And so it was off to the Edgbaston cricket ground (which while very close, isn’t actually in Edgbaston), home of Warwickshire County Cricket Club (except Warwickshire really starts a significant number of miles south), for my first even major sporting event, watching the Warwickshire “Bears” play the game of cricket against the Worcestershire “Royals”. My gang for this trip were Jez, who know all about the game and gives a shit, Matthew, who also knows all about the game and gives a shit, Matt, who, being American, knows all about baseball and is intrigued about cricket in a way only expats can be, and The Bean, who being five years old was being indoctrinated into this strange world of sitting in the rain watching tiny men move a ball around a field by his father.
I knew jack-shit about cricket and could not care less. At best I was expecting a few hours sitting in the evening sun drinking beer with my friends. As the clouds covered I was praying for rain so we could all go somewhere less full of fat men who like sport (a paradox that never ceases to surprise me).
Entering the arena my ears were greeted by very loud and incredibly cheezy music, which was something of a shock. I was expecting something out of a Powell and Pressburger film, something more bucolic, as Jez suggested as I struggled for the word. This was all kinda hyper.
Suddenly at 5.30 the teams were on, and they were playing, really fast, and not wearing white. Turns out this was a Twenty20 game, part of a wider tournament, wherein the teams have just 20 overs each to score as much as possible, and which has to be completed within three hours (I think). After each score of 4 or 6, and whenever someone is out, the veryloudspeaker blasts out a 10 second clip of some corny but apt popular music tune. And play moves very quickly.
Apparently this is a cynical move by the cricket gods to get the general public interested in the game. The long, tedious matches still take place but these are the ones that bring the cash in. Matthew told me the players don’t really take them as seriously, treating them as an enjoyable knockabout, and the stakes aren’t so high. Meanwhile the public get a short but intense burst of cricket without having to invest a week or utter tedium.
I have to say I really enjoyed it. As the balls crossed the boundaries I was punching my firsts in the air and singing along. Towards the end it actually got a little tense and as the rain moved from the steady drizzle to actual rain I felt no desire to leave. Maybe the three pints of overpriced sickly-sweet lager helped, I dunno. Plus you could smoke on the stands, which I wasn’t expecting, and that helped. I also understood everything that was going on, partly I suspect because they weren’t invoking any complicated rules, just bashing ahead with the next bowl, the next over.
I don’t think I’ll be making a regular thing of this, but heavens! Cricket is not shit! Who’d've thought it!
(Here’s a match report which I read thinking “ah, so that’s what was going on!” while still not really understanding it.)
ta for the match report. I find it really hard to decipher those things with all their jargon. ‘newly capped… authentic dismissal…’ etc. Still it made you see that there were all these details going on underneath the frenzied batting, if you knew what to look for and cared.
That sounds exactly like my own one-and-only experience of a big-time cricket game, Pete (although in my case not my only sporting event by any means- which of course you know having once paid me the complement of saying you enjoyed reading my blog when I wasn’t ‘burbling on about football..’) Which I do take as a compliment by the way, thank you!
Anyway as I was saying the only cricket game I ever went to was a 20-20 game, Lancashire Lions, or whatever the hell preposterous name they had given themselves for the occasion, against Yorkshire, er Yeomen or something. I also went with a gang of people who knew what the hell was going on and even knew the songs (that was the first surprise, that they had football-type terrace anthems, and, owing to the ancient rivalry between the two counties competing, agreeably obscene ones at that).
The next surprise was the sheer size of the crowd-I had expected a thin smattering of studious aficionados, but there were about 20000 in. And far from the expected evening of tedium relieved only by a steady supply of lager in plastic pint glasses we were confronted with a colourful, noisy, if somewhat incomprehensible spectacle. I think Lancashire won by a country mile, but like you I really needed the match reports the next day to entirely understand what I had witnessed.
Like you, I was glad I went along in the end- although I rather doubt I will be going to any more of these glorified bunfights. If anything I might rather take a few days off work and surrender myself to one of those crazily slow-moving five-day affairs, which I imagine may prove to be agreeably meditative, especially if it ended, as they so often do, in a draw.
And of course over five days you could really get some proper drinking done…