Wednesday, 18 January 2012

Why we should all love Cricket and Baseball


I love Cricket and would make it compulsory. And for the colonials reading - Cricket the game rather than Cricket the insect. There is the same passion over the pond for baseball. A sport with so much flavour, so much intricacy and history that it becomes more than just what we do when Saturday comes. It becomes a place to meet, to connect, to place ourselves in a social context as well as a sporting one.

British sport doesn’t have as many ‘situation sports’: the slow tick of the overs, the rapidly fading light, the last man in and the crowd on the edge of their seats. The rampant explosion of power as a six flies over the rope or a bunny is skittled out. The same calm before the storm exists  in baseball where the air itself is still before the pitcher winds up.

These sports teach us about ourselves as well as our culture. The historical importance of baseball and cricket are there for all to see, but the character building property of these sports, of these metaphors for the greater game of life is far more important. They are so multi-faceted that you cannot think of them as sports alone. The physical game is there for all to see: the swing of the bat, or the throw of the ball, the athleticism in the field. But then there is the bravery: the willingness to hurl yourself at the ball to save a vital run, to stand before a ninety mile an hour pitch or delivery and swing hard for the wall or the rope. It takes time before you get used to the danger and then after a while the fear comes back. A broken finger, a bruised thigh, some war wound from 22 yards away. And then there is the aspect that really gets me into the game. It’s about the mind, and maybe all sport is after a while; but more so these two gems.

How to bowl or pitch, how to field, what will the surface or the playing conditions do, where do you bat and how? Every action has a thousand variables that need to be weighed and measured and planned for. There is a poetry in the slow-mo, frame by frame in every sportscast that shows inch by inch the widening of the eyes, the grasping hand, the raised expectations and the dashed dreams; all over the course of a single play, a microcosmic game within a game within the game.

Cricket and baseball teach us about life, and in the course of an afternoon in the field about ourselves and how we deal with struggle, moment by precious moment. When we are sitting by the fireside in fifty years we will remember not seasons, or stories or the grand personalities that coloured our lives; but that split second we held a catch and won the moment; maybe even the game.   

That’s what I want for my students: a memory that will last.

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