I have never cared for the game of cricket.
Partially, this is my American bias coming through: we didn’t sink tea in Boston Harbor just to turn around and adopt a sport that has specific rules in place for tea breaks. We even took out the extra ‘u’ that British people put in the word ‘harbor’. What the hell is a harbour anyway? Who invented this dmb langage?
I have been generally dismissive of cricket because it seems like a lesser version of our national game. Here’s a partial list of things that baseball does better than cricket:
1. Baseball is shorter. If you think that watching a four-hour game is interminable, know that cricket matches are sometimes a week long. Even the cricket matches in the current World Cup….matches that give each side a paltry 50 overs….take six to eight hours to play.
2. Baseball allows more back-and-forth on offense. This is the one brilliant ‘fix’ that the inventors of baseball made to cricket. In a cricket match, one team bats, and then the other team tries to ‘chase’ the first team’s tally. It’s a two-act play….two long acts. Baseball, using the same analogy, is an 18-act play which can sometimes stretch to 24 or 36 acts. I have the attention span of a hummingbird: I prefer shorter scenes.
3. Baseball fans aren’t as annoyingly exclusive as cricket fans. I’ve met a few of cricket fans over here. Almost all of them, within three minutes of me asking about cricket, will tell me that I will never understand the game, and that I’d be better off not trying to understand it. This is, in my opinion, the single biggest reason why the median age of a cricket fan in New Zealand is seventy-eight years old: it’s because the people who are cricket fans have no interest in letting anyone else join their ranks.
4. Cricket is absurdly reliant on gentlemanly propriety, instead of rules. I won’t bore you with the details because I mostly don’t understand them, but there’s a lot of aspects of cricket that rely on the competitors to be, well, non-competitive. A batting team is allowed a limited number of pitches: there seems to be little consequence if a pitcher (or bowler, as they’re calling) just throws a bunch of unhittable balls. The only force keeping them honest is a) looking ungentlemanly, and b) ___. It is a game ripe for cheating. Speaking of which…
5. There’s a lot of cheating in cricket. Right…in case you didn’t know this, cricket is obscenely corrupt. Not as corrupt as FIFA or the Olympics…it’s not ‘murdering slaves to build stadiums’ corrupt. It’s more like mid-1910’s baseball….there’s a lot of match-fixing that goes on.
6. There are no souvenirs in cricket. You have to throw the ball back.If you get concussed trying to catch a six, the ball is going back into the game. No memento for you, slow hands!
7. There’s no value in speed. Cricket is basically baseball as it was played in the 1950’s: homers and singles. There’s very little reason to run fast: if you hit the ball to an infielder, you’re not getting a run. If you hit it to an outfielder, you’re getting exactly one run. If it rolls to the fence it’s an automatic four. If you crush it out, it’s a six. There ain’t no triples in cricket.
8. The names of the dramatic hits are boring. In baseball, a long fly ball that leaves the field is called a home run, a homer, a dinger, a long-ball, a jack, or a Giancarlo Stanton. In cricket it’s a six. Meh.
9. The fielding is better in baseball. In an average baseball game, you will see players make a play you couldn’t make roughly three dozen times a game without making a big deal about it. In cricket, a player will catch a high pop-up like he was saving the last baby eagle on earth, and then react to catching it like he had also cured polio. It’s….disorienting.
10. The stats are meaningless, and everywhere. Baseball is more stat-mad than cricket (thanks a lot, Bill), but you can still watch a baseball game without paying any attention to anything but the game. Watching a cricket game on television is like watching the stock-market channel: there’s a bunch of numbers flickering up and down the screen, next to acronyms I can’t understand. Ugh.
So to hell with cricket.
* * *
Or at least that’s what I thought, before I watched yesterday’s semi-final match that saw New Zealand take on South Africa. I got lucky: this was the first game I watched, and as luck would have it, it turned out to be The Greatest Cricket Game Ever.
And, really, I watched half of the game. South Africa won the coin-flip and elected to bat first. I say ‘coin-flip’, but I don’t actually know how they decide these things. It’s just as likely that the referees call the Queen of England and ask her who she’d like to see bat first, and just go from there. I’m sure the rules on how to conduct the coin toss are one hundred pages long. I’m sure they include a tea break between the calling of heads and tail and the actual flip.
So I mostly ignored the first half, because the game started at 2:00 pm locally and I have thing to do.From what I gather, South Africa:
-Batted terribly in the first part of the game.
