and forth, hit the ball again...

You can also score runs by hitting the ball well. If you hit it out of
the field 'on the full' i.e. it doesn't touch the ground before
leaving the field, you score 6 runs.

This has given the phrase 'hit for 6" or 'knocked it for 6" to
indicate that someone has put in a lot of effort and suceeded. But,
being 'knocked for 6' means that you have taken a blow.

If you hit the ball, and it leaves the field, (the edge of the field
is determined by a line drawn on the grass around the field; this is
called the boundary), but it touches the ground inside the boundary,
then you score 4 points.

There are a whole lot of cricket fielding positions, with very silly names -

"I'm silly mid-wicket off", but that's just funny names for standing
in a field trying to catch a ball.

As for the actual scoring, in one day games, it's the number of runs
scored that matters. (I believe.)

For multi day games, it the number of runs AND the number of batters
who were 'not out' that count, and it involves a very arcane formula
that I can't understand.


Hope that helps, and in next week's 1000 word essay, we'll discuss rugby.


Regards,

Liam Clarke
Resident of Otautahi in the South Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Who also hates cricket with a loathing, unless we're winning.

On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 19:58:04 +0000, Scot W. Stevenson
<scot at possum.in-berlin.de> wrote:
> Hello Brian,
> 
> > Cricket is a sport notable chiefly for its ability to make baseball look
> > exciting. ;-)
> 
> A British friend of the family, pressed for the rules of cricket, under
> duress finally admitted that there are none: The British, he confessed, just
> pretend that there are rules and always make sure that they sound terribly,
> terribly complicated so that everybody else thinks that the British are so
> much more intelligent than they are.
> 
> To that we replied: Well, if that is so, why does India keep winning?
> 
> Cheers,
> Y, Scot
> 
> --
>               In the real version, Han Solo shot first
>                 Scot W. Stevenson  Panketal, Germany
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Tutor maillist  -  Tutor at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
> 


-- 
'There is only one basic human right, and that is to do as you damn well please.
And with it comes the only basic human duty, to take the consequences.