The Ashes

Maybe they should allow the use of shoulder-launched missile weapons, to make it a bit easier on the bowler.I just found out there are 42 "laws of cricket". Forty two? Surely that's a joke?Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.

As well as being very probably considered unsporting I suspect that whilst reducing the body strain and injury potential for bowlers, it might result in some career ending injuries for batsman. No. That's just cricket. But it is quite funny nevertheless.Latest news is that Englands best batsman (Kevin Pieterson) is out for the rest of the series with an achilles tendon injury. England has two genuinely world class players. One is out for the count and the other is falling apart at the seams. I am losing hope of winning the ashes and there hasn't even been a ball bowled since Englands last victory.

Unsporting? Never! Because we can fit the batsman with some sort of titanium carbon fibre laser-guided bat with rocket boosters. Howzat? He failed the Test then, I gather. Did someone mention "God's Own Sport"? Hogwash! It's Darwin's Evolutionary Cricket by Random Mutilation at the point of Intersection.My condolances though. Ashes to ashes, and all that. The only consolation I can offer is that you can't cremate English cricket twice.

You may just have invented "Bowlerball". The violent upgrade to Rollerball (the film from the 70s for those who have no idea what my pun is alluding to). That was a little tooooo clever!! It ain't over till the fat lady calls "teatime"Yes in cricket they do still call the two daily intervals "lunch" and "tea" respectively. I realise this must seem very "twee".

Speaking of ladies, fat or otherwise, are there any women's teams in cricket?O, never mind, I think I know the answer to that one. Women are multitasking and the game would be over before breakfast on the first day. Boring.By the way, don't you think this women and multitasking business is just a ruse to give us men a guilty conscience whenever we are staring into the microwave to check every second of the process whether our 3-minute meal really does take three minutes to heat up, when we could have cleaned up the kitchen in the mean time? I do. I do think it's ruse. Because whenever I find my partner in the kitchen, multitasking away like a madwoman, and I try to get her attention by gently stroking her and kissing her in the nape of her neck, which amounts to adding just one tiny task to the list, she just can't handle it. Multitasking? Bollocks. And sorry for the digression. Don't worry, it really can't be twee enough for me. The ultimate Englishness of it all is the thing I like best about cricket - as far as I know the details, that is.

Yes. But I know little about it. The England womens team I believe is quite good. But nobody pays it much attention. I think the "male" ability to absorb oneself in something to the exclusion of absoluetly all else (eating, sleeping, family, friends etc. etc.) whilst inarguably a source of conflict is much underrated. Many great achievements in art, science, literature etc. etc. would arguably be non-existant without the ability of the individual in question to forsake any pretense at multitasking and just "focus". And that is what is so funny about the image (and terminology) Vs the reality of the modern game. The notion that hard arsed ultra competetive professional Aussie sportsmen (for example) stand round sipping tea and nibbling biscuits whilst congratulating their opponents on putting on a "jolly good show" is laughable!! The same applies to players borne from the Indian slums, the ghettos of the Carribean or the rabidly sportingly intense South Africans. All are far more likely to be implying quite unsubtle things about their oponents mothers bedroom habits in an effort to wind up the player in question and cause him to do something stupid (sledging as the practise is termed - it is all but an accepted part of the game!!!!!!).And I am under no illusion that the English team are any less prone to such characteristics and practises depite the rather twee image of cricket as the epitome of old gentlemanly "Englishness".

Ah, thank you so much! That's just what I was looking for. Whenever my partner plays the multitasking card again, I can now say: "Yeah, and I just focus." Great stuff! Maybe the Englishness is not so much visible in tea-sipping biscuit-dipping odd fellows in woollen jumpers, but in all the rum rules and regulations. A quick glance at those "laws" that govern the layout of the field and sizes of the diverse paraphernalia is enough to determine that they must have been invented by the same guy who thought up the imperial units and pre-decimal coinage. As if the universe wasn't quaint enough already.

Now that I can agree with. Just as a taster here are some of the terms used to describe cricket fielding positions:Silly mid-on
Silly mid-off
Cow corner
Long leg
Square leg
Short leg
Silly point
Deep backward square leg
Short backward square leg
etc. etc.And here are some equally bizzarrely named methods of bowling:Googly
Leg break
Doosra
Chinaman
Armball
Flipper
Wrongun
Beamer
Yorker
Full toss
etc. etc. etc. There is always room for more quaintness in the universe.Next Ashes match starts Thurs. Nobody here cares but if anything "interesting" happens I will post an update anyway. So if you don't hear from me here assume Australia are winning

I care. Sort of.

