Tag Archives: informal cricket

How Many Tests Have You Played?

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I can understand when writers praise Test cricket in the highest terms. It, after all, remains the purest form of cricket. A closely fought Test match with two balanced teams with ups and downs with a classic denouement is the aspiration of every cricket spectator. But this does not mean that every other form of cricket is terrible, as some cricket fans are fond of writing.

If you look at how cricket is actually played in most parts of the world, it is totally unlike Test cricket. Nobody plays a match 5 days in a row with 90 overs per day. Many people don’t even play with a hard cricket ball, pads, stumps, a proper cricket pitch or a large enough ground. The essential elements of most cricket played in the world are:

  • A little room to throw a ball from the bowler to the batsman. Which means, you can also play cricket indoors in your bedroom (as long as your parents don’t know)!
  • A “ball”. Size and material does not matter. Heck, you could even play cricket with a table tennis ball.
  • A “bat”. You don’t need a manufactured bat. A broomstick will do just fine. Or even just use your arm and palms!
  • Stumps. Wait – you don’t need that. 3-4 shoe boxes stacked on top of each other is okay. Or sometimes you can do without that too.

What if you don’t even have that? Or it is raining outside? Well, don’t just sit there. Play dice cricket. Or some book cricket!

However there is something to be said about playing cricket according to the rules of the game. But even when you look there, the time dimension of proper cricket is still not always that of Test cricket. There is a stunning lot of limited overs cricket being played even as it lacks some of the “innovations” brought by the IPL.

Fundamentally, playing and viewing cricket is about fun. Different forms of cricket offer different flavors of enjoyment. If you don’t like a particular form of cricket, that is fine. Nobody is forcing you. Just enjoy the cricket you like and let the others enjoy what they like.

Dice Cricket

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In our ever-continuing series on non-conventional forms of cricket, let us take a look at dice cricket. From my Googling, it looks like this is a very popular form of indoor game favored by schoolboys, judging by the number of bloggers writing about it. And there are quite a few variants of the game. (Read other parts of this series: [1 2 3 4 5 6])

The game of dice cricket is simple enough. It is played by two people, each taking turns to be the batsman and the bowler. The batsman rolls a dice which allows him to score 1, 2, 3 or 4 runs. The other two faces of the dice are Run Out and Howzzat. While the first is absolutely out, the second is a signal to the bowler to roll his dice where two of the faces are No Ball and Not Out, thus saving the batsman. James Buckley has the full details. Cricket Fan Club has a description too.

On a given roll of the dice, the batsman will retain his wicket roughly 72% of the time, scoring a statistical average of 1.6 runs each time. I wonder how that compares to real-life cricket. Consider that typical teams have a couple of batsmen above 50, the rest of the upper order above 40, a few 30-ish and then the tailenders below 10.

One variation of the game is “Pencil Cricket” (the standard game) or “Owzthat” (the commercial version). The pencils used have 6 side (hexagonal) cross-sections. Each side is numbered or marked. In Owzthat, the players use specially marked or regular dice. An article on the BBC site calls “Pencil Cricket” as “Schoolboy Cricket” and remarks:

One of the joys of this game is that you can either use real teams, or make up your own team and pit any cricketer of the past or present against any other… virtually. If you are in a rather more mischievous mood you can make up teams entirely of non-cricketers. Wouldn’t it be fun to see Mother Theresa storming back to the pavilion after having been given out off a long-hop from Ludwig van Beethoven?

The folks at the Corridor also used to play dice cricket. Arjan Verweij has some good pictures of cricket dice on his website.

Here is an example of what the dice look like:

Owzat Dice

[Copyrighted image at the linked-to site]

And here is an YouTube video explaining the whole game with some great music:

French Cricket

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beach-cricket

No, this is not about the state of cricket in France. In our tradition of looking at different forms of cricket, we are talking about “French cricket“, a form of informal cricket (played with a soft ball) where the batsman has to defend his legs, there being no stumps to aim at. This is usually played at beaches and other places when you don’t have much equipment, or you are just having a fun time with family and friends. As Wikipedia explains

French cricket is most commonly played by children, or mixed groups of children and adults, although adults sometimes play it as a diversion during outdoor parties or on picnics.

Interestingly, it is not played by the French, and the origin of the name remains to be explained. Suggested possibilities include juxtaposition with the English origin of regular cricket. It seems likely that as the game is a lesser version on regular cricket that the name is intended to mock both the game and the French — just as a “French cut” in real cricket is a poorly executed cut shot which almost gets a batsman out. The name may also have arisen from the similarity of the batting motion to the one used in croquet which while not a French game is sometimes assumed to be French because of its name.

Considering the reason why it is played, there are no rules. You can invent your own form of French cricket. Once, my friends and I invented a form cricket on the spot for a game in one player’s backyard where we had the constraint of not breaking the windows. So the rules were

  • No fours or sixers. If your ball reaches the boundary, you are out.
  • You are out if you are caught directly or off the first bounce.
  • You are out if you fail to block 3 consecutive balls. (hmmm… 3 strike rule: isn’t that a bit like baseball, eh? Funny, we didn’t even know the basics of baseball back then.)

Essentially, you had to play total defense and drop the ball dead. You got one point each time you blocked successfully. Yes, the bowler also had to follow some rules, especially a very strict wide policy. We didn’t even have a wicketkeeper as the batsman had his back towards a wall. So no stumps either!

Isn’t it fun to talk about games you played in your childhood? Here is David Hughes with memories of those games, one of them French cricket:

We spent most of our time outdoors when the weather was fine, most of it playing games. Naturally we played cricket , rugby and soccer whenever possible but that meant rounding up a good number of friends and having some basic equipment. Some of this we had to make ourselves, so that a rugby ball was often a tightly rolled up newspaper tied around with string; and goal posts, and quite often stumps, were our coats placed on the ground.

It was quite possible to play cricket and football in the main street at the front of the houses because very little traffic came along the road; just the odd car and from time to time the baker’s van or the horse and cart of the salt and vinegar man. French cricket was somewhat easier to play as all we needed was a bat and a soft ball. The idea was to hit the legs of the batsman not a wicket, and you could get as close as you liked, but must not move once you had retrieved the ball; even just three could play this game.

[Photo licensed from Foraggio]