Apathy Sketchpad

I’m really not sure I understand cricket. I though it was a nice, simple, polite game where people are nice to each other and drink a lot of tea. But apparently not.

Quite aside from the fact that it’s in fact full of dirty tricks and nastiness (timewasting just to let the clock tick over so you can get a draw more easily, usually), the rules are preposterously complicated. I only found out this week that LBW is any more complicated than simply “if the batsman’s leg stops the ball hitting the wickets, he’s out”. At least it’s simple enough to understand the off-side. Given those odds, even with Hawkeye and video replays and microphones in the stumps, and three umpires, mistakes are still made more-or-less every other time a decision is taken. That, to me, renders that game largely pointless. You might as well have a Magic 8 Ball in charge of the proceedings.

Cricket remains the only game in history (to the best of my knowledge, anyway) where you can avoid losing using a well-timed rainstorm. If play is rained off it isn’t postponed; it just doesn’t happen. And if that means the game’s a draw (say, because one side have four million and the other have only two but still have three tail-end batsmen not out) then so be it. All your clever tactics in deciding when to declare and when to keep on batting go right out the window the moment a big cloud appears because that could easily cancel the rest of the match, even if it doesn’t actually rain.

And it takes five days to play a game. And they play it in five game series. And sometimes it’s a draw!. They play the game for the best part of a month, and don’t even have a winner. What kind of a game is that? A stupid one, that’s what kind it is.