-Batted very well in the middle, and,
-Batted very, very well in the end.
This was part of the strategy….New Zealand played their best bowlers (pitchers) early, and they performed very well. But they didn’t manage to retire many of the good batters for South Africa, so South Africa teed off on New Zealand’s middle-relievers.
South Africa was meant to have 50 overs. An over is 6 pitches, or ‘balls’ or ‘bowls’, so South Africa’s batters were meant to see 300 pitches from the New Zealand bowlers. A rainstorm interrupted South Africa’s batting, so the refs decided that each team would have only 43 overs for the day.
At the end of their 43 overs, South Africa had scored 281 runs.
A rational sort of person, hearing this, would assume that New Zealand, to win the contest, would have to score 282 runs to win.
But cricket, alas, is not a sport for rational people: it is a sport where sabermetricians (or whatever the British equivalent for ‘guys-who-live-in-their-mom’s-basement’ is) have not only gained a position in the game, but have used that position to make insanely stupid changes.
Hence the
Ducksworth-Lewis Method, a complex formula that is used to calculate how many runs New Zealand
actually had to score to beat South Africa.
The Ducksworth-Lewis Method was introduced in 1996: I can only assume that during the seven billion years cricket was played before this metric was introduced, matches were determined by the far stupider measure of who scored the most runs. But huzzah for progress, I guess.
Those of us with statistical bents can only dream of American sports following suit. It’d be great to see the Super Bowl decided by which quarterback has the higher QB rating. And I’m looking forward to watching the Nationals claim this year’s World Series title by having a better xFIP than the Blue Jays.
Anyway, this bizarre system decided that that New Zealand, down 281 runs, needed to score 298 runs to win the match. It was therefore possible for New Zealand to a) score more runs than South Africa, and b) lose the match.
Except even that 298 number wasn’t right….New Zealand actually had to score 297 runs. Because NZ had done better than South Africa in the early rounds of the tournament, they had the tie-breaker. The target was put at 298, but New Zealand would advance by scoring 297 runs. In that eventuality, the tie score, if you can wrap your mind around this, would be New Zealand 297, South Africa 281.
What was especially irksome about this is that for the entire second half, the numbers ticking backwards on the runs New Zealand was chasing were the wrong numbers: the numbers kept saying New Zealand needed 98 or 63 runs, when New Zealand actually needed 97 or 62 runs.
Are you bored? I’m bored. We haven’t even gotten to the playing….we’re just dealing with counting. Cricket manages to mess that up.
* * *
So New Zealand is chasing 298, or 297 if we’re being really accurate. This is a tough score….it’s not impossible, but tough. Let’s get to the part of the game I watched.
The first batter for New Zealand is the team captain Brendon McCullum.
Did you ever watch that show "Home Run Derby"? Not the thing they do at the All-Star game….that old show from the 1960’s, where Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, or Harmon Killebrew and Hank Aaron would compete to see who could hit the most balls out of an empty, winter-frozen stadium?
That’s what Brendon McCullum does: he hits dingers. Or….sixes. He hits sixes and fours. A four is a ball that reached the boundary, either rolling or bouncing. McCullum is a monster batter. Here’s one seven pitch (bowl sequence):
4, 6, Wild Pitch, 4, 6, 4, 4
In baseball terms, this would be like David Ortiz hitting a double, a homer, a double, a homer, and two more doubles. On consecutive pitches.
Which is one way that cricket is compelling: you get to see a masterful batter hitting for a long length of time. This isn’t true for baseball: you can easily catch a game in which David Ortiz goes 0-for-4 with a walk, and you come away less than impressed. With cricket, it’s rare for elite batsmen to not impress, at least for a little while. Cricket showcases their star hitters better than baseball does.
And the batting itself is fascinating: a cricket pitch is a large oval (or circle in some places), so there’s no foul territory. This means that not only can a batter hit the ball anywhere, they are actually incentivized to do so. McCullum’s hits, overlaid on the field, went in every direction. He hit sixes – the cricket equivalent to a homer - to his pull field, the opposite field, and dead center.
Another compelling detail about the batting is the higher stakes: if a batter makes an out, they’re done for the day. There is a monumental pressure to this, especially for the big hitters like McCullum, who go for longer shots. Just miss the ball, and end up hitting a pop-up? Not only are you out, but your team’s chances have plummeted. Swing a little late on a fast ball and it hits the wicket? Enjoy the showers…you’re done.
