A cricket pitch is a long strip. Bowler bowls from one end, batter strikes the bowl from the other. Scoring is done by running from one end of that strip to the other (the unit of scoring is literally called a run). Six legal bowls make an over.
There are two batters in play at each point in time, one at each end of the pitch, and they both must run towards the other end of the pitch (therefore swapping places) to score.
Bruce Edgar had scored 102 runs, was not out (in the same sense as baseball — meaning he was still in play), but, because they either didn’t manage to score any runs, or scored twos, he spent the whole over on the non-striking side of the pitch.
Basically, there's three grabbers, three taggers, five twig runners, and a player at Whackbat. Center tagger lights a pine cone and chucks it over the basket and the whack-batter tries to hit the cedar stick off the cross rock. Then the twig runners dash back and forth until the pine cone burns out and the umpire calls hotbox. Finally, you count up however many score-downs it adds up to and divide that by nine.
The bariet takes a pull at the fumbler, and then one of two things happens: Either he misses, or hits it (towards the flange or along the foul line to the base). There are three spichies who can try to deflect the fumbler, either towards the simulcum or out to the field.
The simulcum is the more audacious play, giving an instant spiel if they succeed in darving the bariet. But it runs a serious risk of a spurn, so unless a spichie is particularly strong, the field is the safer play.
Explaining Cricket to a Baseball fan only makes it worse.
I have tried it many times and failed.
Personally, playing a few games of cricket is the best way to learn the rules of the game.
As an example, in your explanation ( which is good to this lifelong cricket fan from India) your first sentence starts "A cricket pitch..." And when a baseball fan reads it he is probably asking "What is a cricket pitch?"
Down by six is literally that — they were six runs (points) behind. Six is a "magic" number, because that's what you score for knocking the ball out of the park (so the cricket equivalent to hitting a home run).
Yup, batter runs towards the bowler (and the "inactive" batter runs the opposite direction).
In baseball terms, a cricket run is more or less equivalent to running a single base (the bowler is 22 yards away from the batter, which is more than the distance from the pitcher's mound to the home plate, but less than the distance from home to first base). Just like you can run multiple bases in baseball, you can do multiple runs in cricket. From a scoring point of view, you're effectively scoring how many bases you ran, so a baseball run is roughly equivalent to four cricket runs.
Scoring 100+ runs is called "a century", and it's pretty impressive, but, because you keep batting until the bowling team sends you out, you can just keep scoring all day long if you have the endurance for it. Baseball doesn't have a mechanism for a single batter to hit multiple back-to-back home runs.
There's a rope around the field, if the ball goes over it without hitting the ground (like a home run) it counts for 6. If if it did hit the ground it counts for 4.
They can run more than one (get to the other side, turn around, run back, etc) but the chance of the wicket you're running to being hit with the ball (so you're out) becomes larger so they usually manage 1, sometimes 2 or even 3. And both batters have to run the same amount.
If the number of runs is even, they end up on the same side as they started from.
> There's a rope around the field, if the ball goes over it without hitting the ground (like a home run) it counts for 6.
On the larger grounds, it tends to be a decently-sized foam triangular prism (covered in advertising, obvs.) rather than a plain rope which leads to "if it hits the triangle" rather than "goes over the rope" (I believe "hits the rope" also counts but is much harder to judge for obvious scale reasons.)
Also, IIRC, the ball can go over the boundary without hitting the ground but a fielder can knock it back inside for a catch to be performed to get the player out[0].
Sorry, I'm just making this more complicated for the baseballers, aren't I?
Not even the whole of the UK - really only England and Wales (as a singular entity, rather than individually).
The rest of us know it only for its impenetrable jargon ("They've risked a woggle on the silly midden!"), the grating public school chumminess of the commentators, and a rumour about a puerile "joke" which may or may not have been told on the radio coverage in the early 1980s.
Honestly, it's a sport I suspect I ought to like - full of stats and strategy - but it really does seem impossible to follow unless you've been inculcated since birth.
> The rest of us know it only for its impenetrable jargon ("They've risked a woggle on the silly midden!")
You’re thinking of the fielding position “silly point,” so named because the chances of getting knocked out by the ball to the face are so high you’d be silly to stand there.
By “midden” you might be thinking of “maiden,” which is a bowler competing a “maiden over” by completing their 6 balls without conceding a run. An over is just a block of play consisting of 6 balls before switching bowlers.
It’s not as impenetrable as it first sounds, it just needs a bit of time to watch. Most sports have some jargon (offside anyone?)
(Bruce Edgar), who was (on (102 not out)), was stuck at (the (non-striker's end)) the entire (over).
• An “over” consists of six opportunities to hit the ball and score “runs”. (A “run” is the basic unit of scoring.)
• "102 not out" indicates how many runs the player had personally contributed to the team's score. The number is large enough to suggest that this was the player who was playing particularly well in that match.
So the sentence is saying that the player who could be expected to make good use of whichever of those six opportunities he got, did not get any of them.
I think as with most cases of unfamiliar jargon, the sentence can be confusing not because of unusual words but because of everyday words being used with technical meanings ("not out", "end", "over").
By contrast, underhand free throw shooting is legal in the NBA and it is very effective. But it is seen as unmasculine rather than cheating. Players would apparently rather lose than be seen doing it.
To someone who is coming in cold, this kinda feels like people saying it’s unsportsmanlike to kneel at the end of a gridiron game, or pass the ball around the backfield in stoppage time at a soccer game?
Taking a knee to lock in an American football victory used to be considered unsportsmanlike, but then the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_at_the_Meadowlands happened, where the Giants were up 17-12 with 30 seconds left and played normally. They fumbled the ball, the Eagles recovered it and scored a touchdown, the Giants' offensive coordinator was summarily fired and never worked in the NFL again, and ever since, dropping to your knee when it ensures your win is standard, accepted, and even sometimes called the Victory Formation.
