Before coming here, cricket to me would always and only be the game that the Queen of Hearts would play in Alice in Wonderland.
But here cricket is a sport, and actually THE sport. Cricket is to India what soccer is to Italy: cricket players are rich and famous, they date actresses and cute girls from television, they set fashion trends and support charity campaigns.
Where I come from, kids grow up playing soccer in the streets; here they play cricket. And that is sufficient to make of cricket the second most popular game of the world. (After soccer, of course.)
Now, do you know how does cricket work? I know I didn’t.
To be honest I still don’t know, despite having watched several parts of cricket matches on tv.
There are, though, a few things I have observed about it.
To begin with, cricket is a long game, and by long I mean LONG. Long like one game could last for several days. Which - matching perfectly with the after some time philosophy - doesn’t make it surprising that it is India’s national sport.
Cricket is such a long game that New India’s national sport is not cricket anymore, but Twenty20 Cricket. It is basically a shortened version of the original game, of which I have only understood it is made of 20 something (inning? round? points?), to complete which it only takes about 4 hours.
Most Indians seem quite disappointed with this new thing, which is just a minor and less interesting version of the real game, nevertheless they do follow it with interest. In the evening, when the game is on tv, every screen would show it. And everyone who hasn’t access to a screen nor to the alert cricket sms would keep asking updates non-stop.
To my profane eyes, all that is understandable of cricket is that there’s one guy who throws a ball, a guy that should hit it with a wooden wicket and a guy behind him with a glove. I know there are some other players who run around. I know the players don’t have to be that young (they can play very well in their thirties). These elements all combined with the length of the game made me draw a connection between cricket and baseball (another game that I don’t understand, but that I don’t-understand less than cricket).
I happened to draw this connection - which still makes sort of sense to me - talking with an Indian guy. I shouldn’t have dared.
They’re two completely different things, he told me, baseball is just a long boring game.
