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Joined: May 2000
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stranger
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stranger
Joined: May 2000
Posts: 19 |
Googly, I've heard, but only in Jerry Seinfeld's American Express commercial. But I have no idea what it is, nor am I familiar with a silly point or a yorker. What are they?
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 6
stranger
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stranger
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 6 |
Without delving into the mid-on and mid-offs - silly point is a fielding position in cricket - just picture the dumbest place to stand if you don't want to be beheaded by a fast moving cricket ball and you have silly point.
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Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 81
journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 81 |
One of the many reasons that cricket is a superior tactical game to baseball is that the fielding positions are not fixed but altered by the captain to suit the bowlers attack and the batsman's style. Silly point is a close in fielding position designed to get a catch off a batsman who is playing defensively (another difference, batsmen stay in until got out by being caught or bowled or run out or whatever so defensive play, where you protect the wicket until the bowler bowls a lose ball is ok. This tests the stamina and concentration of both batsman and bowler). A version of silly point is very silly point followed by suicide point at which point cricket becomes a contact sport. A yorker is a ball bowled at the batsman feet not likely in itself to get the batsmen out but designed to break his concentration. A googly is an offbreak ball bowled with a leg break action, ie a ball that is signalled to do one thing but actually does another.
As you can possible see cricket is very much a game of mental concentration and stamina. People who complain that it takes to long miss the point of the game which is to test mental stamina. As a beside the cricket ball is just as hard as the baseball and the bowler runs up so the speed of the cricket ball is faster than that of the baseball. More than one batsman has been killed by being struck on the head by a ball.
With regards to baseball I'm in favour of raising the mound back to it's full pre 1969 height.
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,004
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,004 |
To add to Philip's erudite post...
In cricket, there are two notional 'sides' to the wicket (or pitch, the strip between the batsman and the bowler). The 'off' side is the side on which he/she holds the bat. The 'leg' side (also called the on side) is, therefore the side where his/her legs are.
An off-break, therefore, is a ball bowled so that, when it pitches (bounces) it spins from the off-side towards the leg side. (In practice, it is an off-break even if it pitches on the leg side and then moves even further towards leg.) The leg break, by analogy, is a ball that does the opposite.
The googly is such a famous ball because, as you may understand, a bowler has to hold the ball in a distinctive fashion to bowl either an off break or a leg break. Good batsmen watch the bowler's hand to figure out what sort of ball to expect. In a googly, however, the action looks like one type of ball, but the spin is the opposite to what one would expect. The current master of legspin, Shane Warne, has a good googly, but the most legendary googly I ever remember was the one 'patented' by the Indian spinner Chandrashekhar (playing in the '60s and '70s).
I agree with Philip that cricket certainly taxes both tactical skills and stamina (how many other games are regularly played over a five day period?), but I am not sure of the claim that it is tactically 'superior' to baseball. I just think the tactics are different.
cheer
the sunshine warrior
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Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 81
journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 81 |
I suppose I think cricket is tactically superior because there are so many more variables to consider in cricket than in baseball. However, I'm not suggesting that it's a superior game. (It is but I'm not suggesting that.). Unfortunately the match fixing scandel has rather taken the edge of the game at the moment. Hopefully the game will rise afresh much as baseball has done after the strike.
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,004
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,004 |
I agree. The Corinthian ideals with which we invest cricket ("It's just not cricket!" - what more resonant expression could there be of a sense of fair play?) appear to have been sorely besmirched by this scandal.
The only funny thing I heard about it was the one about the bookie who wasted money because he bribed the English team to lose! (The current state of the English cricket team is nearly as depressing as the match-fixing scandal, IMO.)
I also agree that cricket seems, at least to me, to be one of the subtlest, and 'best' games around. But then that is probably more a result of my upbringing than any innate superiority in the game itself. And I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed my one baseball viewing experience (Wrigley Fields, and the Cubs actually won that one).
cheer
the sunshine warrior
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981 |
I was taken to lords a few years ago. It was a lovely sunny day for a pleasant doze and the Sunday papers - cricket is a big yawn. I was impressed by Angus Deayton (sorry, another UK reference) who put it in Room 101 alongside BBC's Radio 2.
Baseball has got to be more interesting.
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,004
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,004 |
As one might tritely say, "it's all a matter of taste". For cricket fans, Atherton's unbeaten 180+ in South Africa a few years ago was possibly the greatest achievement in English sport since, perhaps the '66 World Cup. For others, it's a tale told by an idiot, full of...
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the sunshine warrior
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 6,511
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 6,511 |
I love baseball. Yet I've never seen a cricket game. Thanks for the insights, y'all from Over the Pond. I lived abroad (in the so-called "Third World") for so long that when I came back to the US, baseball was sort of a comfort thing to me. Still is :-) ... *ahem* Go BRAVES!
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Joined: Apr 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542 |
Over here in the US there has been lots of fine writing about baseball over the years (Roger Angell, fiction editor for The New Yorker, leaps to mind); baseball seems to lend itself to very lyrical prose. I'm wondering if there is anything comparable in the world of cricket. http://members.aol.com/tsuwm/
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