There is still the remote possibility of a fumble or tackling the ball away from the defence in those cases. In the underarm bowling incident it was made physically impossible to win. In baseball terms, he had to hit a home run with the ball on the ground.
(Though as a non-American, I am indeed mystified why the kneel is legal and not regarded as delay of game!)
Essentially the player with the ball is going down on their own, ending the down, same as if they had ran with the ball and been tackled.
They’re considered down when their knee touches the ground while in possession of the ball (“possession” having a specific meaning, with regard to the rules). Again, this is the same as if they had been tackled. The only difference is no one forced them to the ground.
Taking a knee is not something that would normally be considered a good thing since you lose yards and a down.
As for why it’s not a delay of game, that’s likely because it does not delay the game any more than any normal play would. It probably runs down less time on the clock than if they played normally, but of course playing normally is riskier which why they take a knee. The idea is to simply run down the clock as much as possible without risking a turnover and then leaving the other team with too little time to score.
If the rules could be changed to disincentivize taking a knee I think that would be more interesting, but I’m not sure how you do that. It’s also safer in an already dangerous sport.
I am a casual American football viewer but my understanding is that the kneel ends the current play but keeps the clock running. Each team has something like 40s to setup their formation and snap the ball after the previous play has ended. If the game clock is still running (this is concurrent to their 40s of "setup time"), the team that is in possession of the ball can just use the full setup time (idk the formal term for this) to just run out the game clock.
Each team has 4 attempts to move the ball forward 10 yards, where if the ball moves >= 10 yards they get a fresh set of 4 attempts. These are called "downs".
If the team has any downs left when they kneel then they can maintain possession of the ball and can thus run out the clock. Most (all?) of the time the teams end the game even if there is time left on the clock.
Note that either team can call a timeout pre-snap which freezes the game clock. Certain plays also result in the game clock freezing between plays. There is also a 2-minute warning at the end of the 2nd/4th quarter that also freezes the game clock.
IMO clock management adds a very interesting strategic layer to NFL football.
Plenty of sports do have rules to prevent stalling tactics (either for sportsmanlike reasons or to make the viewing experience more engaging): the two-minute warning in American football, the shot clock in basketball, icing rules in hockey, etc.
Passing the ball around the backfield is a risky tactic in association football (which similarly banned the goalkeeper just picking up backpasses because it was too easy to waste time). 'Taking the ball to the corner' is a much lower risk option, but it is possible to win the ball back and quickly go up the other end and score with good play. Deliberate time wasting between plays is a yellow card offence (even though the referee could simply add the time on, it's disliked)
Plus cricket nominally has more of a sportmanship culture than most sports. "Mankading" (the practice of a bowler deciding to strike the wicket near to him instead of bowling because the runner from the other end has strayed too far[1]) is technically legal and would be considered smart play in many sports - especially since it's an action performed to stop opponents gaining a small advantage over you - but is regarded as shameful in cricket, at least not unless you've been gentlemanly enough to warn the runner at your end to stop straying forward each time the ball is bowled. Indeed it's so controversial Wikipedia maintains a 'list of incidents' page, starting with poor Vinoo Mankad who probably thought he was just being smart and didn't realise his surname would become synonymous with cheating
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mankading_incidents_in...
[1]baseball fans: roughly the equivalent of a pitcher deciding in mid-pitch to throw the ball to a base to stop someone stealing bases, except the base in question is right next to him.
Not to mention that there's a bunch of new anti-timewasting edicts that have come in for the World Cup and will eventually filter down to the various regional associations for implementation. Going to be interesting seeing how PGMOL use that to pick their winner for the 2026/27 EPL season...
This ties in with something else on HN recently - the end of long wave radio in the UK.
Test Match Special was broadcast on the BBC's long wave frequency and for many people in Britain it was a quintessential summer listening experience: all day for up to 5 days per test match.
Such long time stretches of continuous broadcasting meant that the commentators were adept at talking, stories, banter and general chatter, occasional bollocks.
For me the Test Match Special broadcasts became like a pleasant ambient background noise to long summer days, with occasional excitement and humor - like the time Brian Johnston and Jonathan Agnew fell into uncontrollable laughter at a double entendre, a priceless piece of cricket history: https://youtu.be/KsVTpX7LdZQ
Incomprehensible! “Didn’t quite get his leg over” - that’s the joke? Found a Guardian article and even they do not explain the joke [1]. Further ethnological research [2] explains it all - “to get a leg over” is intercourse.
The story about the test match broadcast is really nice. Just goes to show how deep cultures can be locally ingrained. One could learn perfect English and never get to the point of getting this joke, without serious integration efforts. In this case, worthwhile efforts.
No it is not still within the laws of cricket since the late 1930s.
You might notice the law changes section in that article, that amongst other things you can't have loads of fielders behind square on leg side now.
I would also suggest it is not considered unsportsmanlike to bowl short and aim for the head any more, but rather something people look foster's
forward to seeing.
I was about to post the same thing when I noticed this comment.
For those who might not want to go through the article:
> ...designed to combat the extraordinary batting skill of Australia's leading batsman, Don Bradman... aimed at the body of the batsman in the expectation that when he defended himself with his bat, a resulting deflection could be caught by one of several fielders deliberately placed nearby on the leg side. At the time, no helmets or other upper-body protective gear was worn, and critics of the tactic considered it intimidating, and physically threatening in a game traditionally supposed to uphold conventions of sportsmanship.
It's a gentleman's game. Like in golf, there are expectations of behavior.
They didn't think they needed a rule.
This was what made me certain they were wrong--the commentary of their own older brother, who's hugely respected:
> As the ball was being bowled, Ian Chappell (elder brother of Greg and Trevor, and a former Australian captain), who was commentating on the match, was heard to call out "No, Greg, no, you can't do that"[10] in an instinctive reaction to the incident, and he remained critical in a later newspaper article on the incident.[11]
I suppose my fundamental misunderstanding is that an underarm bowl just seems like the obvious defensive move, not unsportsmanlike.
