As an Australian, I feel like the Kiwis will always be able to hold this against us. A great shame
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Underarm bowling incident of 1981
121–130 of 169 posts
Re: Underarm bowling incident of 1981
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, cricket is pretty analogous to baseball. Instead of 9 innings there's one inning, at least in ODI or T20 formats (best to watch anyway). Instead of 3 outs there's 10 outs (called wickets). An out is having a ball caught after you hit it (same as baseball) or the ball hitting the wickets when at bat (kind of like strikeout) or a fielder knocking the wicket off with the ball before you reach the line, which is bas…
> Instead of 3 outs there's 10 outs (called wickets). > An out is having a ball caught after you hit it (same as baseball) or the ball hitting the wickets when at bat (kind of like strikeout) I thought a wicket is what you call an out? Now it’s something else, too? (This kind of thing is why being a baseball fan having cricket explained at you by a Brit feels exactly the same as listening to people play mornington cr…
The wickets are the physical sticks behind the batter. Someone is out when you "take their wicket". But yes, the player is then out of that inning.
The jargon is annoying but it's a lot like baseball.
Re: Underarm bowling incident of 1981
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Instead of 3 outs there's 10 outs (called wickets). > An out is having a ball caught after you hit it (same as baseball) or the ball hitting the wickets when at bat (kind of like strikeout) I thought a wicket is what you call an out? Now it’s something else, too? (This kind of thing is why being a baseball fan having cricket explained at you by a Brit feels exactly the same as listening to people play mornington cr…
Yes. Actually "wicket" is used for 3 different things. Behind the batter, between the batter and the catcher are 3 vertical sticks. This is called the wicket. The batter is protecting those sticks, the bowler is trying to hit them. If the bowler succeeds he has "got a wicket" and the batter has "lost his wicket." These 2 terms are used though regardless of the actual manner of the out. To make things more confusing,…
So you bowl the ball against the wicket so the batter can try to hit your bowl? And then if the ball you bowled hit another thing that is also a wicket, you got a wicket?
Not confusing at all. :-)
Re: Underarm bowling incident of 1981
#124> 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
I (an American) once arrived in a hotel room in Finland, sleep deprived after a long couple flights, flipped on the TV and saw a game of Pesäpallo. Made me wonder what I was seeing and what might have caused me to hallucinate..
Re: Underarm bowling incident of 1981
#125> 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
This article was like reading Harry Potter.
I kept thinking of the sketch in which contestants in a quiz contest attempt to summarize Proust. IYKYK.
Re: Underarm bowling incident of 1981
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not inherently unhitable. Overarm bowling is a relatively recent development in the history of the sport (rather like overarm serves in tennis). But of course, in this case, the ball was simply rolled along the ground rather than being bowled on the usual understanding of the term.
I did play some cricket as a child, and couldn't stand it... But I do remember that we started by underarm bowling. I've no idea whether this is a standard way of teaching it. I did learn overarm bowling. My one moment of joy in cricket was managing to bowl out some boy who was bullying me who was batting at the time. He kept protesting it.
I remember most of it involving standing around waiting for a solid ball to fly through the air at you.
Re: Underarm bowling incident of 1981
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 gentleman…
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.
> That said, never did I imagine that cricket would interest the HN audience.
It is of little interest to me. I live in Scotland where it is played but barely played. I have played it as a child and detested it. I also remember games on TV going on for days on end and running late so that other programmes got cancelled.
Not one of England's greater contributions to the sporting world.
Re: Underarm bowling incident of 1981
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pit…
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…
Got it.
Re: Underarm bowling incident of 1981
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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!).
> a scoring system that seems almost as deliberately obtuse I don't even watch cricket, but even I find the scoring to be as simple as every other sport - 1 pt for each run a player does (batters two at a time). When the score says "102 runs", that's exactly what it means.
OK, so it isn't nearly as bad as I jokingly made out there (for a start I do understand the scoring for MC, though I don't have the inclination right now to explain it satisfactorily) but when are cricket scores ever a pair of simple run counts?
Some current scores picked arbitrarily by a quick Google search:
Test 3 of 3, end of day three:
NZ 438 & 120/3
Eng 354
Test 1 of 2, end of day three:
Sri Lanka 308 & 51/1
West Indies 626/9d
Central Europe Cup (T20 4 of 6)
Serbia 162/7 (20)
Luxembourg 163/2 (13.1)
Re: Underarm bowling incident of 1981
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, cricket is pretty analogous to baseball. Instead of 9 innings there's one inning, at least in ODI or T20 formats (best to watch anyway). Instead of 3 outs there's 10 outs (called wickets). An out is having a ball caught after you hit it (same as baseball) or the ball hitting the wickets when at bat (kind of like strikeout) or a fielder knocking the wicket off with the ball before you reach the line, which is bas…
> Instead of 3 outs there's 10 outs (called wickets). > An out is having a ball caught after you hit it (same as baseball) or the ball hitting the wickets when at bat (kind of like strikeout) I thought a wicket is what you call an out? Now it’s something else, too? (This kind of thing is why being a baseball fan having cricket explained at you by a Brit feels exactly the same as listening to people play mornington cr…
> I thought a wicket is what you call an out? Now it’s something else, too?
It's a metonym.
The actual wicket is the wooden things the bowler is trying to hit. Because hitting the wicket eliminates the batter, the word is also used colloquially to refer to an out.