When do more than a billion people tune in to a sports match of middling tournament importance? When India plays Pakistan in the men’s Cricket World Cup. Cricket is closer to a religion than a sport in swaths of South Asia, and face-offs between these bitter neighbors are often more like a geopolitical event than a game.
Only 12 countries play in cricket’s top echelon, but huge, fervent fan bases in India (1.35 billion people), Pakistan (212 million), and Bangladesh (161 million) help make it the world’s second-most popular sport, at least when India has a big match.
Cricket traveled via the British Empire, and its history is unsurprisingly stuffy. As recently as 1962, England divided cricketers between upper-class “gentlemen,” who were unpaid, and working-class “players,” who were paid but often treated like servants.
But over the past decade, the sport has begun to embrace glitz, glamor, and greenbacks, cashing in on South Asia’s massive audiences and India’s unstinting growth. When one study calculated the salary of every team sportsperson in the world to an annualized rate, it found that cricket players in India were out-earning British footballers and American basketball players on a per-game basis—netting an average of $361,350 for each match. Man Booker-prize winning novelist Aravind Adiga once lamented that cricket “has become the spearhead of the new Indian capitalism.”
Let’s take a dive into this highly eccentric, mind-bogglingly confusing, and aesthetically stunning game.
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Only 12 countries play in cricket’s top echelon, but huge, fervent fan bases in India (1.35 billion people), Pakistan (212 million), and Bangladesh (161 million) help make it the world’s second-most popular sport, at least when India has a big match.
Cricket traveled via the British Empire, and its history is unsurprisingly stuffy. As recently as 1962, England divided cricketers between upper-class “gentlemen,” who were unpaid, and working-class “players,” who were paid but often treated like servants.
But over the past decade, the sport has begun to embrace glitz, glamor, and greenbacks, cashing in on South Asia’s massive audiences and India’s unstinting growth. When one study calculated the salary of every team sportsperson in the world to an annualized rate, it found that cricket players in India were out-earning British footballers and American basketball players on a per-game basis—netting an average of $361,350 for each match. Man Booker-prize winning novelist Aravind Adiga once lamented that cricket “has become the spearhead of the new Indian capitalism.”
Let’s take a dive into this highly eccentric, mind-bogglingly confusing, and aesthetically stunning game.
 CricketJuly 11, 2019 |
Cricket, meet capitalism
When do more than a billion people tune in to a sports match of middling tournament importance? When India plays Pakistan in the men’s Cricket World Cup. Cricket is closer to a religion than a sport in swaths of South Asia, and face-offs between these bitter neighbors are often more like a geopolitical event than a game.
Only 12 countries play in cricket’s top echelon, but huge, fervent fan bases in India (1.35 billion people), Pakistan (212 million), and Bangladesh (161 million) help make it the world’s second-most popular sport, at least when India has a big match.Cricket traveled via the British Empire, and its history is unsurprisingly stuffy. As recently as 1962, England divided cricketers between upper-class “gentlemen,” who were unpaid, and working-class “players,” who were paid but often treated like servants.
But over the past decade, the sport has begun to embrace glitz, glamor, and greenbacks, cashing in on South Asia’s massive audiences and India’s unstinting growth. When one study calculated the salary of every team sportsperson in the world to an annualized rate, it found that cricket players in India were out-earning British footballers and American basketball players on a per-game basis—netting an average of $361,350 for each match. Man Booker-prize winning novelist Aravind Adiga once lamented that cricket “has become the spearhead of the new Indian capitalism.”
Let’s take a dive into this highly eccentric, mind-bogglingly confusing, and aesthetically stunning game.
By the digits
1.96 billion: Combined population of major cricketing countries
$2.55 billion: Cost of Indian Premier League television rights for 2018–2022, as paid by Rupert Murdoch-owned Star India100: Rank of India captain Virat Kohli on Forbes’s 2019 list of the highest paid athletes
28,279: Average fan attendance per match for Australia’s Big Bash league—the seventh highest of any sporting league in the world in 2016
100.23 mph (161.3 kph): Speed of the fastest cricket ball bowled on record, during the 2003 men’s World Cup.
42: Laws—never call them “rules”—of cricket
11: Men’s Cricket World Cups held since 1975; Australia leads the rankings with five wins
5: Days it takes to play a Test match, the longest form of cricket
3: Hours it takes to play the shortest form of cricket, a T20 match
3:43: Running time of Lagaan, the Oscar-nominated 2001 Bollywood cricket epic
2: Former cricketers to become prime ministers, one in Pakistan and one in England
Explain it like I'm 5!
How to play cricket
As simply as possible, a game of cricket goes thus:
- Two teams of 11 each have a chance to bat and to bowl.
- The bowler’s job is to hurl the ball towards the batter from 22 yards away. She can get a batter out in 10 ways. Two of the most common are for a fielder to catch a ball hit in the air by the batter (as in baseball), or for the bowler to hit one of three wooden poles, the “stumps,” which stand behind the batter (a bit like the strike zone in baseball).
- The batter is trying to score runs. They bat in pairs, with each standing at opposite ends of the 22-yard strip. She can score one run by running to the other end of the strip while the ball is in play (her partner runs to the opposite end). Hitting the ball to the edge of the pitch along the ground gets her four runs. Hitting it over the edge of the pitch without bouncing scores six runs.