I said this in another comment and it seems relevant: "I know they're different, but in baseball the pitch is part of the game. Not being able to make good use of a pitch is a problem for the hitter, not the pitcher."
I think my baseballed mind simply cannot warp itself to your gentlemanly ways lol
Imagine the strike zone was just convention and pitchers were technically allowed to roll the ball if they were more bothered about preventing home runs than getting the opponent out. Think your baseball mind would be annoyed when someone did it, and the lawmakers would have to step in pretty quick to stop it being a regular thing...
(Think there's also a general prejudice against underarm play in professional sport as it's for kids who can't throw properly and feels like mockery. Underarm serves in tennis are frowned upon, even though an alert opponent has plenty of chance of scoring a point from them)
I don't think there's a rule against rolling the ball to a batter; it would be called a ball. It would be similar to a wild pitch or an intentional walk (when you had to actually throw the 4 balls).
I'm beginning to feel like Americans trying to understand cricket trying to understand the tactical permutations of intentional walks :D
The equivalent would be bowling a ball rather than a strike in a baseball variant where each innings ended after a fixed number of balls regardless of the number of outs (which is effectively what One Day variants of cricket are). Specifically, walking the batsman when they needed to score a home run or at least a double. I think fans would get upset!
This wasn’t only underarm, but also rolling the ball over the ground.
Imagine that, in baseball, rolling the ball over the plate were considered a strike. If so, wouldn’t pitchers go for it if, at some time, all they need to do is prevent an home run (yes, I know that doesn’t happen in baseball) and wouldn’t it, subsequently, be banned?
It’s because overhand bowling was just the way you bowled, so nobody considered making a rule to tell you that was necessary until someone didn’t. Imagine playing football and someone picks up the ball and- oh right ;-)
The sporting thing to do is to give the batsman a chance to score but to defeat him using skill. There is no skill in bowling and underarm ball, the batsmen is not being defeated by skill.
That said, never did I imagine that cricket would interest the HN audience.
I think it is the violation of centuries old conventions and gentlemen’s agreements that maybe should have been, in hindsight, codified, that has our attention piqued
The issue is countless teams had opportunities to do this in the past - they all knew it was an option - but they chose not to. Then suddenly one team decided “well there’s no rule…” even though it was clearly established that everyone agreed not to do it. It’s not like they discovered something new, they just broke convention with no warning at a very consequential time after many teams undoubtedly could’ve done the same to them. It’s dirty.
We all saw this on the school yard as a kid and none of us appreciated it. It’s annoying to have to enshrine literally every situation into the rules. Just play the game as intended. This is part of what has made American football become less fun to watch (besides learning about CTE’s…). Soooo many rules, constantly stopping play to assess every little mm of the play. It’s boring as hell for all involved. It’s why you often hear “just let them play!”
I actually suspect they didn’t know. When a sport is played one way for 200 years, you don’t read the rule book to check, you just copy what everyone is doing!
I disagree: players rarely know the rules in-depth. A great example is a YouTube video I watched where a Premier League and World Cup referee told the camera that most players didn’t know where they needed to be placed for kick off and that they needed to kick the ball forward. It was so bad that IFAB changed the rules to allow kick off to backpass because it was causing so much conflict at the start of football matches!
Cricket is a game that was designed for toffs to show off their free time, to each other and the plebs (including those making the G&Ts and cucumber sandwiches for the players and spectators) who couldn't take five days out of their lives for a match.
> Like golf
That too.
There is a reason why most other sports income 60/90/ish minute matches: people closer to normal had to squeeze their sports into what little free time they actually had, usually not much more than part of Sunday afternoons or maybe a bit of time some evenings.
> there are expectations of behavior.
While social contracts can be a good thing in terms of helping varied people people get along, cricket and golf are as important in that respect as knowing which of the four forks & three spoons on the table to use next. Etiquette in those forms is just artificial rules by which you show off how "civilised" you think you are, not sportsmanship or other genuine civility.
The problem here is that limited overs cricket has been modified from regular test cricket in a way that fundamentally alters the strategy and flow of the game to increase the action and decrease how long it takes to play.
Because of those concessions to speed and entertainment, some rules that worked ok in test cricket break the game in limited overs. In this case, NZ was down to their “final over”, a concept that doesn’t exist in test cricket. Underarm bowling basically removes overs from the game and can guarantee a win for the bowlers, but in test cricket, would lead to a draw.
I know they're different, but in baseball the pitch is part of the game. Not being able to make good use of a pitch is a problem for the hitter, not the pitcher.
Now that I think of it telling a baseball pitcher that he could throw a pitch, but not too difficult of one at certain times is hilarious.
Are you allowed to pitch the baseball along the ground, therefore making it impossible to properly hit with the bat? It's no different in cricket really.
There's definitely an argument for just exploiting edge cases in the rules as hard as you can, seeing how the game evolves from there, and relying on the governing body to fix it if needed. (A la https://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub .) Cricket saw itself unironically as "the gentlemen's game", though, so this didn't really fit the culture.
> There's definitely an argument for just exploiting edge cases in the rules as hard as you can, seeing how the game evolves from there, and relying on the governing body to fix it if needed.
Sadly, a lot of people live their entire lives this way. Ignoring courtesy, norms, ethics, grace, walking right up to the very edge of the law and then smugly declaring “ha ha there is no rule saying I can’t do this!!” Like the annoying little brother who waves his hand a millimeter from your face saying “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!”
The fact that everything has to be written down or some people will exploit and take advantage is a human failing, not a feature.
I'm reading a book at the moment (https://academic.oup.com/book/32137) in which the author makes a point of the distinction between "the goals of a game and our purpose in playing a game". My purpose in playing games is never winning for winning's sake, let alone winning at the cost of violating basic decency. But sometimes the purpose is best served by pursuing the goals quite single-mindedly. Competition can be fun, and some games become much more interesting when both players are really trying to win, even when this means using 'cheap' moves, learning to counter the cheap moves, etc. There's no reason this approach has to carry over into the rest of our lives; we can 'play to win' in the appropriate arenas while caring deeply about courtesy and ethics.
