This was the question I was faced with today. When you hear cricket spoken about it's either the frank and sincere admission of not understanding the game or an involved discussion of the performance of a batsman or bowler or the prediction of an inevitable draw or rout by one team against the other. To use a cliche, cricket, is like marmite? You either love it or hate it. No one can deny the pleasure promised and derived from the occasion even for the complete neophyte. A day out on a bright and breezy blue sky day, a picnic, entertaining intermittent music, amusing characters and enthusiastic cheering when a wicket falls or boundary is hit. But what does it all mean?
You can start with the intense psychological battle that ensues in a long five day test match. What seems to start off as a long and tedious day of bat on ball and few and far between dramatic moments of near misses, it seems to the non-initiate a pointless boring day of nothing happening. But as the days wear on the avid follower sees the subtle changes taking place, the pendulum of the upper hand moving from one team to the other until the unpredictablity of the result begins to loom. (This is where a draw is not an inevitable and foregone conclusion. And sometimes when you switch off thinking the draw is on the cards, you wake up next morning to find out that victory has been snatched from the jaws of defeat and you regret not staying tuned and watching it to the very end)
So what's the attraction? In cricket, like in life, you can never tell what's going to happen next?
You can start with the intense psychological battle that ensues in a long five day test match. What seems to start off as a long and tedious day of bat on ball and few and far between dramatic moments of near misses, it seems to the non-initiate a pointless boring day of nothing happening. But as the days wear on the avid follower sees the subtle changes taking place, the pendulum of the upper hand moving from one team to the other until the unpredictablity of the result begins to loom. (This is where a draw is not an inevitable and foregone conclusion. And sometimes when you switch off thinking the draw is on the cards, you wake up next morning to find out that victory has been snatched from the jaws of defeat and you regret not staying tuned and watching it to the very end)
So what's the attraction? In cricket, like in life, you can never tell what's going to happen next?
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