How to Play Cricket
Learning how to play cricket is actually more challenging that it looks. In cricket, there are two teams of eleven players who play on an elliptical field. Most all of the action takes place however, on a 22-yard rectangle called the pitch. The pitch has a wicket at both ends. In front of one wicket, the bowler bowls the ball to the striker or batter who stands in front of the other wicket. Beside the striker is another player from his team called the non-striker, and behind the striker is the wicket-keeper.
The bowler tries to bowl a ball the striker can’t hit and the striker tries to hit the ball so he and the non-striker can run to the wicket behind the bowler and score runs. The rest of the bowler’s team is behind him in the field and it is their job to field a hit ball.
This is the basic explanation of how to play cricket but truly learning how to play cricket means learning the strategies and tactics the bowler and the striker use to bowl and hit the ball respectively. For instance, the bowler has two ways he can bowl the ball, either fast or with spin. The bowler who uses a fast technique tries to get it by the batsman with speed, much like a pitcher in baseball trying to get a fastball by a hitter.
A spinning bowling style is designed to make the ball hard to hit, sort of like a curveball or a breaking ball in baseball. In this case, the bowler uses his wrist and fingers to put a spin on the ball. When the ball bounces off the pitch it should spin to one side and be almost impossible for the batsman to hit. There is also such a thing as a swing bowler, who holds the ball on the seams so that after it bounces on the pitch it will deflect to the right or left.
A fast bowler like a fastball pitcher can also try to put some spin on the ball so that it will move sideways off of the pitch like a cutter in baseball. It is, in fact, called a leg-cutter. There are several other ways the bowler puts spin on the ball, but the point is that part of learning how to play cricket is learning how to bowl a ball in these different ways. Equally important in learning how to play cricket are the batman’s shots, which all fall into two categories--straight bat shots and cross bat shots.
The goal of the batsman is to loft the ball over the fielders and thus, score runs. The straight bat shots he uses are played with the bat close to vertical, and these are blocks drives and glances. With cross bat shots the bat is held more horizontally as in baseball, and these shots are cuts, pulls, sweeps and hooks. The batting portion of learning how to play cricket is also challenging and the angles and power with which the ball is hit will determine who scores the most runs and thus, wins the game.
In learning how to play cricket it is important to learn how to play both the bowler position and the batter position because everyone on the team gets to bowl the ball and to bat the ball. No one on a cricket team is set in a specified position, so someone wanting to be good at cricket has to learn the different skills of all the positions.