My whole life I have been avoiding cricket for whatever reason. I can't really come up with any other reason than that a match took too long, and that I didn't understand the scoreline whenever I saw cricket results. That matches can indeed take very long is a valid point, at least I think so. Why does a match need to take several days to be finished? It's really something that didn't make sense and that stopped me from watching the sports.
When I was a kid, there wasn't any internet around. The main source for sports results to me was NOS Teletekst. If you click on the name, you can see the current internet version of it. The look is exactly the same as it was 25-30 years ago. As I was interested in all sports, I just started at 600 and browsed through all pages on a daily basis. One of the pages is dedicated to cricket, also back in the days. For some reason, I always immediately moved on to the next one, as I had no idea what the scorelines meant.
That argument to me is currently not a valid one, because as soon as I don't understand a rule in a sport, or if they have implemented a new rule, I'm always eager to learn about that rule as soon as possible. Still, this didn't count for cricket. I have definitely tried it a couple of times, but apparently not serious enough. Also not, after all the right information showed up on the internet.
When I got to Scorum, I noticed there were a couple of people writing about cricket as well. I gave myself the task to read some of the cricket articles to get familiar with the sport, and perhaps to start understanding it. It was when @talesfrmthecrypt wrote a newbie guide on cricket, in which he also promoted the upcoming Big Bash League.
"Now is the time to get into cricket, the Big Bash League is coming to town"
The first eight of these words were exactly what I needed. I wanted to get into cricket, or at least to understand it, so why not do it if now is the time. If the Big Bash League can make me interested in the sport, then why not. I clicked on the post and started reading it. All that was unclear to me to understand became clear now. Tales has been extremely good in explaining the rules in a clear and in an easily understandable write-up.
Tales got me excited enough to give it a try, and just to experience, having his article in mind. I went to check out the team names, and I found it funny to see KFC being the main sponsor of the event. Looking at the team names, I decided to support the Hobart Hurricanes, as to me hey seemed like the underdogs, coming from the island in the south, Tasmania. Later, I found out that they were last year's runner-up, so they don't seem to be that much of an underdog after all. I am still going to support the Hobart Hurricanes and I am happy to see they won their match earlier today. My initial plan was to watch this one today, but when I realized I was going to be occupied, I had to think of an alternative. As I had a day off from work yesterday, and we would only travel in the afternoon, the Sydney Thunder vs. Melbourne Stars match was a great opportunity.
Sydney Thunder vs. Melbourne Stars
As soon as I started the game they just started. I was running a bit late due to my wife needing my computer for a bit. I told her I needed to watch some cricket, and she looked at me like I had too much to drink the night before. When I explained to her why I'm going to watch it, she wished me the best of luck. The first one to bowl was Adam Zampa of the Melbourne Stars. He threw that ball right at the wicket. I was overwhelmed by how easily that went, as I considered that to be something extremely difficult to do, but Zampa did it. I was also a bit overwhelmed by the cheering of the players. It makes sense to cheer when doing something good in sports, of course, I was just not expecting to hear it that loud.
Next up was Dwayne Bravo, who seemed like he is an experienced bowler. I later looked him up and, well he is 35 and definitely experienced. I was a bit surprised to see he is from Trinidad & Tobago, not a country I would expect to be very well at cricket.
Anyway, Bravo made an impression straight away as well, and whatever happened there, was not something I expected to happen. Bravo threw the ball towards the batter, who it is, but into the direction of Bravo, who picked up the ball and threw it again straight at the wicket. Like he had a second chance or something. It was totally allowed and, well that was a success, a very quick one. I started to wonder, those 20 overs Tales was talking about, they are never going to make it, right?
Now that I'm looking at my screenshots, I'm not 100% sure anymore that it was Bravo who did that, maybe it was Zampa. I might have mixed something up, but I lost my notes by accident, so I apologize if something is wrong here. The point is about the experience, rather than getting things straight, so I hope you forgive me for that.
Callum Ferguson was at bat now and was the first one I saw hit a six-pointer, not sure if that has a special name, but well, he hit the ball that hard, it went out of the park, like a home run in baseball. In baseball, it depends on how many people are on the bases to determine how many points that will be, whereas in cricket these are 6 points straight away. Perhaps I should say runs, as these totals are added to the number of runs the batters run after hitting the balls.
