Escaped from the doldrums of March Aunt Fanny's Devil's Dictionary of Cricket is alive and well (Hi E) and back in business.Well off-topic.
Most Americans I know who've come to NZ (and presumably this also would hold good for any that went to Oz, Britain, South Africa, the West Indies, India, Pakistan or Sri Lanka)find cricket to be totally inexplicable. Most dismiss it as a cultural quirk and immediately start complaining that baseball, NBA or NFL isn't shown at all, never mind live, on NZ TV. And most never seem to get over it. They get cable TV ASAP and live on ESPN.
Yet ... yet ... an American lecturer from Louisiana and another from Idaho (where? I hear you ask) started work at Otago University when I was working there. Like all the others, they initially carped bitterly about the lack of "real sport" in NZ - just that "rugby and cricket crap".
A few of us from the department were going to a one-day international between NZ and Oz and kidded these guys into coming along. Lying on the embankment in the sun drinking beer and eating hotdogs and sandwiches ain't so bad, and it mellowed one of them, in particular (the Louisianan) towards cricket. Going from "Why doesn't the bowler just throw the ball at the those sticks?" to challenging umpires' decisions "Ah, c'mon, he didn't touch the f***ing ball with the bat, how can he be out?" followed by a condensed and intense tutorial on LBW took about four hours.
Before you knew it, he was playing in the evening competition for a scratch team of University staff (no real competition, just fun, beer and wickets) and he developed into a reasonable slow/medium pace bowler. His scorn at the width of the cricket bat in comparison with a baseball bat just melted away when he was faced with 100kph deliveries from one or other of the many Otago reps who played for fun.
Last I heard he was the secretary of the University Cricket Club ...
Still, I find the notion of US cricket to be as much of an oxymoron as NZ baseball!
