Cricket. Pillar of English society. Mark of a gentleman. Also a great excuse for getting out for a day’s drinking, have a three course lunch and get home being able to say with all honesty that you had watched a days sport. What other game gives you all of that, and so cheaply at that?

Every Summer, during the test series, the pub talk moves away from football, football and more football to in-depth discussion over googlies, bouncers, beamers, leg spin, off spin and the like.

But what does it all mean? If they were honest, most of the pub pundits would admit they haven’t got a clue. Now that Geoffrey Boycott has been sacked by the BBC, how will they come up with their ‘well informed’ comments?

To try to assist, here is a brief guide to the game of Cricket, with most of the frills removed.

Cricket is a game of two teams of eleven a side, twelve pieces of wood (six stumps, four bails and two bats), two umpires and with luck at least one umpire (the referee to the uninitiated). There used to be thirteen pieces of wood, but the advent of paper and improvements in the level of literacy did away with the original practice of cutting notches in a stick (hence the term ‘score’).

The game begins by one of the captains tossing a coin in the air and the other calling ‘heads’ or ‘tails’. The winning skipper can elect to:

1. BAT

In which case the team is known as ‘in’. Being ‘in’ means nine of the team do go in – into the pavilion to drink lemon squash and suchlike. The other two go out into the middle and take up their positions. Put simply, the two out in the middle are ‘in’. With me so far?

The batsmen aim to score runs by the following methods:

1.1 Hitting the ball and running between the stumps, hence the term ‘runs’ (stumps being the three pieces of wood stuck in the ground with two smaller pieces of wood (the bails) balanced on top).
As an aside, in the former Soviet Union stumps are known as Broomsticks. This is due to a very suspicious set of customs officers confiscating the first set of the genuine items to be taken to Moscow Airport. An enterprising soul bought three brooms and cut them down to size so that play could commence.

1.2 Scoring a four. This is achieved by hitting the ball so hard it crosses the boundary rope.

1.3 Scoring a six. Same as a four, but the ball is not allowed to bounce before it crosses.

You cannot be out if you score by 1.2 or 1.3 above. However, like everything in Cricket there is an exception to this rule. If you are playing at Kent’s home ground at Canterbury, hitting the tree on the edge of the field counts as four runs, but you can be caught out (see ‘2’ below) as the tree forms part of the field of play (can you imagine something like this at Wembley? Alan Shearer scoring a goal from a lucky rebound off of the Silver Birch growing just on the edge of the six-yard box?).


2. FIELD

The fielding team all goes out to the middle. Despite all being out with the two who are ‘in’, they are not ‘in’ themselves (still with me?).

The fielding team chooses two members of his team who are very good at hurling a small leather bound projectile over 22 yards (or 20.12 metres for the metrically minded). These chaps are called ‘Bowlers’ and may have something to do with the choice of hat worn in Victorian times. The bowler has six attempts to either knock over the stumps or get the batman to hit the ball into the air and have one of his team catch it before it hits the ground.

Should the fielding team succeed in doing any of the above, then the batsman is said to be ‘out’. Being ‘out’, he goes back in – into the pavilion to have some of the lemon squash that the others have been guzzling. Another batsman goes out to the middle and is now ‘in’ (all still fairly simple, yes?).

This process goes on until ten of the eleven batsmen are ‘out’. The last batsman is not allowed to stay ‘in’ on his own, probably because he is not old enough or he might get lonely. Once this happens, the team is said to be ‘all out’ and all go to the pavilion for a short rest, more lemon squash and some sandwiches made by a kind lady, normally married to one of the home players.

After the break for food and drink, the other teams goes ‘in’ (i.e. out to the middle) to bat and tries to score more runs than their opponents without being ‘all out’ beforehand. Sometimes this happens, but more often than not bad light or rain stops play and the game is declared a draw.

Whichever way the result of the game is decided, once they have finished the umpires ‘draw stumps’. This does not mean that they doodle pictures of small pieces of wood but take the sticks out of the ground and go off the field themselves for some of the squash and sandwiches both teams have been gorging themselves on up until now.

After this, everyone goes home until the next time when they do the same thing all over again.

That all seems perfectly clear to me, hope you now know what is going on!