To someone raised on baseball, the heightened stakes of each cricket at-bat is fascinating. If Mike Trout strikes out in his first at-bat, I can rest assured that he’ll have other chances. In cricket there’s no second turn at-bat: if you mess up there’s no redeeming yourself.
Anyway, McCullum batted brilliantly: he scored 59 runs on just 26 balls before hitting a liner directly at one of the South African defenders. This is (apparently) exactly what he was supposed to do: rack up as many runs as possible, as quickly as possible. He succeeded brilliantly: his average per over was a blistering 13.7. To put that in context, if all of the New Zealand team had maintained that pace, they would have scored 589 runs. Or, actually, New Zealand would have scored enough runs to win by the 22nd over.
Another aspect to cricket that is extremely enjoyable, especially in contrast to baseball, is that pitchers rotate through the game: the pitchers (or bowlers) change during every over…every six balls. This opens up a great deal of strategy that isn’t available in baseball: you can adjust your pitching order as the game progresses, to accommodate to how the hitters are doing. If your opponent’s best hitter is cracking 4’s and 6’s against your faster bowler, you can try to bring in a ‘spin’ bowler to see if that helps throw the batter off his timing.
This is, in a sense, what baseball does in the later innings of games, with the primary difference being that pitchers cannot return to the game. Baseball is moving, gradually, towards some version of the cricket model: really brief appearances by the pitcher. But cricket is smart in that it has a ‘check’ on relentlessly subbing in pitchers: a pitcher (a bowler) is not allowed to come in and throw one ball: they have to complete their over.
Things were looking up for New Zealand after McCullum was retired in the 7th over: though their best hitter was out, they still had two talented hitters taking turns, and they were well ahead of South Africa’s pace.
In the 9th over, the second batter, Kane Williamson tried to go for a long ball and fouled it off the wicket. That’s baseball lingo, ‘foul’…there's no fouls in cricket. But it was a foul tip that hit the little horizontal bar off the three taller vertical bars. This was a big blow to New Zealand’s chances: in the course of ten balls, two of their best hitters were out of the game.
They still had Martin Guptill batting. If McCullum is New Zealand’s best player, Guptill is the team’s Jose Abreu: their most fearsome batsman. In the World Cup match that preceding this one, Guptill scored 237 runs against the West Indies. That’s 237…almost the entire South African total….all by himself. It was the most runs any New Zealand cricket player has notched in a World Cup match. The guy who had the previous record? Martin Guptill, with 189.
I happened to be in Wellington, just a-walkin' along the waterfront, when Guptill went off. The stadium is at one end of the harbor, and the sound from the stadium echoed throughout the city.
This is something baseball doesn’t have, at least from a hitting standpoint. We’ve all heard stories about hitters getting on hot streaks, but those streaks play out over a long space of time. In cricket, a batter on a hot streak just goes: he can hit shot after shot for hours or days, until he makes a mistake, or until the natural life of the game has ended.
Anyway, New Zealand still had Guptill, who was four days removed from the greatest batting performance any New Zealand has had in a World Cup match. They had a batter who could single-handedly knock in enough runs to beat South Africa.
And Guptill was run out.
In cricket, two batters are on the field, one at each wicket. Runs are scored when the batters switch wickets…when they run from one to the other. If the batter who is being pitched to runs, the other guy has to follow suit.
In the 18th over, the batter opposite Guptill, a player named Ross Taylor, hit a grounder directly at one of the fielders. Taylor, for reasons known only by him and God, decided to run. Guptill, noticing this terrible decision, tried to get to the opposite wicket, but didn’t come close to beating the throw. New Zealand wasn’t halfway through their overs, nor were they halfway to their goal of 298, and their two star batters were out of the game.
The nearest equivalent to Guptill getting run out, in baseball, was Babe Ruth getting caught stealing to end the 1926 World Series. Except in this case, Babe Ruth was a) caught stealing because he was forced to run by a teammate’s bad decision, and b) on deck to bat.
So, yeah….horrible.
* * *
I should say here that New Zealand’s national cricket team is in many ways the polar opposite of New Zealand’s national rugby team. The rugby team, the famous All Blacks, are the most successful international rugby team in the world. Since they started playing in international competitions in 1903, the All Blacks have posted a winning record against every country they’ve competed against. That doesn’t do it justice: only five countries have ever beaten them in an official game. The All Blacks are the rugby version of the Yankees: they expect to win every game, every year, and they usually do.