There’s definitely a time and place for both. Even in sport, “playing to win” can defeat the point when you’re doing it for fun. During swim training, if our coach wants to setup a relay race, he’ll deliberately mix swim ability (even changing teams between rounds) so that there’s a competitive element. Not much of a race if lane 1 is in the same team and beats everyone by 30 seconds!
Yeah I totally agree. Perhaps pedantically, though, I'd say this isn't a counterexample to 'playing to win':
> During swim training, if our coach wants to setup a relay race, he’ll deliberately mix swim ability (even changing teams between rounds) so that there’s a competitive element. Not much of a race if lane 1 is in the same team and beats everyone by 30 seconds!
I think this is actually a good example of setting up the game appropriately (in this case the teams as well as the rules) and then playing to win within those constraints. The end result is more fun and better training than you would get by departing from the 'playing to win' philosophy by, for example, having a tacit agreement that the faster swimmers will take it easy so as not to embarrass the others.
I understand this attitude, but I think the line between tactical progress and (the bad kind of) exploiting the rules can get very fuzzy. It's arguably more interesting to do whatever the game allows, even if it seems cheap, and find out the hard way whether there are ways to counter it. Sometimes there aren't, or the counter-tactics just leave you with a more boring game (usually fixable with rule changes). But sometimes you can uncover hidden depths this way, and the opposite approach can leave a game very tactically stagnant.
(I'm of course not suggesting this was the Chappells' direct motive, or even that this incident realistically could have uncovered hidden depths in the game of cricket. But as a general philosophy I think 'playing to win' has some merit, even from a perspective that ultimately cares about the health of the game and not just about winning as a terminal goal.)
In context, it was a bit like taking advantage of a videogame exploit that others variously hadn't discovered, thought was forbidden, or assumed would not be used by tacit agreement.
Cricket is my analogy for life: a lot of standing around, interspersed by bouts of running back & forth often with people shouting at you, and a scoring system that seems almost as deliberately obtuse as Mornington Crescent (the true gentleman's game!).
Not to take anything away from Maridona's overall excellence, but his goal was 100% illegal, just none of the referees saw his handball.
Underarm bowling was still allowed when this incident occurred and was therefore legal, just considered very unsportsmanlike and outside the spirit of the game.
I think that's too strong. The underarm ball was a case of playing within the rules, but against most people's notion of fair play. The hand of god would fit most people's definition of actual cheating.
I think I agree, but I hedged because I thought one could argue that it's not 'cheating' in the same way as, say, sneaking into the scorer's shed and writing in an extra goal would be. A deliberate handball is 'just' an in-game action that should have been penalised but wasn't (due to referee error), and deliberately breaking the rules isn't always considered cheating. For example, basketball and soccer both have their own version of the 'professional foul', and even in soccer where this earns the player a card, it seems to be considered an accepted tactical trade rather than cheating. I don't think this argument really holds up, though, because the hand of god goal depended entirely on getting away with the rule breach, whereas professional fouls involve getting caught and accepting the consequences.
The football (soccer) equivalent is someone kicking the ball out of play so that the game is stopped to allow medical attention to come on, and once the medical attention is over, the opposition taking the throw in doesn't throw the ball back to the other team. Occasionally teams have not done this, and scored a goal, shocked by this the goalkeeper will stand aside to allow the opposition to score an equaliser
To those not familiar with cricket and why this is so scandalous the English/Australian/New Zealand phrase “it’s not cricket” is used to describe an action or behaviour that is “unfair, dishonest, or goes against basic moral principles”
> Bruce Edgar, who was on 102 not out, was stuck at the non-striker's end the entire over.
Now Americans can finally know how Europeans feel when watching baseball
It’s surprisingly simple, actually.
A cricket pitch is a long strip. Bowler bowls from one end, batter strikes the bowl from the other. Scoring is done by running from one end of that strip to the other (the unit of scoring is literally called a run). Six legal bowls make an over.
There are two batters in play at each point in time, one at each end of the pitch, and they both must run towards the other end of the pitch (therefore swapping places) to score.
Bruce Edgar had scored 102 runs, was not out (in the same sense as baseball — meaning he was still in play), but, because they either didn’t manage to score any runs, or scored twos, he spent the whole over on the non-striking side of the pitch.
It’s surprisingly simple, actually.
Basically, there's three grabbers, three taggers, five twig runners, and a player at Whackbat. Center tagger lights a pine cone and chucks it over the basket and the whack-batter tries to hit the cedar stick off the cross rock. Then the twig runners dash back and forth until the pine cone burns out and the umpire calls hotbox. Finally, you count up however many score-downs it adds up to and divide that by nine.
It's surprisingly simple, actually.
The bariet takes a pull at the fumbler, and then one of two things happens: Either he misses, or hits it (towards the flange or along the foul line to the base). There are three spichies who can try to deflect the fumbler, either towards the simulcum or out to the field.
The simulcum is the more audacious play, giving an instant spiel if they succeed in darving the bariet. But it runs a serious risk of a spurn, so unless a spichie is particularly strong, the field is the safer play.
Explaining Cricket to a Baseball fan only makes it worse.
I have tried it many times and failed.
Personally, playing a few games of cricket is the best way to learn the rules of the game.
As an example, in your explanation ( which is good to this lifelong cricket fan from India) your first sentence starts "A cricket pitch..." And when a baseball fan reads it he is probably asking "What is a cricket pitch?"
So the batter runs towards the bowler? 102 runs? Can a run score more than one? What was the down by 6 thing? It's not really that simple?
Down by six is literally that — they were six runs (points) behind. Six is a "magic" number, because that's what you score for knocking the ball out of the park (so the cricket equivalent to hitting a home run).
Yup, batter runs towards the bowler (and the "inactive" batter runs the opposite direction).
