Cricket? I got your wicket, right here!
I found the following explanation of the rules of cricket here. Unfortunately, the author is not cited. It’s a nice piece of satire.
You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that's in goes out, and when he's out he comes in and the next man goes in until he is out. When they are all out, the side that's been out comes in and the side that's been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.
When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out, he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who are all out all the time, and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.
It’s cricket season again in the southern hemisphere. While in New Zealand this past September I had a lively debate about the sport with a colleague of mine, Steve. Steve lives in Glasgow, Scotland and is an avid fan of cricket. He went so far as to call it the finest sport on the planet. Even better than your baseball, he said.
We were drinking, heavily, at the time. I haven’t a clue about the sport of cricket. I haven’t a clue about a lot of things, but that doesn’t keep me from having an opinion. I am, after all, an American. I stood up in defense of our most treasured sport. What was that you said about baseball? I asked pointedly. Steve stood up to look me in the eye. I don’t remember, he said. Don’t remember what? I countered. I don’t remember where the bathroom is, do you?
I didn’t remember where the bathroom was either. So we were at least in agreement on that. We both took a pee and had another beer. Steve continued with his defense of cricket as the best sport in the world. It went very much like the satirical explanation of the rules above. By the end of it, I was willing to concede that to the best of my knowledge I had stayed awake through his entire discourse and that I actually better understood the sport. It is the best sport in the world, I told Steve. It was the kind of affirmation you give when you have been drinking and your mind gets wound up tight so that the corners of your eyes feel like they have been stretched back behind your ears. Best god-damned sport ever. I was plastered.
After I sobered up, I was, of course, no wiser than before about cricket. I was, however, comforted by this thought: it really doesn’t matter. The sport of cricket gets almost no coverage on television in America. Chess gets more air time. With the start of the cricket season in Australia and New Zealand, I am curious again about just what it is that makes this sport so popular. I’ll tell you one thing. Cricket has a real image problem in my mind that precludes it from ever finding a wide audience in the United States. Forget the arcane rules and the fact that players dress like models from a J.Crew catalog and that the game is so long that there is a lunch break, how can we ever take a sport seriously when it is even remotely possible to be caught in a pose like this:
9:19:51 AM 
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