PSA to the USA: Cricket has landed

As co-hosts of the men’s T20 World Cup, and having just achieved one of cricket’s most astonishing upsets, Americans may just now be realising the very existence of their national team and perhaps – just perhaps – they might be okay at the game. To help Americans understand their new pastime, I fielded a series of questions from a curious Yankee.

So, the United States – wily edgelord, gallant master of Normandy, creator of baseball, jazz and the deep-dish pizza – just beat Pakistan in this sport you call “cricket”. How big a deal is it?

Well, in terms of your country surprising and humiliating Pakistan, this easily ranks with the time Barack Obama sent those two Black Hawks into Abbottabad without telling Osama bin Laden’s hosts. While Americans may be largely oblivious to your team’s historic triumph, Pakistan’s humiliation might best be measured by the indescribable pleasure it gave a billion Indians.

U-S-A! U-S-A!

Indeed.

Wait, was Pakistan aware of bin Laden’s presence mere kilometres from its national military base?

Contestable, but likely. They’ve always professed ignorance, but there’s a weight of opinion that suggests otherwise.

What is cricket?

Geez. Can I answer by saying it’s a state of mind?

No.

Okay. Well, professionally, there are three forms of this whole stick-and-ball lark. The one in question, T20, is the shortest and fastest and the one most likely to condemn the sport’s purists to an early grave, clutching their chests.

Why?

They see it as a vulgarity: the rules of T20 strongly incentivise aggression at the cost of the game’s tactical nuances. It also flattens the deliciously subtle variety of individual skills you might see in Test cricket.

I don’t know what any of that means.

Perhaps you could think of it like this: T20 is to Test cricket as stickball is to baseball. Or you could think of it as tradition being corrupted by modernity’s instinct to flatter and monopolise our ever-diminishing attention spans.

Might it be that the average person doesn’t have a spare five days to watch a whole Test match?

I take your point.

I see that for these T20 matches you’ve adopted some American flair – some razzamatazz, if you will – in the form of fireworks, T-shirt cannons and pipes that belch giant flames.

Unfortunately. I’m old enough to remember when the only entertainment a fan needed was watching David Boon nonchalantly readjust his box, or Merv Hughes perform warm-up stretches on the boundary – our capacity to be charmed by such things encouraged, obviously, by a dozen cups of bitter.

I read somewhere that J.K. Rowling invented cricket – is that true?

Emphatically not. It was Samuel Beckett.

The nomenclature is confusing. As I see it, the basic goal is for the batting side to score as many runs as they can, and for the fielding side to take as many wickets as they can while conceding as few runs as possible. But this word “wicket” would seem to apply to three separate things: the pitch the game is played on, the sticks at either end of it, as well as an “out”.

You’re learning fast.

There are also yorkers, maidens, sweeps, slips, hooks, gullies, third men and silly mid-offs. There are googlies and flippers. There are off-cutters and chin music. Can you explain these to me?

I don’t have all day, mate. Can I just say every sport has its own exotic vocabularies and that we love and have accepted ours.

Fair enough. What can you tell me about the game’s most infamous scandals?

Australia’s equivalent of Watergate was something we like to call… Sandpapergate.

Sandpapergate?

Correct.

That’s a remarkably inelegant term. But tell me about it – you say it’s the Aussie equivalent of a scandal that forced the resignation of a president and further poisoned America’s faith in its leaders?

I think if you squint, there’s no appreciable difference between Richard Nixon and our Test captain at the time, Steve Smith, though presumably Nixon would have fidgeted far less at the crease. See, both men had their talents but, in the grave crucible of leadership, their sense of perspective shrank. Both men became too ruthless in their pursuit of victory. So, Nixon ordered crooks to break into the office of his political enemy’s therapist; Smith assented to the coarsening of a ball with sandpaper so that it might achieve some pleasing aerodynamic qualities. Our boys called it headbutting the line. Well, Nixon and Smithy both smashed their skulls through it.

This comparison seems particularly tenuous and hyperbolic.

Well, we took it quite seriously at the time.

How seriously?

Smith was stripped of the captaincy and lengthy suspensions were applied to several players. There was great public shame and some embarrassingly tearful press conferences. Our prime minister at the time – who would have a similar knowledge of the game as yourself – was moved to solemnly remark upon the spiritual consequences of the scandal. It was thought of as a national humbling, a confusion of identity, proof the spirit animal of Australian cricket had become a pitiless werewolf. Basically, from now on, all Australian history books will acknowledge it as an epochal moment and see the country’s development as existing either pre- or post-Sandpapergate.

Interesting. What else?

Well, you may have heard about the stumping of Jonny Bairstow during last year’s Ashes?

Nope.

Okay. Well. We were playing the Poms …

The Poms?

The English – the chaps you heroically rebelled against. So, we were playing these pompous clowns, and they were banging on about how they’d invented the six and how their style of cricket was unprecedented in its glory and courage, and they even gave their delusion of grandeur a name: Bazball. And, frankly mate, it was all a bit much. So, anyway, it’s the Second Test and their batter, sweet Jonny Bairstow, distractedly wanders from his crease with the air of a child inspecting bugs in a meadow. Very silly. The ball has not been declared dead and our canny wicketkeeper throws down the stumps and dismisses him. Still with me?

Not at all.

That’s okay. Now, it just so happens that this occurs at the famous ground of Lord’s – home of the Marylebone Cricket Club, which is where the game’s genteel legislators and custodians of its “spirit” reside. Great decorum is expected of these aristocrats, but when Bairstow was stumped they see yet another intolerable example of Aussie boorishness and they abusively erupt. Spill their drinks, heckle and jostle our players when they walk past on their tea break. In the fracas, the knots of their silk ties tragically loosen. It was quite the story, mate.

I’m not sure I follow. Had the Aussies successfully got sweet Jonny Bairstow “out”?

Absolutely, a point somehow lost on the game’s gin-soaked, castle-owning rule wizards. But their sudden ignorance of the game’s laws was, I suspect, encouraged by the outrage Australia had committed against their moral delicacy. They saw the stumping as a breach of the game’s spirit, and thus a cousin of the whole sandpaper thing. You see, for England, victory had become entirely abstract – defined not by ever actually winning, but by how well they upheld in their own minds their moral superiority and swashbuckling elan. They seemed both supercilious and pathetically defensive – a terrible combination.

And how did Australians respond?

We laughed.

How are England doing in this T20 World Cup?

Terribly. It’s prime time for schadenfreude if you’re Indian or Australian.

So, I’ll be honest: I still can’t see cricket taking off here. Didn’t Charles Darwin suggest that equally passionate commitment to both baseball and cricket is, in an evolutionary sense, impossible?

I wasn’t aware of that but concede the great man’s point. Still, remember what Nixon said: “Our little girl Tricia named it ‘Checkers’. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.”

I don’t follow.

Sorry, wrong quote. Here: “For one priceless moment in the whole history of man all the people on this Earth are truly one – one in their pride in what you have done and one in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.”

I still fail to see the relevance.

Never mind.