In baseball terms, a cricket run is more or less equivalent to running a single base (the bowler is 22 yards away from the batter, which is more than the distance from the pitcher's mound to the home plate, but less than the distance from home to first base). Just like you can run multiple bases in baseball, you can do multiple runs in cricket. From a scoring point of view, you're effectively scoring how many bases you ran, so a baseball run is roughly equivalent to four cricket runs.
Scoring 100+ runs is called "a century", and it's pretty impressive, but, because you keep batting until the bowling team sends you out, you can just keep scoring all day long if you have the endurance for it. Baseball doesn't have a mechanism for a single batter to hit multiple back-to-back home runs.
There's a rope around the field, if the ball goes over it without hitting the ground (like a home run) it counts for 6. If if it did hit the ground it counts for 4.
They can run more than one (get to the other side, turn around, run back, etc) but the chance of the wicket you're running to being hit with the ball (so you're out) becomes larger so they usually manage 1, sometimes 2 or even 3. And both batters have to run the same amount.
If the number of runs is even, they end up on the same side as they started from.
> There's a rope around the field, if the ball goes over it without hitting the ground (like a home run) it counts for 6.
On the larger grounds, it tends to be a decently-sized foam triangular prism (covered in advertising, obvs.) rather than a plain rope which leads to "if it hits the triangle" rather than "goes over the rope" (I believe "hits the rope" also counts but is much harder to judge for obvious scale reasons.)
Also, IIRC, the ball can go over the boundary without hitting the ground but a fielder can knock it back inside for a catch to be performed to get the player out[0].
Sorry, I'm just making this more complicated for the baseballers, aren't I?
[0] If they comply with the changes around that last year - https://www.cricinfo.com/story/mcc-changes-rule-to-make-boun...
As an American it has taken me nearly half a century of occasionally watching cricket to barely comprehend what that sentence means. I love it.
As a European, what the hell is going on.
I was reminded of this hilarious skit about English sports. https://youtu.be/E_6d3JBBo4s
I like this explanation of cricket for Americans: https://www.dangermouse.net/cricket/baseball.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_6d3JBBo4s
Classic display of hoop-shorting and running wide and low, all while ignoring the reds on the board
The chums are going to rib him rotten over the cucumber sandwiches and tea in the wains room at half-over time
This article was like reading Harry Potter.
> Americans
Everyone not from one Uk, India... maybe Australia you mean?
Not even the whole of the UK - really only England and Wales (as a singular entity, rather than individually).
The rest of us know it only for its impenetrable jargon ("They've risked a woggle on the silly midden!"), the grating public school chumminess of the commentators, and a rumour about a puerile "joke" which may or may not have been told on the radio coverage in the early 1980s.
Honestly, it's a sport I suspect I ought to like - full of stats and strategy - but it really does seem impossible to follow unless you've been inculcated since birth.
> The rest of us know it only for its impenetrable jargon ("They've risked a woggle on the silly midden!")
You’re thinking of the fielding position “silly point,” so named because the chances of getting knocked out by the ball to the face are so high you’d be silly to stand there.
By “midden” you might be thinking of “maiden,” which is a bowler competing a “maiden over” by completing their 6 balls without conceding a run. An over is just a block of play consisting of 6 balls before switching bowlers.
It’s not as impenetrable as it first sounds, it just needs a bit of time to watch. Most sports have some jargon (offside anyone?)
> Not even the whole of the UK - really only England and Wales
"Only" England & Wales ... which is ~90% of the UK population. It's a fair generalisation in a casual context like this.
We get it, cricket isn't wildly popular in Northern Ireland (nor Scotland). Why chastise the parent for suggesting it is?
But come on - don't shoehorn an indirect political point into a casual conversation.
And as if cricket was unique in having jargon? Hurling doesn't have jargon? Gaelic football? Football? Of course they do.
...South Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, West Indies...
X, who was Y, was stuck at Z the entire W.
(Bruce Edgar), who was (on (102 not out)), was stuck at (the (non-striker's end)) the entire (over).
• An “over” consists of six opportunities to hit the ball and score “runs”. (A “run” is the basic unit of scoring.)
• "102 not out" indicates how many runs the player had personally contributed to the team's score. The number is large enough to suggest that this was the player who was playing particularly well in that match.
So the sentence is saying that the player who could be expected to make good use of whichever of those six opportunities he got, did not get any of them.
I think as with most cases of unfamiliar jargon, the sentence can be confusing not because of unusual words but because of everyday words being used with technical meanings ("not out", "end", "over").
https://restoringhopebhm.com/blog/wilt-chamberlain-and-the-g...
By contrast, underhand free throw shooting is legal in the NBA and it is very effective. But it is seen as unmasculine rather than cheating. Players would apparently rather lose than be seen doing it.
To someone who is coming in cold, this kinda feels like people saying it’s unsportsmanlike to kneel at the end of a gridiron game, or pass the ball around the backfield in stoppage time at a soccer game?
Taking a knee to lock in an American football victory used to be considered unsportsmanlike, but then the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_at_the_Meadowlands happened, where the Giants were up 17-12 with 30 seconds left and played normally. They fumbled the ball, the Eagles recovered it and scored a touchdown, the Giants' offensive coordinator was summarily fired and never worked in the NFL again, and ever since, dropping to your knee when it ensures your win is standard, accepted, and even sometimes called the Victory Formation.
There is still the remote possibility of a fumble or tackling the ball away from the defence in those cases. In the underarm bowling incident it was made physically impossible to win. In baseball terms, he had to hit a home run with the ball on the ground.
(Though as a non-American, I am indeed mystified why the kneel is legal and not regarded as delay of game!)
Essentially the player with the ball is going down on their own, ending the down, same as if they had ran with the ball and been tackled.
They’re considered down when their knee touches the ground while in possession of the ball (“possession” having a specific meaning, with regard to the rules). Again, this is the same as if they had been tackled. The only difference is no one forced them to the ground.