As soon as Ferguson hit the ball out of the park the attention went to one man in the audience. Just like I've seen in baseball, people try catching the ball as soon as it reaches them. So did this guy, the problem here was, he dived wrongly and didn't catch the ball. By the looks of it, it wasn't an easy ball to catch. I'm quite sure that most people would not have caught that ball either. Anyway, the cameras went towards him, the man put his hands in front of his face, the whole stadium was laughing at him like he made the worst possible mistake. I didn't blame him for not catching it, but it seems like everyone else (including himself and potentially his girlfriend next to him) did.
The next one to bowl was Sandeep Lamichhane. Until this match, I had no idea who this guy was, but it seems like he is considered to be a wonder kid in the sport. Funnily enough, I had just read an article about him on Scorum the day before, in which the writer @raamesa was wondering if he was going to make his BBL debut, well he did make his debut indeed. I recommend checking out this new writer, as he seems to know a lot about cricket. Of course, I was going to let him impress me with his skills to bowl those wickets apart. Well, what a debut was that! Within no time he put the Melbourne Stars in a very good position. When he entered the pitch the Stars had allowed 57 runs so far, and Sandeep was going to face some big names at-bat. He wasn't impressed by them at all and knocked over two wickets, only conceding two runs in the meantime. Boy, his teammates loved his performance there!
Then another bowler named Michael Beer came into play. I was getting thirsty straight away, but it was still early in the morning for me. I continued watching, but this was the moment where the bowlers started to lose their grip on the game.
Something happened at this stage, that I still don't understand. The ball ended up in the hands of a player who was close to the wicket. He grabbed the ball and simply pushed the wicket over with his hands before the batter returned from his run. First of all, I was surprised to see that this was a move that was allowed. But, I also would assume that the batter was out at this stage, which seemed not the be the case. Perhaps someone reading this can explain to me what happened here.
As you can see, until now I have mainly reported the match from the defending team's point of view. I found it interesting that, when watching baseball, my focus is on the attacking team, whereas at least in this cricket game my attention was mainly on the performances of the defending team. I'm not sure why this is, but perhaps it had to do with the impressive wicket killing in the early stages of this match.
Things started to change when Jason Sangha came at bat. This guy just nailed it and scored run after run, he even had a couple of six-pointers and seem to overtake the domination of the bowlers within a short time period. I was wondering if this was due to the bowlers getting tired, or that the later batsmen are better than the previous ones. If I understand it correctly the ones eliminated by Sandeep earlier in the match were the experienced ones and Sangha is less experienced than them and was also making his debut in the BBL. Sangha scored 21 runs out of the first 13 balls that were thrown at him.
When Daniel Sams came in, after Zampa threw another wicket, things started to look seriously good for the Sydney Thunder. The combination of Sams and Singha was just outstanding. They scored so many runs, they were just playing with the bowlers. I'm pretty sure that they got tired during the match, which resulted in them throwing less efficient, but than that would naturally happen in every cricket game, and as this was the first one that I watched, I have no idea if this is really the case.
Either way, Sams and Sangha were on fire at this stage of the game batting in a total of 75 runs from just 41 balls. To me, that sounds impressive, and it seems like the people broadcasting the game on BT Sport agreed with me, as they showed this statistic on screen.
In the last over Dwayne Bravo threw the ball at Sams' wicket, but at this stage, there were only three balls left to be thrown. The batting period for the Thunder finished with 181 runs, and it was then up to the Stars to overtake that.
For me, 181 runs don't really say anything. I am not sure if that is good, mediocre, or bad. Looking at the game, I believe it is mediocre, simply because 5 wickets were thrown, despite the fact that most of these were thrown very early in the game. Too bad it started to rain heavily, which interrupted play at that stage. I wanted to continue watching, but it seemed like they weren't going to continue for another while. Therefore I stopped watching from that moment.
I have to say, it was a great experience to watch it. It was much better than I expected it to be. The T20 format seems to be the right format when it comes to reaching the wider audience. I think now a cricket match lasts about as long as a baseball match. That is still long, but it's more likely to attract fans in my opinion. Not that cricket needs any more fans, as it is very popular in many countries. I looked at the final result later on and I saw that the Thunder had won the game with a 15-run difference (DLS mode). When I look at the result, that doesn't make any sense to me. So if there is someone out there who can explain that to me, that would be very much appreciated. Please don't be angry with me comparing this with baseball. There's a lot of similarities, but also a lot that has nothing to do with baseball at all. Thank you Tales, for making me do this and learn a new sport.
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed this look on cricket from a newbie perspective.
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