What is cricket?

A North American recently asked me something about cricket.  I am not English, but have lived in England and have been dragged along to watch it, so I tried to help.

But first, a warning: if you try to understand cricket as a sport, your head will explode. Don't do it!

Cricket is a ritualised social activity, acted out as a form of dry surrealism.  It is predominantly played not in stadiums, but on village greens.  It's a village ritual, designed to create the illusion of community activity while minimising both actual activity and meaningful social engagement. (For those unfamiliar with the men of England, activity is regarded as ungentlemanly, best left to women, peasants and foreigners. Genuine socialisation is deplored, and polite conversation should not extend beyond the two acceptable topics: weather and cricket.)

There are nominally two teams of 11 people, but at any given time 9 of these 22 people are not even on the grass.  Of the 13 people nominally playing, most of them are standing in remote corners of the field, scratching their crotch.  Most of the rest spend most of the time standing around doing nothing.

The whole thing takes so long that in course of any one game, many people are born, educated, married, become parents, get divorced, remarry, build careers, retire and die.  Plenty of people go along allegedly to watch, but that is only a ruse to confuse outsiders, because anyone who actually stayed to watch the whole thing would be an unidentifiable fossil by the time the game was over.

Tea served at an English village cricket match in 2009

In sports with a ball, that ball is the focal point of the game.  Not in cricket, which is actually centred on the tea.  Piles of anaemic sandwiches are accompanied by soggy cakes, and vast quantities of bad tea served out of huge urns.

An important part of the ritual is that the tea is served in hugely impractical cups and saucers, which are lovely on a table, but a nuisance when standing on a field or sitting in deckchairs.  The resulting effort to balance the cup and saucer keeps both hands occupied, which stops the men hitting each other and distracts everyone else from paying too much attention to the conversation they are nominally having. Any remaining points of conversational difficulty are bound to be interrupted at some point in the next ten minutes, when the ball starts moving again.

The movements of the ball are theoretically regulated by rules.  However, the rules do not actually exist.  They are merely an incomprehensible vocabulary which in participants converse instensely to avoid spending too much time moving the ball around.  Naturally, all participants strictly uphold the pretence that there are actual rules, to uphold an illusion of insider knowledge and thereby giving them status over outsiders who develop psychoses trying to understand them.

A cricket umpire performing
random angry gestures
to disorientate participants

In addition to the 13 players and the 9 idlers, there is also an umpire, whose nominal role is to enforce the non-existent rules. His actual function is to frown a lot, and engage in animated conversations with players, using as much as possible of the incomprehensible vocabulary. This helps to prolong the gaps between movements of the ball, and if the players are excessively co-operative, a crucial umpiring skill is the ability to invent new terminology to confuse everyone and further delay the return of the ball.

Sometimes the new terminology is insufficiently engaging and distracting. In such situations, the umpire is required to adopt a pompously bossy demeanour, while performing bizarre and/or threatening hand gestures.

Cricket scoreboard

At the end of the day (or several days for some cricket games), after someone has finished putting random numbers up on an incomprehensible board, a nominal sporting result is declared.  This bears no relation to the bizarre numbers, and is in fact determined by an Anglican vicar reading the entrails of a mouldy cucumber sandwich.

In any case, nobody cares about the result. This makes the whole thing familiar to the Anglican vicar whose life is spent mouthing religious talk to people who have no interest in religion and are only in church as a way of dodging the rites of England's real religion, which is ritualised car-washing on Sunday.

Then everyone goes home to wallow in the corpse of their marriages, having pretended to spend a whole day socialising with other villagers ... but having fulfilled the primary social obligation of an English person, which is to carefully avoid any real conversation about anything at all.