Soon after arriving in Bangladesh I had my first exposure to cricket.  It’s that game that is kind of like baseball, but only with two “bases”, the bat is flat, and they only play it in ex-British colonies and Great Britain itself.  Because barely anyone in America has heard of cricket, I thought I’d give a few observations that I’ve made since being here.

1)    Cricket takes forever.  There are one days matches and 4-5 day matches.  And when I say day I mean 90 overs, which means that there are 540 pitches made to the batter.  So, people have to sit around in the hot sun for a long long time. If you are following cricket this might mean spending 4-5 days, 8 hours a day watching cricket.  That’s like a full work week!  I talked to some Australians about this a few weeks ago and they said they knew “mates” that would spend days watching cricket and drinking beer on the couch.  Honestly, watching cricket isn’t that great.  It can be an exciting sport to watch, but not for 8 hours, day after day.  The matches take so long that they need tea breaks and meal breaks during the game.

2)    I’m sure the majority of the people that are reading this article don’t have the slightest idea how to play cricket.  Upon coming here I spent a great amount of time asking people how the game is played, I finally figured out how it works.  The interesting thing is how little coverage it gets in America.  I can’t ever remember seeing cricket on the news in America.  Recently a there was a huge upset. Australia lost its first cricket match in three years.  This was a huge deal in the cricket world, but I doubt it made headlines in any sports section in America. 

3)    Because people are standing in the sun for extended periods of time while playing cricket, they have to protect themselves from getting sunburned.  So people wear wide brimmed hats and wear obscene amounts of zinc oxide cream.  Zinc oxide cream is that really white sunscreen that people used to wear in the 50’s and its kind of odd that they wear it for cricket when they could use normal looking sunscreen that doesn’t leave tons of residue.  People use tons of this stuff.  I can’t find a picture that does it justice, but some guys have more than half of their face covered in this thick opaque cream.  I thought this was really weird, but after some quick research I learned the real reason for wearing zinc oxide.  The bowler (American=pitcher) discreetly rubs the zinc oxide on the ball to make it heavier so he can control the motion of the ball more and put spin on it, thus making it more difficult for the batter to hit it.  This has made some controversy lately and zinc oxide is now banned in certain leagues.

4)    When people think of American football they often think about cheerleaders.  For instance you can always count on seeing a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader calendar at the calendar stand at the local mall during the holidays.  But many people don’t know that cricket has its own form of cheerleaders, with a very slight twist.  All the countries in south Asia have fairly modest clothing standards.  Bangladesh and Pakistan are both essentially Muslim states so they are not down with skimpy clothing and India culturally isn’t okay with women in bikinis shaking pompoms.  So to get around this they either have male cheerleaders or create tons of controversy by hiring cheerleaders from American football teams and have them run around wearing skimpy clothing.  A quick Google search of cricket cheerleaders will show you lots of articles on the subject.  I was watching a Karachi Dolphins (Pakistan) match where they had 3 young men in tight fitting clothing dancing on a wooden platform.  I guess because its difficult to dance in a salwar kameez or sari they just figured they’d get men to do it, but I don’t think it has quite the same effect.

5)    I think my favorite aspect of cricket is that it’s such an international sport.  Because the sport is spread all over the world, you often see teams from other sides of the world facing off or see teams that are made up of players from tons of different countries.  Also, when a team comes to another country to have a match, they stay there for weeks.  They have various types of 1 day test matches and 4-5 days long matches.  I think being a “cricket star” would be pretty cool just in the fact that you get to travel around the world and spend extended periods of time in each country.  But because of how international cricket is, its makes some conflicts.  The cheerleading thing would totally fly in England, South Africa, or Australia but it doesn’t work in more morally strict countries like Pakistan.  Also, because you constantly having various country teams facing off its like having the world cup going on every year.  The amount of national spirit poured into the game is pretty inspiring.

6)    Lastly, cricket can be really boring to watch.  Hours and hours of people bowling and hitting and running back and fourth between 3 pieces of wood stuck in the ground, but cricket highlights are so much fun to watch.  The first time I watched cricket highlights I was on the edge of my seat.  Every time someone bowled the batter hit it and there was either some sort of point scored or someone got out.  I thought it was just an extremely good game of cricket, but I soon realized that I was watching cricket highlights.  I was slightly disappointed to figure out that minor detail.  Now when I watch cricket I can enjoy it for a little bit and I mostly just wish I could watch every game condensed into 20 minutes with only the highlights, but I guess that would take a lot of the culture and character out of the game.