One of my professors recently had the opportunity to teach a class how to play cricket. He started out with the generic explanation of “it’s sort of like baseball, but you play for five days” which really doesn’t tell you much. He then put up a slide which went something like this –
“You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side thats 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 stay 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 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!”
I thought it was funny, but mostly because I’d seen it before and knew it was a joke. The rest of the students sort of just sat there, one even asked a serious question.
The context for this lesson in sport and in comedic timing was the class for the study abroad to Trinidad and Tobago that I somehow was given the privilege of instructing. One of the things we may be able to do while we’re on those Caribbean islands is get our asses royally kicked by locals in a game of cricket. All the students in the class are fantastically white, and I doubt that any of us has touched a cricket bat in our lives. Should be interesting. I doubt my bowling skills are any good, but I really want to see if I can knock the bails off the stumps with a frisbee from the same distance the ball would be bowled from.
Point is, one of my goals from my UK trip was to get a cricket ball. That did not happen. Maybe it’ll happen in May…
what Was, what Is, and what Will Be 