Well fired up and fuelled by that near admission of not complete indifference I will endevour to do my best.

Straggler, Straggler, Straggler,Please! Not all on this side of the pond are cricket-challenged. Just the vast majority.I may not be a fanatic but I am a fan of the game. Seems I have to go to Australia to see it (about once every 18 months) so I do not get to relish in the sport as much as I would like.Please do keep us poor folk posted. At least until September when the NFL gets going again.

I am not all alone in the EvC universe after all.......! Hallelujah! I will do my best to update those interested whilst conveying the thrill, excitement and nail biting tension of the game to those more cynically minded amongst us (yes Oni - That means you) That is a sport I would like to understand.

I don't know if you can see NFL games in England, though I do know they plan to play another game at Wimbledon. If they do, and you would like to start a thread with any questions you have regarding the NFL, there are surely a number of us who can illuminate the darker areas of your understanding.If you don't want or need to actually see the games to try and understand the rules and concepts, feel free to start a thread now, and we Yanks can try and explain the intircacies of mankind's best sport. As a curious person, if you could try and explain some of the rules of Cricket, without making me go to Wiki (though I love to go there as well) I'd definitely appreciate it.

The basic premise is reasonably simple. Two teams. Eleven players each. The fielding team has all 11 players on the field and their aim is to get the battting team out. The batting team has two players on the field at any one time (Yes two. I think this is where people start to get confused) and their aim is to score points ("runs") by hitting the ball with the bat. Each team has an equal number of turns at batting (called an "innings") and the team with the most points ("runs") at the end wins.There are a ridiculous number of exceptions, details and subtleties to the above but that is in essence the "aim of the game" as a team sport and spectacle. But it is the more dualistic nature of the sport that makes it interesting.There is a guy with a bat. There is a guy with a ball. There are three sticks in the ground that the batsman has to protect from being hit with the ball. He has to do this whilst scoring "runs" by hitting the ball. He scores 4 runs if he hits it to the edge of the playing field (the "boundary") and 6 runs if he achieves this without the ball touching the ground. If the ball does not reach the boundary he can also score by running to the set of three sticks that the second batsman occupies. It is this running between wickets that I think is confusing so I wouldn't worry too much about that unless the rest makes sense.Meanwhile the guy with the ball (the bowler) has to try and get the batsman "out" either by hitting those three sticks (called the "stumps" or the "wicket") with the ball or by making the batsman hit the ball to one of the bowlers teammates fielding such that they can catch it*. The ball (a piece of heavy wood coated in hard stitched leather) can bounce on the pitch before reaching the batsman and this is used to add all sorts of variation to the motion of the ball. Spin bowling is a subtle art whilst fast bowling is as much about forcing an error from the batsman by means of intimidation and forcing him to protect himself from the ball rather as it is about hitting the actual wicket.I am waffling now. But does that make any sense or enlighten at all?* There are other ways too, such as "Leg Before Wicket" or LBW as it is known but ignore those complications until the basics are in place. I have watched the Superbowl and played John Madden on the computer. I fully intend to take you up on that offer at some point though. It would be good to understand America's best sport.

Thanks for attempting to explain the game to me.Do you have a diagram of the playing field, perhaps with the positions labelled?For instance, where is the second batsman located in relation to the first one? How far does the batsman have to hit the ball for it to reach the boundary?I think I get the scoring system down (sort of) but am still unsure on some of the mechanics. Does the batting team get one out, or similar to baseball, does each team get 3 outs before switching sides? The Superbowl is a great spectacle, I love watching it, but ot be honest, the spectacle often overwhelms the game itself. The best thing to do is watch a normal, Sunday afternoon game. It usually has commentators who are very knowledgeable about the game and can actually explain, as opposed to the primetime announcers who generally have more star power than actual ability to speak coherently (I'm looking at John Madden specifically, but a few others come to mind).I'm all for try to help in the international exchange of sports ideas whenever you're curious enough to continue, but perhaps one sport at a time. Edited by Perdition, : No reason given.