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Final Four Fever at Duke, Cricket Style

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Shubham Patel bowls during a second round game of the Duke Cricket Club tournament Wednesday evening. Photos by Megan Mendenhall/Duke Photography

Millions of people across the globe came down with Final Four fever this week, but the action wasn't on the hardcourts. The Cricket World Cup concludes Saturday after a month of play in Australia and New Zealand that had nations from Asia to the West Indies hanging on every moment of the seven-hour games.

The fever isn't widespread in the United States, and the rules, length and language of the sport seem impenetrable to many here. But with Duke's widening international reach, cricket has a growing fan base on campus. The Duke Cricket Club held its own tournament this week, playing on the turf fields behind Wallace Wade Stadium. The club also heldviewing parties extending into the early hours of the morning for this week's two semi-final matches.

Personally, I have always been mystified by the sport. As I read the breathless accounts of the current World Cup in the global press, though, I figured it was time for me to learn just where all this passion comes from. So I turned to Pratt junior Vinay Nagaraj, a native of India and president of the Duke Cricket Club. After a long night of watching New Zealand eke out a thrilling semi-final victory over South Africa, Nagaraj generously agreed to be my guide in explaining the game and teaching me how to properly tell a "yorker" from a "googly."

 

The Basics

The best place to start with the rules is this video for Americans posted by Slate this week. 

About Those Seven Hour Games

The length of its international matches set cricket apart from other major global sports, but for true fans, that's just part of the passion.

Vinay: "There is one type of match that goes on for five days!  They take breaks but just pick it up the next day. 

"That format is losing popularity, and increasingly people are going for a type called '20/20,' which is 20 overs, and it's over in about two hours, the length of most basketball games.  The World Cup uses 50 overs, because that's the tradition for international matches. 

"The passion comes from it being so ingrained in so many cultures. In India, kids play in the streets all day.  It's a very communal. 

"Kids will play with anything they can use. Tennis balls for throwing, wooden sticks for bats. If they don't have wickets, they'll use garbage cans.  Anything just to play. 

"For me, I just love the feel of the bat on the ball. When you get a clean hit, it's a great feeling and a wonderful sound.  I could play every day."

  

Cricket is Rocket Science 

Usually, the team with the most runs wins the match, but because of the length of the matches, the sport is prone to rain interruptions and other delays.  That's when math gets involved, complex math that takes into account a large number of factors to determine the winner.

Vinay:"It's the D/L [Duckworth/Lewis] method.  It was used just this week in one of the semi-finals. Because there was rain, the match between New Zealand and South Africa didn't get to 50 overs. So they used the D/L formula and set it for 43 overs and determine how many runs New Zealand (which batted second) needed to win to defeat South Africa's 281. [Note: New Zealand reached the target number on the next to last ball, very exciting.]

"The formula says the amount of runs you need to get isn't based just on the number of overs the other team had or the number of outs they made. It takes into consideration the quality of the batters to come. The best batters are one to five in the lineup, and when you go down lineup, the bottom of the order won't be as good. 

"It's very complicated, but it's been reliable in the past and they're sticking it.  I appreciate a sport that they bring math in it."

 

A Language of Its Own

Geoffrey: "One of the things that's hard for me is the sport has it's own terminology, that's hard for the uninitiated to understand.  I'm going to read you a story from The Guardian about a match in the early rounds of the World Cup, and I'm going to ask you to tell me what happened.

"Can Taylor get to his century? He flat-bats the first of Hazelwood’s over through the man at mid on to move to 98 … then a leg bye sees him stranded at the wrong end. Anderson leading edges up into the air but it just drops safe from Warner’s dive. From the next he’s slammed on the pad from a yorker. The finger goes up … but Taylor reviews and it’s missing leg by a whisker. But Anderson was run out as they scuttled through for an attempted leg bye. The crowd cheers the replay. But the umpire had given him out lbw. So the ball should be dead. Carnage. Taylor is convinced it should be a dead ball but the umpires have called it. Game over. Taylor is left stranded on 98 not out and Australia have won by 111 runs."

Vinay: [Laughing] "Ok, just out of curiosity, how much of that did you understand?"

Gepffrey: "Total Incomprehension. Maybe the part of having 98 runs, just short of a century."

Vinay: "So Taylor is up and he hits a flat bat. Flat bat is a type of hitting stroke. There are different kinds of swings because you can hit the ball 360 degrees. There is no foul territory. A flat bed is you are hitting the ball horizontally, hard like a baseball swing.  So he scores a couple of runs and gets to 98, just short of the century run mark [for an individual].

"Taylor is still at bat. On the next bowl, he gets a leg bye. If the ball isn't going to hit the stumps, the batter gets his leg on it and the ball goes off of him, he's still allowed to run. So now he's at the wrong end, meaning he's at the wicket where he's not batting.  Anderson is up now. He pops it up but it's not caught so Anderson's not out and he gets to bat again.

"On the next bowl, the bowler throws him a Yorker. This is a type of pitch. The bowler is going to pitch the ball right where the bat is on the ground. It's a tough pitch. If the batter doesn't shove his bat into the ground and hit it off of the ground, it's going to get by him. If the batter doesn't time it right, he's going to be out.

"In this case, the ball hits him. The finger goes up means the umpire is calling him out on a leg before wicket or lbw. That means the umpire has judged that if the ball didn't hit him in the leg, it would have hit the wicket for an out.

"But the call is reviewed. There is a third umpire 'in the sky' who looks at the replay and reviews the call.  In this case the third umpire changes the lbw ruling and says it wouldn't have hit the wicket, so the batter isn't out.

"But there's another problem. Anderson, after the ball hit him, started running toward the other wicket. And the fielding team got the ball to the wicket crease before Anderson did. So although he wasn't out on the lbw, he was out anyhow on the run. The batting team protests that out shouldn't count because the ball should have been dead, but the protest is rejected." 

Geoffrey: "And that's how the game ended?" 

Vinay: "That's how the match ended. As the reporter said, it was carnage."

Wikipedia has a useful but very long list of cricket terms to help the novice.

 

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Talent Morgan Chaunzwa bats during a second round game of the Duke Cricket Club tournament.

The Empire Strikes Back

Cricket's worldwide popularity is a product of the British Empire, but it's been some time since England has been a sport power. This year they were knocked out of the World Cup early. 

Vinay: "The British were in India for so long, and they brought the sport with them. But it's surprising that the British aren't that good anymore. [England got knocked out very early in the World Cup this year.] India grew up with the sport, but now we are the defending champions. It's like the teacher has been surpassed by the student. 

"There are great rivalries in the sport. When India plays Pakistan, everyone in India stays up to watch because we want to beat Pakistan. And everyone in Pakistan wants to beat India.  But now we even have a rivalry with Australia, which is now a giant in the sport."

In fact, an entire book has been written about the colonial connection to the sport. Famed Trinidadian historian and critic CLR James' book "Beyond a Boundary," is a memoir of his fascination with cricket that explores  issues of West Indian history, culture and society. The book, which is published in the United States by Duke University Press, is regularly listed among the greatest scholarly works on sport.

  

A Rising Triangle Power at Duke?

The Duke Cricket Club wasn't very active when Nagaraj arrived on campus in 2012. But with help from other cricket fans, including physics professor Arya Roy, money was raised to buy equipment and regular practices began. Now the Duke club hopes to register with the collegiate cricket association and begin competing against other university teams.

Vinay: "There's such a rich history to cricket. It was for the upper class at first, but it developed into more of a middle class game, a democratic game. "It unites people, and you can see it in our club. We have people from all over the world playing together."