Thank you sir, may I have another?

Thank you sir, may I have another?A classic line from Animal House, which has nothing to do with the sport of Cricket, but there I am swinging a giant paddle-looking-thing and I couldn’t resist.

In reality, that’s me swinging a Cricket bat. In the full post you can click the photo to see a larger version on Flickr.

I had just missed of course. As a striker, I never made contact and made an out when the bowler struck the wickets before six balls made an over. How’s that for some interesting words?

Hopefully that is an accurate description, but if you want to know what some of those terms mean, then by all means check out this explanation of cricket I found via Google. I suppose I could try and relate some of that to Baseball, but the similarities aren’t as cut-and-dry as you might think. I would take a stab at it, but I will probably get some of it wrong and I don’t to do that. The link gives a pretty good explanation of things, but it is tough to visualize without going thru the motions, which I did and I’m still not 100% on everything!

So, you are probably asking how I found myself playing Cricket? Well, last Friday afternoon we had a team/group outing at work. In addition to having all the employees on the team invited, we also had invited all our contractors — who are all on-shore from an off-shore firm — and someone had the great idea of trying our hand at a Cricket match. Being a baseball fan, I always wondered what Cricket was all about!

My team is probably split just about 50-50 in terms of contractors and employees and all the contractors are from a firm in India. We also have a couple employees of Indian descent who had the basic equipment we needed; two bats and one wickets (normally there is a set). We used a tennis ball instead of the Cricket ball because that would hurt pretty good without any pads (it’s harder and heavier than a baseball).

We took over a park close to our office and had a BBQ. Following that, we tried our hand at cricket with the idea that after the Americans embarrassed themselves playing Cricket, we could embarass the Indians with a game of wiffleball. I think everyone had a good time trying out Cricket and while I didn’t do very well for myself, I liked learning more about it. I think the hardest thing about it is in most cases you are swinging the bat like a golf club and the sucker is pretty heavy, so without getting used to it first, it was hard for me to connect. Plus, you have that whole difference in plane of sight with baseball. Finally, you have to remind yourself you don’t need to swing super hard like in baseball. You can if you want to, but in a lot of cases you are better off not.

Anyway, we split up our teams so it wasn’t an Us vs. Them kind of drubbing. My team batted first and I think that hurt us a bit because we lost to the other team. I think their time in the field helped them learn what to do when they batted and gave them an advantage. While I kept asking questions about what to do before I had my first over, I didn’t grasp it all until seeing it all and experiencing it first-hand. You can ask all the questions you want sometimes, but more often then not when it comes to sport, you have to do it to get it.

We never got our *revenge* with a game of wiffleball. Those that weren’t drinking, me included, ended up playing Bocce ball instead. It was a good time all-around and a nice way to spend a gorgeous Friday afternoon.

Well, anything is better than being in the office…