First Choice - Englisch für Erwachsene

If you open the sport section of an English newspaper or go on the BBC Sport website, you will see many familiar names. There will be articles about football, Formula One or tennis. Amongst them there is one sport that is unknown to most Europeans. That sport is cricket. Most of the readers would probably know that it’s a team sport, that the players wear white clothes and that it looks a bit like baseball.

Cricket is indeed a strange sport: a game can last from 6 hours up to 5 days. It’s also a very fascinating sport, played by hundred of millions of people worldwide. It comes from England and was invented several centuries ago. Because of the British Empire, it’s mainly popular in former colonies like Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka where it’s the most popular sport. Cricket is also played in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Zimbabwe and some Caribbean countries which are known, in the world of cricket, as the West Indies.

What are the rules of this game then?

Cricket is a game played between two teams. Each team has eleven players. The field is oval-shaped. At the centre of it, there is a 20 m long, flat strip. It’s called the pitch. At each end there is a wooden stick balanced over three bars. This is called a wicket. A player from one team, called the 'bowler', throws the ball from one wicket trying to hit the other. In front of the opposite wicket, there’s a player from the opposing team (the 'batsman'). He defends the wicket from the ball with a wooden bat. A second batsman stands near the bowler's wicket.

The batsman tries to strike the ball with the bat and runs to the other end of the pitch, exchanging places with his partner. In doing so he scores a point ('run'). In the meantime, the bowling team on the field tries to return the ball to their men next to the wickets. If the ball hits a wicket and makes it fall before the batsman nearer to that wicket has reached safety, the batsman is out. If the batsman doesn’t stop the ball from hitting the wicket while he’s batting, he is also out.

Once out, a batsman is replaced by the next batsman in the team. The team's turn ('inning') ends when ten batsmen are out, and the teams exchange roles. At the end of the match, the team which has scored the most runs wins. There is no fixed rule saying how many innings are played. Some games last an afternoon, others last days. If you watch a game of cricket on TV or at the ground, you should take some sandwiches and a few pints of beer. The game is going to last for a while!