Cricket: Color Me Confused.

I am American.  Soccer is played with your feet, and football is primarily played with your hands.  Baseball is the national pastime, and the team will never take a food break.  Yet, in all my sporting glory, I found something on ESPN that baffled me – Cricket.

Ladies and Gentleman I have been confused, astounded, baffled, intrigued, and above all else frustrated with the sport since I found it on my ESPN app on my Xbox360 a few nights ago.  I was instantly enthralled when I found nothing else was on other than recaps of games I had either seen, heard the outcomes of, or just didn’t want to see.  Now cricket, that’s not something you see very often here in the states.  In fact, the sport is most popular in England, South Africa, the West Indies, Australia/New Zealand, and India.  In any event, I watched a little of a test game between Pakistan and Bangladesh.  First off, test games have some different rules than a regular match.  This added to the initial confusion.  Secondly, the cameraman would always focus on the ball.  This made figuring the game out even harder seeing as I had no clue what the batsman was doing during this time.  I assumed he was running, but to what end?

So, to educate myself on the sport, I went to the one source I know will never fail me: The internet.  After dodging past the puffery of articles on the sport and league informational websites I found the Wikipedia page for Cricket.  Now normally I do not advise the use of Wikipedia, but as far as sports go I have found it is fairly accurate.  The page is direct and to the point, which is exactly what I was looking for.  Am I going to waste my time explaining the whole process to you in this blog?  No.  Of course not.  I will however mention that after watching part of one game, reading the basic rules of play on Wikipedia, and mulling over the confusion this brought, I have found that I keep searching my Xbox ESPN application for new games.  I am strangely intrigued by this foreign sport.  Wicket, bowling, batsman, innings (plural and singular are innings – weird, right?).  New words to add to my vocabulary.  Alright, so maybe I knew that their pitching was known as bowling, and I knew that the three sticks at either end of the pitch are called a wicket, but that’s beside the point.

However, this does bring up a new question in my mind: Did cricket have some influence on J.K. Rowling’s creation of the game of Quidditch?  Think about it.  The area of play that sees the most action is called the pitch.  The name of the Quidditch field is the pitch.  A wicket is a group of three sticks at either end of the pitch which the bowler aims his throws at and the batsman defends, for the bowling team will get credit for taking a wicket if the wicket is hit.  A Quidditch pitch has three hoops on either end of the pitch which will be defended by the keeper, and chasers try to throw a ball through the hoops to score.  The batsman defends the wicket by hitting the ball away with his bat.  Beaters are armed with bats (that look like a hybrid between baseball and cricket bats) with which they strike bludgers, aiming at the other team to try and throw them off.  The game of cricket is played on an oval shaped field of play.  A Quidditch pitch is in the shape of an oval.  Am I wrong or does there seem to be more than a few similarities between the games?  JKR is English, after all, so it is quite possible that the sport had some influence on her – if even subconsciously – when she was creating the magical pastime of Quidditch.  Maybe I’ll write her a letter and ask her someday.  Still, it’s some food for thought.

Cricket on a Quidditch Pitch.  It's a sports mash-up!

I hope you all enjoyed this very random distraction that ended up being a comparison between fictional literature and reality.  I thoroughly enjoyed discovering both!