Oh, where to start? [knuckle-cracking -e]
Cricket -- Pretty obvious. Name appears constant the world over.Yes, baseball, but with some sport attached!
In baseball, you're creased if you see a constant procession of batters going over the base plate. In cricket, you ache to see each batsman at the crease for as long as possible ... in baseball if you have all your batters struck out, you're on a sticky wicket unless you have a lot of home runs. In cricket, you want a lot of runs with as few batsmen home in the pavilion as possible. A lot of baseballers are out on bail, cricketers are out when the bails are struck, so to speak.
Soccer -- I assumed everyone but Americans called this sport some variation of "football" ('cept for the Italians who call it "kick"). This is apparently not true in Oz/NZ?Nope, it's soccer in Zild (and, I suspect, Oz). Football is rugby union in Zild, rugby league is, uh,
league. Oh, sometimes someone makes so bold as to call soccer
association football, but most Zilders see soccer players as the types who frequent gay bars on nights off .... so "association" is, by association, almost a dirty word ...
Australian Rules Football -- This is the sport on the round field with people constantly jumping about and kneeing each other in the back of the head, and the referees with the little gunslinger move to signal a goal, right? Despite watching it occasionally late-nights on one of the all-sports networks, I still have no understanding of the rules of this sport. This is called footy in Oz? And what in NZ? Is it even played in NZ?To call AFL "football" is to grossly malign the sport. Those aerial moves ... the grace and athleticisim of the players ... the long, flowing hair ... the referees who looks as if they should be judging a livestock competition ... the way the ball flies back and forth from one end of the pitch to the other, seemingly without motive force ... the fact that there are
four goal posts and
no crossbars ... the designer tight shorts, sleeveless vest designed to show off the muscular chests of the players and to divert attention away from the lack of brains under the flowing hair ... and exaggerated jockstraps (Ah, the Black Russian!) ... the lack of obvious rules ... they all add up to the sport of kings. Well, mostly of queens from Kings Cross in any case.
Aerial Ping-Pong Not played at any serious level in Zild. Well, no one who is serious about football plays it, anyway.
Rugby -- This is the one with the scrums and the no forward passes and the lack of teeth. A friend of mine in grad school played women's rugby. She was about 5 feet tall and 100 pounds. I have no idea how she survived. What do you call this one?We call it
football (is there any other kind?). Or, at a pinch,
rugby.
HTH, in an unbiased and strictly neutral way ...
but if we're talking tests, only the weather beat Australia then. 