The New Zealand cricket team - the Black Caps – are very different. International cricket has traditionally been dominated by five or six countries: India, Australia, England, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and maybe South Africa and the West Indies. Of those, the strongest teams are India and Australia and England. India won the last World Cup; Australia won the three World Cups before that.
New Zealand has never been a big player in international cricket. They are certainly strong - especially for a country of 4.5 million people - but they’re firmly in the second-tier when it comes to international competition.
Anyway, when New Zealand’s electric batter Guptill was run out, it looked like New Zealand’s run was coming to an end. My cricket-obsessed friend likes to say that the Black Caps have an alarming habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: Guptill getting run out because his teammate wanted to score a useless run was exactly that: defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.
This left New Zealand with two batters: twenty-five year old Corey Anderson, a slap-hitting left-hander, and thirty-six year old veteran Grant Elliott.
In the 38th over, Anderson was retired: he put up an impressive 58 runs. Elliott, the old guy, was still playing, but he’s being paired with the bottom part of the New Zealand batting order. Elliott was the last decent bat standing in the way of South Africa and the final.
Just an aside: one other way in which cricket is more compelling than baseball is that it is has two forces working against an offense. Your chances to score runs will end after the 50th over (or, in the case of this match the 43rd over). This is exactly like baseball’s 27 outs…once you get through those outs, you’re out of chances.
But cricket has a second force that puts pressure on an offense: you can run out of batters. If ten batters get out, your offense is finished, whether or not you’ve used up all of your outs (pitchers/bowls) or overs (innings).
I think this is great, frankly: it gives the game a second dimension. If you’re the trailing team and you’ve had seven batters retired, you have to think a little bit more about how you want your remaining batters to approach the game. What’s the right balance between trying for extra runs, and making sure that you don’t lose all of your batters? It’s fascinating...it opens up a range of tactical tensions that baseball simply doesn’t have.
I’ve been trying to think of a ‘second check’ that baseball could apply to their offense to give it an equivalent. We have twenty-seven outs....just thinking out loud here, but baseball could adopt a rule in which every five strikeouts by an offense would lose that team an additional out. If your batters whiff five times, the ninth inning is a two-out affair. If your batters strike out another five times, it’s one out. Strike out fifteen times in the first eight innings, and winning or losing, you don’t get to bat in the 9th.
I have no idea how that would play out, but it’d be an interesting solution to the strikeout problem.
Anyway…back to cricket. Near the end of the 41st over, South Africa had a chance to retire Grant Elliott. The catcher (that’s not the real term for his position, but he gets to wear gloves) fielded a throw towards the wicket, but he missed the ball: he knocked the wicket off but didn’t actually have the ball, so Elliott was still batting.
At the end of the 41st over, New Zealand has 275 runs. They need 297 to advance, so they’re 22 short. They have 12 pitches left. Let’s go ball-by-ball:
Over 42 (out of 43)
Ball 1 – 1 run
Ball 2 – 2 runs
Ball 3 – 1 run
Ball 4 – 1 run
Ball 5 – 4 runs
Ball 6 – 2 runs
This does nothing to communicate the intensity of this round. One of those runs was a high pop fly which magically landed in the infield. Somehow the defenders all completely misjudged it, or lost it in the lights: the ball hung in the air forever and then just landed. That’s not supposed to happen in cricket: if the ball is hit high, someone usually catches it.
So that was a break for New Zealand. Instead of a) their best batter being out, and b) them not getting any runs on the ball, the Black Caps got a lucky run, and Elliott was still batting.
Then came the sixth ball. Here Elliott went for a six and ended up hitting just under the ball, sending what we’d call ‘a lazy fly ball’ to what we’d call ‘the outfield.’ This was the end for Elliott, and the end for New Zealand’s chances.
Except….the two outfielders collidedinto each other, and the ball landed between them. Instead of zero runs and Elliott out of the game, New Zealand had two extra runs, and Elliott was still swinging.
New Zealand had scored 11 runs in the over…three of those runs gifted by the South African defense utterly falling apart at the worst possible moment. They was at 286 now….they need exactly 11 runs to get to 297, tie the game, and advance to the final.
