The rules of the game
Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 10:02PM Cricket, the wonderful game with which I have a love hate relationship, is gaining popularity even in China, according to the news buzz!
In truth, I have always loved the game. It is the players, the umpires (referees), the coaches, the cricket control organizations, sports media, gamblers, bookies etc. that I really hate.
A nice game turned into a mockery, sometimes even a soap opera!
When my brother was here visiting, we were watching CSI. He commented that, there was less crime and more cleavage, and it was something else other than the scene that was being investgated and my response was :
prime time shows : soap opera in stage
Star trek : soap opera in space
CSI : soap opera in lab
24 : soap opera in counter terrorism office
Law and order : soap opera in DA office
20/20 : soap opera in cricket field
If you noticed the previous post, you would have noticed that both Jr. and the little one are now courting plastic cricket bats, thanks to their australian cousin's refusal to share his bat, while the men and kids were waiting in the verandah, after being kicked out of the house during a "ladies only" ceremony before the BIL's wedding!
All these kids are growing outside India, but the aussie dude has an unfair advantage in that he is growing up in a land where Cricket is played! He even knew who Sachin was, and Jr. ignored his critical knowledge and insulted his intelligence by holding the cricket bat with one hand, baseball style, and generally swooshing the bat in arbitrary directions and coming up with a higher success rate at connecting the ball with bat.
Sachin in pink and Dhoni in yellow set me back fifty rupees on Station road in West Mambalam and the weird game of cricket played by three kids with three bats and three balls along a single pitch, started. We even had great grandpa (from San's side) keep wickets, for fear that the ball might end up in the open toilet!
This game as usual, brought back a rush of memories. The rules of cricket are simple and can be explained to non cricket playing folk in California terms as follows:
1: Dude hurls ball at another dude who has a bat
2: Bat dude hits ball
3: fielders converge on ball
4: Bat dude runs across and trades places (bases) with another bat dude while fielders get ball
5: If the ball clears the outer boundary of field, with bounce they get more runs, without bounce is even more runs.
6: If ball is caught before bounce or if bat dude misses the ball and it hits the wicket (equivalent of plate), he is out and next dude comes in.
the official rules are here! and as you can see, are a lot more elaborate than the ones mentioned above. However for most practitioners of the game on a field, the rules cover 80% of what normally happens.
The keywords here are "on a field"!
We now venture on to practitioners of this wonderful game on the streets of Mandaiveli. Come on, you knew that was coming way before you even came to this paragraph, didn't you?
As a touring member of the Mandaiveli Therukkutheru Cricket Club, myself and my brother must have spent approximately 45.75% of our middle school years playing cricket. Of this ~ 82.37% was spent around Devanathan street. The most important lesson learnt from all that time?
The game is defined purely by the boundary! Guess this holds true even for the "real" game. If you play on a smaller field, every tom, dick and harry can hoist the ball across the boundary and give the bowlers more than a "run" for their money.
In street cricket though, the rules are very different. It is almost like living through the story "A table is a table", where a bored fellow decides to call a Table a chair, a chair a bed, etc. till he becomes so wrapped in his new world he is unable to communicate with others!
Let me explain. Let us say, you are using the electric box on Sambandam street as the wicket.... Oh wait, you don't necessarily know the local map. So I have taken the liberty of using google maps, which by the way does not do justice to the street layout! The U shaped road marked in that map is Sambandam street.
(thank you Google)
Going back to the electric box wicket, the rules were, if you hit the ball straight out to Devanathan Street you got runs, if you hit to your right into the middle Sambandam street, you got runs (with the exception of the house with Django the dog) and you were out if you hit it into any of the three houses with musudu maamaa's and or maami's who would keep your ball! Django was another story altogether, and did I forget to mention that if you hit the ball into the house with the glass windows owned by angry thatha, you had to sit out the next two games?
If you have not got the picture yet, the danger houses from those times are all marked with red, orange or yellow dots depending on the % chance that you would get your ball back. Needless to say, the rules when the electric box on Chandrasekaran street was used as the wicket would be completely different based purely on the danger houses!
When playing the boys in another local street, they would first explain the rules on their street for the first five minutes before the game proceeded! This reminds you of the National Geographic videos where people from one polynesian island sail to another island and the locals explain things like "if you enter any womans hut, you have married her, and if you come out immediately after entering the hut, you have married her sister as well!". Once the rules were clear, you would just throw caution to the wind and hit the ball, hoping that you were not out by the local street "rules" and would stay on to play the next ball!
Now, don't even get me started on Uppukkuchappas! (something you won't find in any cricket rule book).
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