hi, I've been lurking for a while, wondering if an interesting thread was ever going to arise.
Roger Odisio, 12 Oct 99, 16:52
> Fascinating, no? Nothing like this in cricket, is there? There is, in
> fact, nothing even interesting about cricket, which, correct me if I'm
> wrong, doesn't even produce any stats to pour over.
>
you're wrong: http://www-usa.cricket.org/link_to_database/STATS/ would be a place to start.
This is the kind of list where every so often Americans start crowing to each other about how with the international proletariat they are because they have heard of soccer. What they don't realise is that soccer is really only a big sport in places - South America and the European sub-continent. The combined population of these continents is smaller than that of India - where cricket is by far the most popular sport. If you count Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Australia and all the thousands of cricket-playing islands in the Pacific, Carribean and North Atlantic, the huge swaths of formerly pink countries in Africa and the Middle East, and the enthusiastic newcomers to the sport in Southeast Asia, you'll see that perhaps 2 billion people live in cricket-playing nations. Perhaps 1.5 billion in countries where cricket is the main game.
Yet Americans, particularly leftist Americans, blithely insist that that soccer is the international game of the masses. It is true that many people do play it, but it is also true that these people are disproportionately wealthy and geographically and culturally close to the United States. Some weird perceptual twist makes Americans think that cricket is an extremely English game, when the English are mad about football, and that football is a Third-World game, when the Third World plays cricket. Then they go on to suggest that baseball is American. Baseball I believe is to Dutch Rounders as the Kiwifruit is to the Chinese Gooseberry - a sacharrine standardisation of a wild and exotic fruit. The chinese gooseberry was renamed for the US market, at a time when chinese-anything was hard to sell. Dutch Rounders can only have been renamed as a nationalist project, at a time when America needed something to call its own. You make quite a deal about the standardisation of rules and dimensions - as if these constituted the invention of a new game. This is not the case - apart from the fact that most participants in any sport do not play in official games on standard courts - you'll find that, by your definition (precise universal rules), NO sports existed at the beginning of the 19th century. Except perhaps tennis and bowls. Standardisation of sporting codes was a lateish 19th and early 20th century project, as was the development of administrative bodies and representative teams. So to say baseball became a new game when the regulations were ossified is to imply that every sport currently played came into existence at around the same time. I guess you could well argue that.
Another thing that shouldn't be underestimated is the geopolitical importance of cricket. Earlier this year when India and Pakistan were scrapping over Kargil, their national cricket teams were playing in the cricket world cup in the UK. Throughout the conflict the Times of India <http://www.timesofindia.com/> kept its cricket news in the top lefthand corner of its website (while war dominated the rest of the page), and its daily polls were as likely to be questions like "Should Azherruddin stand aside as captain?", "Is Sachin Tendulkar at the top of his form?" as "Should India test more nuclear devices?". Pakistan lost its World Cup match against India, but went on to reach the final, while India didn't even make the semi's. This divinely equitable solution may have saved thousands of lives by allowing each side a bit of pride. Maybe I'm making too much of it, but as even Chomsky has noticed - Sport is Important. After the World Cup Pakistan, the West Indies (combined Carribean teams -former world champions now ruined by US sattelite TV) and India were due to meet for a tournament in Toronto. The Times of India poll asked if the tournament should go ahead, and responses were abut 2/3 against, and eventually the tournament was rearranged so that West Indies played both sides, but they never played each other. Anyway, I believe if it were not for cricket, there would never be peace in South Asia. Can you make a similar claim for baseball? i don't think so.
douglas bagnall plays both cricket + soccer