South Africa was playing, in those last overs, with what we’d call a ‘no doubles’ defense: all of the outfielders were crowded at the edge of the pitch, trying to make sure that anything on the ground wouldn’t get over the boundary. In cricket terms, it was a ‘no-4’s’ defense.
Six balls left, eleven runs needed.
Over 43:
Ball 1 – Over throw. The pitcher threw a wild pitch. The batters, knowing this was a possibility, decided to run on the pitch. They scored a run. Five balls left, 10 runs needed.
Ball 2 – One run. A slasher to the deep outfield. Four balls left, 9 runs needed.
Ball 3- Four! A great shot over the boundary. Three balls left, 5 runs needed.
Ball 4 – Another wild pitch. Another run for New Zealand. Two balls left, 4 runs needed.
At this point, the New Zealand batters need to get a 4 or a 6 on one of the next two balls. Two clean hits wouldn't do it: they need to reach the boundary. And because the outfielders are playing a very conservative defense, a four was going to be tough to get.
At this point, of course, the pitcher could've thrown two more wild pitches. He would concede two runs (maybe), but he’d likely win the game. I think that the danger of throwing wild pitches is that a) they’re easier to hit, because the batter doesn’t have to worry about protecting the wicket, and b) a wild pitch past the catcher might reach the boundary fence, for a four. But I'm not sure about this.
While I’m on the subject, I don’t know what the odds are of a cricket match coming down to the last two pitches, but I imagine the chances are pretty slim, even in a one-day match. After 8 hours and 514 pitches, the game still hung in the balance, right to the end.
So we have Grant Elliott is batting against South Africa, needing to hit a boundary shot to put New Zealand into the World Cup final.
Did I mention that Grant Elliott is from South Africa? He is. He was born and raised in South Africa. He moved to New Zealand in 2001 because there’s less competition to play high-level cricket in New Zealand than South Africa. We can presume that he knows most of the guys on the South African team, because he used to play for them.
Anyway, Elliott has two shots to reach the boundary, and send his team to the World Cup final.
Ball 5 – Six.
You knew that was coming, right? On the second-to-last pitch of the game, Grant Elliott crushed a game-winning six. It was an impressive shot, a deep fly that landed into the frenzied crowd. The game was over. New Zealand had pulled it out.
* * *
I said earlier that cricket is a game of two acts. I mentioned this as one of the flaws of the game.
A cricket game is essentially one action (Team A tries to score as many runs as possible), and one reaction (Team B tries to beat the score of Team A). While these two parts take place over a considerable length of time, there’s no getting away that cricket is just two events.
Every other sports interchanges offense and defense regularly. Baseball changes from offense to defense eighteen times in a regulation game. In American football it’s probably about the same….15-20 changes in a regulation game. A professional basketball game must change 40-50 times in a game. I have no idea how many changes take place in a game of ice hockey or soccer, but it’s a lot. It’s more than two. Hell…even sports like darts and bowling take turns on offense. You don’t have one guy bowl a game, and then see if the other guy can keep up.
In a way, this makes cricket perhaps the purest of sports. In every other sport you get second chances….but cricket gives you one chance. It gives each batter one chance: if you make an out on the first pitch, your day is done. If your team has a lousy at-bat, they’re done…they can’t hope that they’ll do better in the second inning, or on the next possession.
This structure is objectively compelling, but played out on the field, the drama of the game is more subtle than it is in other sports. For most of yesterday’s game I was convinced that New Zealand was losing…not marginally, but badly. I thought they had made too many mistakes to pull it out.
I don’t think this is actually correct: New Zealand did make costly mistakes, but at least statistically they were always in the game. I was surprised when they won, but it’s possible that I simply didn’t understand what I was seeing. In retrospect, the game might’ve been closer than it felt, the comeback less dramatic than it seemed.
But that last moment was glorious: it was certainly one of the most exciting sporting moments I’ve seen on television. I say that and acknowledge my considerable ignorance about what I saw: I assume that it’s tough to hit a 6 with two balls left, but I have no idea how hard it is. I have no idea whether the degree of difficulty is Dave Roberts hard (steal a base off a catcher who knows you’re running) or Kirk Gibson hard (homer off peak Dennis Eckersley). I suspect it’s somewhere between the two.
It has me hooked, though. The second semi-final starts in a few hours. The two titans of the sport, Australia and India, will be battling to see who plays New Zealand in the final. I’ll be watching it, for most of the eight or ten hours it takes to play. I don’t have that much to do.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming 1986@yahoo.com.