Bringing Cricket to American Sports Fans
Cricket on Campus
The college basketball season wrapped up last month with Florida taking home the national title and we've just had the NFL Draft, where the top college football players make the jump from the collegiate game to the pro game. Americans love sports and, for most fans, that love extends down to the game played at the college level. March Madness and the Draft were watched by millions of Americans -- and, heck, the draft isn't even a sporting event; it's three days of guys in nice suits getting their names called.
Cricket has definitely made a lot of inroads into the mainstream here in the US in the past few years. Major League Cricket has attracted some of the biggest names in the world to...(Read more)
Cricket and the Cosmos: Inside the Mind of Himanish Ganjoo
Here's all you need to know about Himanish Ganjoo: He's one of the world's most respected voices and thinkers when it comes to cricket stats and data analysis and he recently used that expertise to help India capture the 2024 T20 World Cup -- the team's first major international championship in over a decade. The scary part? Cricket isn't even his main gig. Ganjoo is a physicist who recently received his PhD in Cosmology. And he's about to move from the US... (Read more)
The Rules
Not the 18th century "Laws of Cricket," but a quick way to understand the basics of the game and be able to watch either live or televised cricket as if you've been doing it for years.
Terminology
Cricket is famous for its jargon and terminology. Don't fret! I've come up with the 40 most used words and phrases that you'll need in order to watch, understand, and enjoy the game.
Features
My take on what's going on in the sport. Hopefully, it'll help you understand things a little bit better. If it doesn't, I apologize in advance.
About CricAmerica
Why an already really busy guy decided to devote a ridiculous amount of his time to watching, thinking about, reading about, and writing about a sport he only discovered a few years ago.
Most Americans have a preconception about cricket -- that it’s a complex and slow-paced, days-long game played in England by guys dressed in white. And while, yes, this is partially true, it's generally based on very limited exposure. (It'd be like generalizing that football is a game played only by giant, freezing guys in Buffalo and Green Bay.)
The fact is that cricket is just a really weird version of baseball. Take a big swig of NyQuil, go to sleep, and have a dream about baseball.
That's cricket.
Batters have to be a bizarre combination of Tuukka Rask, Ichiro, and Mike Trout. The guys throwing to the batters are not only gunning it at 90-plus mph, but they get the added advantage of being able to bounce the ball to further mess with the hitter. No one on the fielding team -- other than the guy that's essentially the catcher -- is allowed to wear a glove. (And the ball is even harder than a baseball.) Oh, and there's no foul ground. You can hit the ball anywhere.
A NyQuil dream about baseball.
Other than that, though, the rules are incredibly similar to baseball.
My goal for CricAmerica is to have you be able to watch, understand, and enjoy cricket. Your initial investment is minimal. Start with The Rules section and the Features section and then poke around the rest of the site, which is constantly being updated.
The return on your investment? The ability to enjoy the athleticism, excitement, and drama of the second most popular sport in the world.
More importantly, it'll let you pretend to work while watching the best players in the world square off live in an Indian Premier League game at 11:00 on a Tuesday morning.