Taking a knee is not something that would normally be considered a good thing since you lose yards and a down.
As for why it’s not a delay of game, that’s likely because it does not delay the game any more than any normal play would. It probably runs down less time on the clock than if they played normally, but of course playing normally is riskier which why they take a knee. The idea is to simply run down the clock as much as possible without risking a turnover and then leaving the other team with too little time to score.
If the rules could be changed to disincentivize taking a knee I think that would be more interesting, but I’m not sure how you do that. It’s also safer in an already dangerous sport.
In other games simply taking an action that intentionally runs down the clock is delaying the game. It’s a ref’s call, and could be done here too.
I am a casual American football viewer but my understanding is that the kneel ends the current play but keeps the clock running. Each team has something like 40s to setup their formation and snap the ball after the previous play has ended. If the game clock is still running (this is concurrent to their 40s of "setup time"), the team that is in possession of the ball can just use the full setup time (idk the formal term for this) to just run out the game clock.
Each team has 4 attempts to move the ball forward 10 yards, where if the ball moves >= 10 yards they get a fresh set of 4 attempts. These are called "downs".
If the team has any downs left when they kneel then they can maintain possession of the ball and can thus run out the clock. Most (all?) of the time the teams end the game even if there is time left on the clock.
Note that either team can call a timeout pre-snap which freezes the game clock. Certain plays also result in the game clock freezing between plays. There is also a 2-minute warning at the end of the 2nd/4th quarter that also freezes the game clock.
IMO clock management adds a very interesting strategic layer to NFL football.
> (idk the formal term for this)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_clock
There's also a full article about the kneel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarterback_kneel
In baseball it is possible to hit a home run without the ball leaving the playing field. It's happened several times in the past 2 months.
Or intentionally walking a batter so you so t have to pitch to them in baseball
Plenty of sports do have rules to prevent stalling tactics (either for sportsmanlike reasons or to make the viewing experience more engaging): the two-minute warning in American football, the shot clock in basketball, icing rules in hockey, etc.
Yeah.
Passing the ball around the backfield is a risky tactic in association football (which similarly banned the goalkeeper just picking up backpasses because it was too easy to waste time). 'Taking the ball to the corner' is a much lower risk option, but it is possible to win the ball back and quickly go up the other end and score with good play. Deliberate time wasting between plays is a yellow card offence (even though the referee could simply add the time on, it's disliked)
Plus cricket nominally has more of a sportmanship culture than most sports. "Mankading" (the practice of a bowler deciding to strike the wicket near to him instead of bowling because the runner from the other end has strayed too far[1]) is technically legal and would be considered smart play in many sports - especially since it's an action performed to stop opponents gaining a small advantage over you - but is regarded as shameful in cricket, at least not unless you've been gentlemanly enough to warn the runner at your end to stop straying forward each time the ball is bowled. Indeed it's so controversial Wikipedia maintains a 'list of incidents' page, starting with poor Vinoo Mankad who probably thought he was just being smart and didn't realise his surname would become synonymous with cheating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mankading_incidents_in...
[1]baseball fans: roughly the equivalent of a pitcher deciding in mid-pitch to throw the ball to a base to stop someone stealing bases, except the base in question is right next to him.
Not to mention that there's a bunch of new anti-timewasting edicts that have come in for the World Cup and will eventually filter down to the various regional associations for implementation. Going to be interesting seeing how PGMOL use that to pick their winner for the 2026/27 EPL season...
This ties in with something else on HN recently - the end of long wave radio in the UK.
Test Match Special was broadcast on the BBC's long wave frequency and for many people in Britain it was a quintessential summer listening experience: all day for up to 5 days per test match.
Such long time stretches of continuous broadcasting meant that the commentators were adept at talking, stories, banter and general chatter, occasional bollocks.
For me the Test Match Special broadcasts became like a pleasant ambient background noise to long summer days, with occasional excitement and humor - like the time Brian Johnston and Jonathan Agnew fell into uncontrollable laughter at a double entendre, a priceless piece of cricket history: https://youtu.be/KsVTpX7LdZQ
Incomprehensible! “Didn’t quite get his leg over” - that’s the joke? Found a Guardian article and even they do not explain the joke [1]. Further ethnological research [2] explains it all - “to get a leg over” is intercourse.
The story about the test match broadcast is really nice. Just goes to show how deep cultures can be locally ingrained. One could learn perfect English and never get to the point of getting this joke, without serious integration efforts. In this case, worthwhile efforts.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/aug/20/sport.andrewculf
[2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/get-leg-...
There are probably people that speak English perfectly well who don't get "the bowler's Holding, the batsman's Willey" either...
A more serious case of unsportsmanlike conduct that was (and still is) within the Laws of Cricket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodyline
No it is not still within the laws of cricket since the late 1930s.
You might notice the law changes section in that article, that amongst other things you can't have loads of fielders behind square on leg side now.
I would also suggest it is not considered unsportsmanlike to bowl short and aim for the head any more, but rather something people look foster's forward to seeing.
I was about to post the same thing when I noticed this comment.
For those who might not want to go through the article:
> ...designed to combat the extraordinary batting skill of Australia's leading batsman, Don Bradman... aimed at the body of the batsman in the expectation that when he defended himself with his bat, a resulting deflection could be caught by one of several fielders deliberately placed nearby on the leg side. At the time, no helmets or other upper-body protective gear was worn, and critics of the tactic considered it intimidating, and physically threatening in a game traditionally supposed to uphold conventions of sportsmanship.
Cricket will never make sense to me. That just seems like playing the game.
It's a gentleman's game. Like in golf, there are expectations of behavior.
They didn't think they needed a rule.
This was what made me certain they were wrong--the commentary of their own older brother, who's hugely respected:
> As the ball was being bowled, Ian Chappell (elder brother of Greg and Trevor, and a former Australian captain), who was commentating on the match, was heard to call out "No, Greg, no, you can't do that"[10] in an instinctive reaction to the incident, and he remained critical in a later newspaper article on the incident.[11]
I suppose my fundamental misunderstanding is that an underarm bowl just seems like the obvious defensive move, not unsportsmanlike.