- Once 10 batters are out, the bowling team goes in to bat. If they score more runs than the other team, they win. If their 10 batters get out before they reach that score, they lose.
If it helps to visualize, here’s a detailed video.
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Fun fact!
Cricket’s longest official match lasted 10 days—plus a rain day and a rest day—and ended in a draw between England and South Africa. The 1939 match only finished because England’s players had to catch their boat home. Now, Test matches are limited to five days.
The bat is mightier than the pen
Cricket literati
Writers have long been bewitched by cricket’s languid style, its poetic ebbs and flows, and its extraordinary vocabulary. In 1805, a 17-year-old Lord Byron played in the first edition of cricket’s oldest regular match—between Eton and Harrow schools. After Eton’s victory, its players sent a ditty to Byron’s Harrow, telling them, “You play not cricket, but the fool.” Byron reportedly responded:
“Ye Eton wits, to play the foolIs not the boast of Harrow school;No wonder, then, at our defeat —Folly like yours could ne’er be beat.”The sport counts at least four Nobel Laureates among its acolytes. V.S. Naipaul’s reflection on what he’d gleaned from an Oxford degree was, “I have developed my cricket, if anything.” Harold Pinter declared that cricket is “greater than sex.” James Joyce included a cricket match, described in a series of bawdy double-entendres, in Finnegan’s Wake. Samuel Beckett has the accolade of best writer-cricketer, having played two professional level matches while studying at Trinity College, Dublin.
Virginia Woolf never won a Nobel, but a childhood photo shows her playing an exemplary defensive shot while her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, watches. “Vanessa and I were both what we call tomboys; that is, we played cricket, scrambled over rocks, climbed trees, were said not to care for clothes and so on,” she wrote in a letter recently unearthed by Smith College.
One theory for why so many great wordsmiths were enamored of the game: the incredibly diverse and creative language that accompanies it. A regular day of cricket will likely see a “googly,” a “silly mid-off,” and “the corridor of uncertainty.” Writer and actor Stephen Fry keeps a list of the more than 100 words used to describe hitting a cricket ball—the entries for the letter “S” include scythe, shovel, slap, slash, slog, slug, smear, smite, smoke, snick, spank, spear, spoon, squeeze, and squirt.
The Guardian has even made the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the sport’s verbiage helped cricket-loving Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein develop his concept of “language games.”
Brief history
Middle Ages: Some form of cricket is played in Northern Europe.
1300: King Edward I’s household accounts appear to reference cricket being played in Kent, in southeast England.~1500: Cricket is played at a school in Guildford, Surrey.
1744: First known version of the Laws of Cricket issued.
1844: First official international cricket match is played.
1882: Cricket’s oldest rivalry, “The Ashes,” is born after Australia beats England in the UK, and a British paper runs a mock obituary lamenting the death—and cremation—of English cricket.
1928: West Indies, a composite team from several Caribbean Islands, plays its first Test Match.
1932: India plays its first Test Match.
1970: South Africa is banned from international cricket due to the racist policies of apartheid. They return in 1991.
1973: England wins the first women’s World Cup.
1975: West Indies wins the first men’s World Cup.
2003: T20, the shortest form of cricket, is first played professionally in England.
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Corruption in the “gentlemen’s game”
Cricket’s embrace of Indian capitalism hasn’t been without consequences. India’s illegal betting industry—worth an estimated $100 billion per year—is run by mafiosos who have paid players to fix matches. Most notoriously, South Africa captain Hansie Cronje was banned for life in 2000, after admitting to taking $100,000 in bribes from Indian bookmakers, including for throwing a Test match against England.
Cricket bets may also focus on what happens in a single ball, leading to what’s known as “spot-fixing.” In 2011, Pakistan captain Salman Butt and two of his players were jailed in England for taking bribes to orchestrate “no-balls” (when a bowler lets go of the ball from too close to the batsman).Cricketing authorities say they’ve made great efforts to stamp out the problem. But last year, an Al Jazeera documentary alleged that a handful of unnamed England and Australia players also participated in “spot-fixing” in 2016 and 2017. Both countries’ cricket boards denied the accusations.
Gambling isn’t the only area where cricket’s newfound pizzazz has led the sport astray. In 2008, Texan billionaire Allen Stanford flew into Lord’s Cricket Ground in London, the genteel heart of British cricket, in a helicopter carrying a treasure chest full of fake dollar bills. Later that year, West Indies played England in a game in Antigua for $20 million in prize money, paid for by Stanford. West Indies, named “Stanford Superstars” in this match, trounced England. Four years later, Stanford was sentenced to 110 years in jail for running the second-largest Ponzi scheme in US history.
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According to The Cricket Monthly, the 1999 World Cup semi-final between Australia and South Africa is the greatest cricket match of all time, with “a twist so savage that even Hitchcock might have deemed it too callous.”
take me down this 
hole!
A sport with native South Asian roots is on the rise in the world’s biggest democracy: kabaddi, which the New York Times calls “a hybrid of rugby, touch football and the playground game known in England as British Bulldog and in the United States as Red Rover.” In 2017, 313 million Indians watched league matches, and the highest-paid player made $210,000 last year.
Poll
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In yesterday’s poll about the gold standard, 56% of you say you don’t support returning to it; 22% say “unsound money is for chumps.” 📧 Correction: The golden calf mentioned in yesterday’s email, was discovered in Ashkelon, Israel.
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