Skip to main content

Basics and Future of Cricket

The global governing body for cricket is the International Cricket Council (ICC). Cricket is one of the world's most popular sports with an estimated 2.5 billion fans. The global governing body for cricket is the International Cricket Council (ICC). The ICC governs and administers the game and works with its 105 members to grow the sport. Cricket is a bat and ball sport that involves two competing sides of 11 players each.

An official Cricket match is played in a grass field, which is oval, with a flat strip of ground at the middle, which is 22 yards long and 10 feet wide. In the game of cricket, this pitch plays a vital role in deciding the fate of the match.

Construction of three parallel wooden stakes driven vertically into the ground is present at each end of the pitch, which is known as stumps. At the top, small cross pieces are laid which is known as bails. The objective of cricket is to score more runs than the opponent.

Cricket - 2.5 billion fans globally : Basics and Future of the Game

Key Players

There are three key functions a player performs in a match - Batting, Bowling and Fielding. In cricket, the team winning the toss of the coin chooses whether to bat or bowl first.

Batsman

A player who is currently batting in the pitch is known as a batsman. A batsman is one who possesses the skill of hitting the ball with a bat to score runs or to prevent his wicket. Before the start of a cricket match, the order in which the eleven players will bat is usually disclosed. This order may be altered during play according to the captain's discretion.

Bowler

A bowler is a player who delivers the ball to the batsman. There are different types of bowlers in Cricket.

Fast bowlers - Uses pace as their primary weapon

Swing and Seam bowlers - Make the ball deviate in its course through the air or when it bounces

Spin Bowlers - Puts a spin on the ball, causing it to turn at an angle while bouncing off the pitch, by delivering the ball quite slowly.

Fielder

A member of the team, who is fielding and tries to prevent the other team from scoring. Any part of the body may be used by the fielder to field the ball. The captain of the team may decide to switch players between fielding positions at any time except when a bowler is in the act of bowling to the batsman.

Formats of the Game

There are three formats of Cricket played at the international level - Test matches, One-Day Internationals and Twenty20 Internationals.

Unlimited Overs Format

Test Cricket is the traditional and the longest form of the sport. A test match is played over five days, with each day's play lasting six hours and at least 90 overs bowled per day. Test Cricket is regarded by cricket fans as the ultimate test of playing ability as compared to the limited-overs format. Usually, test cricket is considered the pinnacle form because it tests teams over a longer period.

The Players wear a white jersey in Test Cricket because of the reason, that Test matches usually take place during Day time.

White clothing reflects heat better and can be more comfortable to wear in the heat, than any other color. White clothing also reduces the stress levels of the players and prevents them from getting a sun-stroke or dehydration to some extent. Occasionally Day - Night matches are now being organized in Test Cricket.

For Day matches dark red ball is used and for Day - Night matches pink ball is used.

Limited Overs Format

Both One-Day Internationals and Twenty20 Internationals are part of the Limited Overs format. In the early days of One-day Internationals, matches could last 60, 55, or 50 overs, although the standard ODI format has been set at 50 overs per side for several years. In Limited overs format, it is all about who can score the most runs in the allotted amount of time.

In this type of format teams, bat only once, and an innings is over when either 10 batsmen are out or all the overs have been bowled. The white ball is used in the limited-overs format. The players of different teams wear jerseys of different colors.

Future Of Cricket

The game of Cricket enjoys its popularity in the world's second most populated country (India), where over 800 million people (57% of India's population) watch this sport. This sport is also popular in countries like Australia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Srilanka, West Indies (the Caribbean), South Africa, New Zealand, and Zimbabwe. The future of Cricket looks somewhat similar to Football, as the game is sliding towards the club culture with more number of nations expected to get engaged because of the Twenty20 format. I expect that because of its developing club culture the game will see an exponential increase in the number of fans in the coming years.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Korean War | change in position of the 38th parallel

Korean War history and the 38th parallel North Korea is an isolated nation that proclaims its southern neighbor South Korea as its enemy. North Korea blew up its joint liaison office with South Korea on 16 June 2020, in a dramatic and carefully planned display of rancor toward its southern neighbor. Till the end of the Second World War, there was no separate North and South Korea and they were collectively called Korea. In this article, we will see what led to the separation of Korea and the Korean War, which was fought after the separation in detail. Korean war led to the split of North and South Korea Separation of Korea At the end of the Second World War, Korea — which had formerly been occupied by the Japanese — was divided along the 38th Parallel (38 degrees North) by the United States (US) military planners Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel, as a temporary division of the country. But the onset of the Cold War (rivalry that developed after World War II between the US and the Soviet
17 comments
Read more

Maximum time difference on Earth - 26 hours

maximum time difference Earth's largest time difference: Time Zone may be used to refer to the local time of a country or a region. Time zones in the world are obtained from the UTC. If each time zone were 1 hour apart, there would be 24 time zones in the world. The clocks throughout the World are not adjusted for Daylight savings as all are under the regulation of a Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).  UTC is 0 hours which means any area on the Earth can only be ahead (+) or behind (-) the UTC. We know that there are 24 hours in a day, so we may think that the biggest time difference between two points on the earth would only be 24 hours. But, according to the standard time (UTC) which we follow, the biggest time difference is 26 hours. The reason behind this is because of the man-made imaginary International Date Line (IDL) which was agreed in 1884 at the International Meridian Conference (IMC). The IDL serves as the "line of demarcation" between two consecutive calendar
4 comments
Read more

Penguins contribute to Climate Change

Penguins contribute to climate change The Earth’s average temperature has been keeping on increasing at a rapid pace over the past few decades. A major problem that contributes to the increase in global temperature is the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. When the Sun’s energy reaches the Earth’s atmosphere, some of it is reflected into space and the rest is absorbed and re-radiated by the greenhouse gases. The absorbed energy warms the atmosphere and therefore the surface of the world. This process maintains the Earth’s temperature at around 33 degrees Celsius warmer than it might rather be, allowing life on Earth to exist. Climate forcing is the change in the balance between radiation coming into the atmosphere and radiation going out. A positive radiative forcing tends on the average to warm the surface of the world, and negative forcing tends on the average to chill the surface. Likely, human activities such as burning fossil fuels, agriculture, and land clearing are
4 comments
Read more