I said this in another comment and it seems relevant: "I know they're different, but in baseball the pitch is part of the game. Not being able to make good use of a pitch is a problem for the hitter, not the pitcher."
I think my baseballed mind simply cannot warp itself to your gentlemanly ways lol
Imagine the strike zone was just convention and pitchers were technically allowed to roll the ball if they were more bothered about preventing home runs than getting the opponent out. Think your baseball mind would be annoyed when someone did it, and the lawmakers would have to step in pretty quick to stop it being a regular thing...
(Think there's also a general prejudice against underarm play in professional sport as it's for kids who can't throw properly and feels like mockery. Underarm serves in tennis are frowned upon, even though an alert opponent has plenty of chance of scoring a point from them)
Watch softball sometime.
I don't think there's a rule against rolling the ball to a batter; it would be called a ball. It would be similar to a wild pitch or an intentional walk (when you had to actually throw the 4 balls).
I'm beginning to feel like Americans trying to understand cricket trying to understand the tactical permutations of intentional walks :D
The equivalent would be bowling a ball rather than a strike in a baseball variant where each innings ended after a fixed number of balls regardless of the number of outs (which is effectively what One Day variants of cricket are). Specifically, walking the batsman when they needed to score a home run or at least a double. I think fans would get upset!
I mean this does exist in baseball, kinda, but there’s incentive to not do so since it gets the opposing team closer to scoring: https://www.mlb.com/glossary/standard-stats/intentional-walk
This wasn’t only underarm, but also rolling the ball over the ground.
Imagine that, in baseball, rolling the ball over the plate were considered a strike. If so, wouldn’t pitchers go for it if, at some time, all they need to do is prevent an home run (yes, I know that doesn’t happen in baseball) and wouldn’t it, subsequently, be banned?
It’s because overhand bowling was just the way you bowled, so nobody considered making a rule to tell you that was necessary until someone didn’t. Imagine playing football and someone picks up the ball and- oh right ;-)
An under-armed ball is essentially un-hitable.
The sporting thing to do is to give the batsman a chance to score but to defeat him using skill. There is no skill in bowling and underarm ball, the batsmen is not being defeated by skill.
That said, never did I imagine that cricket would interest the HN audience.
I think it is the violation of centuries old conventions and gentlemen’s agreements that maybe should have been, in hindsight, codified, that has our attention piqued
The issue is countless teams had opportunities to do this in the past - they all knew it was an option - but they chose not to. Then suddenly one team decided “well there’s no rule…” even though it was clearly established that everyone agreed not to do it. It’s not like they discovered something new, they just broke convention with no warning at a very consequential time after many teams undoubtedly could’ve done the same to them. It’s dirty.
We all saw this on the school yard as a kid and none of us appreciated it. It’s annoying to have to enshrine literally every situation into the rules. Just play the game as intended. This is part of what has made American football become less fun to watch (besides learning about CTE’s…). Soooo many rules, constantly stopping play to assess every little mm of the play. It’s boring as hell for all involved. It’s why you often hear “just let them play!”
I actually suspect they didn’t know. When a sport is played one way for 200 years, you don’t read the rule book to check, you just copy what everyone is doing!
On the local elementary school field, sure.
At the highest levels of the sport, they know the rulebook like the back of their hand.
I disagree: players rarely know the rules in-depth. A great example is a YouTube video I watched where a Premier League and World Cup referee told the camera that most players didn’t know where they needed to be placed for kick off and that they needed to kick the ball forward. It was so bad that IFAB changed the rules to allow kick off to backpass because it was causing so much conflict at the start of football matches!
> It's a gentleman's game.
Cricket is a game that was designed for toffs to show off their free time, to each other and the plebs (including those making the G&Ts and cucumber sandwiches for the players and spectators) who couldn't take five days out of their lives for a match.
> Like golf
That too.
There is a reason why most other sports income 60/90/ish minute matches: people closer to normal had to squeeze their sports into what little free time they actually had, usually not much more than part of Sunday afternoons or maybe a bit of time some evenings.
> there are expectations of behavior.
While social contracts can be a good thing in terms of helping varied people people get along, cricket and golf are as important in that respect as knowing which of the four forks & three spoons on the table to use next. Etiquette in those forms is just artificial rules by which you show off how "civilised" you think you are, not sportsmanship or other genuine civility.
The problem here is that limited overs cricket has been modified from regular test cricket in a way that fundamentally alters the strategy and flow of the game to increase the action and decrease how long it takes to play.
Because of those concessions to speed and entertainment, some rules that worked ok in test cricket break the game in limited overs. In this case, NZ was down to their “final over”, a concept that doesn’t exist in test cricket. Underarm bowling basically removes overs from the game and can guarantee a win for the bowlers, but in test cricket, would lead to a draw.
It's pretty much completely not like playing the game, because the batting team can't meaningfully hit the ball.
I know they're different, but in baseball the pitch is part of the game. Not being able to make good use of a pitch is a problem for the hitter, not the pitcher.
Now that I think of it telling a baseball pitcher that he could throw a pitch, but not too difficult of one at certain times is hilarious.
Are you allowed to pitch the baseball along the ground, therefore making it impossible to properly hit with the bat? It's no different in cricket really.
No. That would be a foul. It's in the book though lol.
Yeah, that was the flaw at the time, it wasn't in the book and not thought to be needed in the book.
There's definitely an argument for just exploiting edge cases in the rules as hard as you can, seeing how the game evolves from there, and relying on the governing body to fix it if needed. (A la https://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub .) Cricket saw itself unironically as "the gentlemen's game", though, so this didn't really fit the culture.
> There's definitely an argument for just exploiting edge cases in the rules as hard as you can, seeing how the game evolves from there, and relying on the governing body to fix it if needed.
