So the US has finally joined the rest of the world....

Hey, some of us even compete at curling.

Don't mean it's a real sport. .

I can only see T20 cricket ever getting even miniscule popularity in the states, which is a shame. The true joy of a One Day International will never be appreciated in the US, mainly due to its length.

As for test matches, forget it.

The fact that not many people play cricket here is a pretty good sign that it has been discovered before and outed as a long boring game.
The original base ballers in New York and Boston shucked it aside and wrote up the baseball rules. When club teams of US baseball players returned to England to play matches vs English teams they beat them soundly. Then they returned to refine baseball that could be played in two hours instead of two days.
I've played cricket and it is an easier game to play than baseball is and I watched cricket matches in Hawaii about fifty years ago. Last I checked that is part of the US, and the English game hasn't caught on here in that length of time, though there are, have been for many years, places in the US where it is enjoyed. Actually it was played here long before the American Pastime was invented, with players like George and Harry Wright excelling.

mirandashell said:

Really? So the fact that pretty much everywhere but the American continent plays cricket and not baseball means nothing?

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The Japanese play baseball.

The worst part about cricket is when they break out the worm chart and you are left staring at dear goodness knows what.

The US Open Golf Championship takes 4 days so what is wrong with a test match?

waylander said:

The US Open Golf Championship takes 4 days so what is wrong with a test match?

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And the (British) Open Championship doesn't?

My point was that plenty of people are happy to watch Championship golf but seem reluctant to consider a cricket match that lasts a similar length of time.

mirandashell said:

107 nations play cricket.

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Even more nations play chess, and we don't watch much of that on TV either.

Cricket's a much better game than baseball. Requires far more skill, thought and physical courage. With baseball everything is so samey you need to play 10000000 games a season to detect enough of a statistical edge to declare a winner (or steroids, I guess.)

haven't played much baseball?

Torgo said:

Cricket's a much better game than baseball. Requires far more skill, thought and physical courage. With baseball everything is so samey you need to play 10000000 games a season to detect enough of a statistical edge to declare a winner (or steroids, I guess.)

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They're called innings, and it only takes nine (usually).

PorterStarrByrd said:

haven't played much baseball?

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A little bit - enough to know it's a lot harder to play cricket well than baseball. For one thing, if you get hit by a pitch in baseball they reward you with a free base. If you get hit by a ball in cricket you get to dust yourself off and be intimidated, because the next ball is going to be even faster. And the bounce that helpfully takes a few MPH off - taking it down from the raw speed of a baseball pitch - causes the ball to deviate in unexpected and unpredictable ways, making judgement calls even finer.

Cricket, with its dizzying variations in bowling styles and paces - spin, swing, seam - is very different from baseball, in which the only really unique pitchers seem to be knuckleball pitchers, who are dying out it seems. And as the game wears on, the initial conditions are always changing. The weather. The pitch. The condition of the ball. Each over brings different challenges, a different dynamic between bowler and batsman. The variety of unique situations possible in any given baseball game seems far more limited.

As a batsman, you have the option of hitting the ball anywhere, and the fielders have the freedom to move basically anywhere they want. This is far more interesting than baseball, where very similar players stand in very similar positions and the batter hits in, what, a 100 degree forward arc the whole time?

Plus empirically the greatest sportsman of modern times was a cricketer, so suck it up, other sports! In conclusion, then: cricket yay, baseball zzzzz. I commend the motion to the House.

mirandashell said:

What? What is a worm chart?

107 nations play cricket.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Cricket_Council_members

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_baseball_outside_the_United_States

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I think the worm chart that is being referred to is the graph that depicts the run rate per over.

And while I like test matches, the fact that you can play for five days and have it end in a miserable draw is a major turn off. I believe that there should be an over limit per inning in test matches to improve its appeal.

When you have a bat the size of a canoe paddle, a lot of the tricky stuff doesn't mean much.

mirandashell said:

We already have that. It's called a ODI. 50 overs per inning.

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I mean letting each team bat for 110 overs each inning. That will come to 440 overs per match, which is about what the average test match comes to. The point of doing this is to have a winner each test match because one of the biggest problems with the game is that you can invest 5 days of time and energy into watching it only for it to be a draw. Watching a team make 700 runs and declaring after three days of batting in the first inning might be interesting, but it also means that the rest of the match will go nowhere, especially if the match is being played on a batting friendly pitch.

PorterStarrByrd said:

When you have a bat the size of a canoe paddle, a lot of the tricky stuff doesn't mean much.

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You wouldn't be saying that if you were up against a spin bowler like Sri Lanka's Muralitharan.

zerosystem said:

And while I like test matches, the fact that you can play for five days and have it end in a miserable draw is a major turn off. I believe that there should be an over limit per inning in test matches to improve its appeal.

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The miserable draws seem less prevalent in these days of 3,4 runs per over... these days the draws tend to the heroic or the weather-affected.

mirandashell said:

A draw is part of the point of a test.

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To me, the only good thing about a draw is it gives a batsman the opportunity to go for the scoring record. It would be extremely difficult to break Brian Lara' s record if there were over limits.