For years now, I’ve been experiencing the onset of a slow love affair with cricket. Maybe it’s because I love puzzles (especially the cryptic kind), and here in North America, cricket is usually shrouded in mystery. It’s viewed as baseball’s exotic, off-kilter cousin whose rules are just a bit too cryptic to figure out, thank you very much, especially if there’s a baseball game on.
As it turns out, just as with cryptic crosswords, puzzling through the rules of cricket offers great satisfaction. Now that I have a clue what’s happening on the pitch, I can hardly tear myself away. And the language! Can any other sport compete with googlies, doosras, yorkers, maiden overs and ducks?
There’s a kind of poetry to cricket. In honour of the 2011 Cricket World Cup, about to begin in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, here’s my mini-doc on how I came to love the sport:
And my guide to Team Canada appears in this week’s edition of Eye Weekly in Toronto.