Sadly, a lot of people live their entire lives this way. Ignoring courtesy, norms, ethics, grace, walking right up to the very edge of the law and then smugly declaring “ha ha there is no rule saying I can’t do this!!” Like the annoying little brother who waves his hand a millimeter from your face saying “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!”
The fact that everything has to be written down or some people will exploit and take advantage is a human failing, not a feature.
I'm reading a book at the moment (https://academic.oup.com/book/32137) in which the author makes a point of the distinction between "the goals of a game and our purpose in playing a game". My purpose in playing games is never winning for winning's sake, let alone winning at the cost of violating basic decency. But sometimes the purpose is best served by pursuing the goals quite single-mindedly. Competition can be fun, and some games become much more interesting when both players are really trying to win, even when this means using 'cheap' moves, learning to counter the cheap moves, etc. There's no reason this approach has to carry over into the rest of our lives; we can 'play to win' in the appropriate arenas while caring deeply about courtesy and ethics.
There’s definitely a time and place for both. Even in sport, “playing to win” can defeat the point when you’re doing it for fun. During swim training, if our coach wants to setup a relay race, he’ll deliberately mix swim ability (even changing teams between rounds) so that there’s a competitive element. Not much of a race if lane 1 is in the same team and beats everyone by 30 seconds!
Yeah I totally agree. Perhaps pedantically, though, I'd say this isn't a counterexample to 'playing to win':
> During swim training, if our coach wants to setup a relay race, he’ll deliberately mix swim ability (even changing teams between rounds) so that there’s a competitive element. Not much of a race if lane 1 is in the same team and beats everyone by 30 seconds!
I think this is actually a good example of setting up the game appropriately (in this case the teams as well as the rules) and then playing to win within those constraints. The end result is more fun and better training than you would get by departing from the 'playing to win' philosophy by, for example, having a tacit agreement that the faster swimmers will take it easy so as not to embarrass the others.
This seems to describe automobile racing.
Really, any game that you're exploiting the rules, you should expect your opponents to get mad, and possibly your teammates and fans as well.
I understand this attitude, but I think the line between tactical progress and (the bad kind of) exploiting the rules can get very fuzzy. It's arguably more interesting to do whatever the game allows, even if it seems cheap, and find out the hard way whether there are ways to counter it. Sometimes there aren't, or the counter-tactics just leave you with a more boring game (usually fixable with rule changes). But sometimes you can uncover hidden depths this way, and the opposite approach can leave a game very tactically stagnant.
(I'm of course not suggesting this was the Chappells' direct motive, or even that this incident realistically could have uncovered hidden depths in the game of cricket. But as a general philosophy I think 'playing to win' has some merit, even from a perspective that ultimately cares about the health of the game and not just about winning as a terminal goal.)
Sure, but baseball has things like walking a batter so they can't hit. Not totally analogous here, but every sport has things like this.
In context, it was a bit like taking advantage of a videogame exploit that others variously hadn't discovered, thought was forbidden, or assumed would not be used by tacit agreement.
No, everyone had discovered it.
This is like taking oddjob in the final match.
Underarm bowling was nothing new, but I reckon some had never even thought about literally just rolling the thing.
> Cricket will never make sense to me
Cricket is my analogy for life: a lot of standing around, interspersed by bouts of running back & forth often with people shouting at you, and a scoring system that seems almost as deliberately obtuse as Mornington Crescent (the true gentleman's game!).
As an Australian, I feel like the Kiwis will always be able to hold this against us. A great shame
As an aside, underarm bowling is the original style im cricket.
The overarm standard has (claimed) origins around 1800 in a lady cricketer raising her arm when bowling to avoid her skirt getting in the way.
In baseball, intentionally walking a batter to avoid a hit is considered "fair".
This incident was an intentional pitch (bowl) to a avoid a "home run" and in cricket it is sacrilege.
don't know anything about cricket, know only about the beginnings of the writings by learned scholar Douglas Adams
I have no idea why this article is here on HN but this was so hugely controversial in cricket
(as an Aussie, sorry)
The "hand of god" of Cricket?
Not to take anything away from Maridona's overall excellence, but his goal was 100% illegal, just none of the referees saw his handball.
Underarm bowling was still allowed when this incident occurred and was therefore legal, just considered very unsportsmanlike and outside the spirit of the game.
I think that's too strong. The underarm ball was a case of playing within the rules, but against most people's notion of fair play. The hand of god would fit most people's definition of actual cheating.
It was actual cheating by even the rules of the game, just the referee didn’t see it.
I think I agree, but I hedged because I thought one could argue that it's not 'cheating' in the same way as, say, sneaking into the scorer's shed and writing in an extra goal would be. A deliberate handball is 'just' an in-game action that should have been penalised but wasn't (due to referee error), and deliberately breaking the rules isn't always considered cheating. For example, basketball and soccer both have their own version of the 'professional foul', and even in soccer where this earns the player a card, it seems to be considered an accepted tactical trade rather than cheating. I don't think this argument really holds up, though, because the hand of god goal depended entirely on getting away with the rule breach, whereas professional fouls involve getting caught and accepting the consequences.
This was pretty bad. Will never be forgotten in NZ.
Has probably been forgotten by Australia and everywhere else though.
reminds me of the episode in HIMYM with the Minnesota sports bar
Dammit!
This article may as well be written in greek for how much of it I understand
The football (soccer) equivalent is someone kicking the ball out of play so that the game is stopped to allow medical attention to come on, and once the medical attention is over, the opposition taking the throw in doesn't throw the ball back to the other team. Occasionally teams have not done this, and scored a goal, shocked by this the goalkeeper will stand aside to allow the opposition to score an equaliser
The Aussies were simply adhering to the TLC-Sirlin credo.
To those not familiar with cricket and why this is so scandalous the English/Australian/New Zealand phrase “it’s not cricket” is used to describe an action or behaviour that is “unfair, dishonest, or goes against basic moral principles”