What is cricket?

(Slightly edited since, 25.12.10)

'Unusual to see a right-hander coming round the wicket in rain..' said the commentator on TMS (Test Match Special 4.1.11) - but of course it is easy to 'see' on the radio!

So what is this game, and what are the rules? What follows are some short extracts from an academic paper on expertise which necessitated the authors attempt a technical description of cricket for a largely America readership.

‘..Cricket is a complicated game. We must explain some of the rules here on the assumption that not every reader of this journal will know them. We will, however, assume that readers who are not familiar with cricket will know baseball. 

Cricket is like baseball in that it involves the equivalent of a pitcher and a batter, known, respectively, as the ‘bowler’ and the ‘batsman.’ The bowler ‘bowls’ the cricket ball to the batsman and, as in baseball, the batsman tries to hit it. Unlike baseball, there is no limit to the number of balls the batsman may receive - on a good day a batsman may face hundreds of balls before being out. In international matches, one game may continue for up to five days. 

As in baseball, there are a number of ways of being out, such as when one of the ‘fielders’ catches the ball before it hits the ground. In cricket the batsman stands in front of a ‘wicket’ (otherwise known as ‘the stumps’) that he has to defend with his bat. If the ball hits the wicket, the batsman is out – there is no equivalent in baseball. The wicket is a set of three vertical sticks or ‘stumps.’  The wicket is 28 inches high and 9 inches wide overall. The top of each stump has a shallow groove cut at right angles to the direction from which the ball is coming; two smaller sticks, known as ‘bails’, are carefully balanced in these grooves, the ends of the two bails touching each other where they meet in middle of the groove cut in the central stump. The working, and universally accepted, definition of ‘the ball hitting the wicket’ is that one or both of the delicately balanced bails fall to the ground - the wicket must be ‘broken’. On very rare occasions a ball grazes the stumps, or rolls very gently against them, but no bail falls; in such a case the batsman is not out because the wicket has not been broken. 

In cricket, the bowler nearly always directs the ball in such a way that it hits the ground before it reaches the batsman and it usually then bounces toward the batsman’s legs. The batsman wears a ‘pad’ to protect each leg. Each pad is an armoured sheath running from ankle to just above the knee. The ball is very hard, about as hard as wood at the beginning of the game, though it begins to soften slightly as the hours pass (the same ball is used for many hours before it is changed). The ball can sometimes be bowled at more than 90 mph.  Allowing the ball to hit the pads is an integral part of the game. Clearly, the batsman would never be out if he simply stood in front of the wicket, kept his bat out of the way, and allowed the ball to hit him or his pads. To make that impossible the notoriously complicated ‘lbw rule’ says that a batsman is out in certain restricted circumstances if the pads alone stop a ball that would otherwise hit the wicket - this counts as out in virtue of ‘leg before wicket’. In the normal way, the umpire, who stands at the point from which the bowler bowls the ball, is the sole judge of whether the ball (a) falls within the restrictions and (b) would have gone on to hit the wicket..

.. A cricket ball is not uniformly spherical. Around its ‘equator’ it has a raised seam and the two ‘hemispheres’ become more asymmetrical as the game goes on. The trajectory of the ball after it hits the ground can vary enormously. The bounce depends on the speed, the hardness and texture of the ball - which changes during the game, the state of the ground at the exact point of the bounce, the spin on the ball and the position of the seam. The ‘swing’ - which is the aerodynamically induced curve in the flight of the ball, which can be in any plane - depends on the ball’s speed, its spin, its state, its orientation, the orientation of the seam and the state of the atmosphere. As a result, what happens to the ball after it bounces is not going to be fully predictable from its pre-bounce trajectory

.. In the case of the human umpire making an lbw decision it is acknowledged that the accuracy of the judgment is affected by how close the batsman is to the wickets when the pads are struck by the ball. If the batsman whose pads are struck is well forward in his stance then he is rarely given out. In this way, human judges deliberately introduce a systematic error into their judgments that favours the batsman - the so-called ‘benefit of the doubt’ rule. The importance of this rule will become clear later…’

Extract from draft of Collins H.M and Evans R (2008) You cannot be serious!  Public Understanding of Technology with special reference to ‘Hawk-Eye.’

If the above is unclear, the best I (or anyone) can do is to refer you to the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) located at, or otherwise known as Lord’s…