The world's 2nd most popular sport you don't know much about, here's a beginners guide to it (featuring @unrealisback as author)

Attention: This post has been written by @unrealisback

Would you like to know more about the worlds second most popular sport which is like a religion for 1.5 billion people?

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Followed by more than 2.5 billion people all across the world, the passion for cricket in South Asia is a spectacle to be seen. But unlike football cricket is a not understood by many outside its fan base. With this post I would like to introduce my fellow Steemers to this fun sport which is nothing less than a religion for its fans.

If you understand how baseball works then you’ll easily catch up on the rules of cricket as there are a lot of similarities between two sports.

The cricket field

Cricket is played on a oval field, which is approximately 137 to 150 metres in diameter, but varies from ground to ground. The size approximately 4 times that of baseball field.

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The rectangular patch in the center of the ground is called Pitch and it’s 22 yards long. The circumference of the ground is called Boundary.

On two ends of the pitch are three wooden sticks with two bails on their top and together they are called Stumps. The stumps look like this:

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Teams

There are two teams playing at any moment of time, one is the Batting Team and other is Bowling Team. Each team has 11 players in total, but on the field there are always 2 members of batting team, and all 11 of the bowling team. Each team gets to bowl and bat during a match.

What does batting team(or a batsmen) do?

There are always two players of batting team on the field. The one who faces the ball is called striker and the other is runner. The goal of the batting team is to score runs. Runs can be scored when players upon hitting the ball run between the pitch, just like players running between the bases in baseball. Or the player can hit the ball outside the boundary to score 4 or 6 runs. 

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What does the bowling team(or a bowler) do?

The bowler from one end of pitch throws the ball, overarm, towards the batsmen who his on the other end of the pitch. The goal of the bowler is to get the batsmen out. Batsmen can be out in many ways, one of them being bowled out. When the batsmen misses the ball and it hits the stump, the batsmen is given out. When when batsmen gets out the other comes in. The target of the bowling team is to bowl out 10 batsmen and try to prevent them from making runs by fielding the ball. The other common ways of dismissing a batsmen are:

Catch Out

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Run Out

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What is an over?

An over constitutes six legal attempts by the bowler to bowl a ball to the batsmen. 

How many overs are there in a match?

There are different formats of the game, both short and long. The most popular format today is 20-20, in which each team gets to bat and bowl for 20 Overs each. In One Day International (ODI) format each team gets 50 overs.

Who wins the match?

The runs scored by each batsmen are added up, and the number that comes out is called the team score. This number is suffixed with another number, which indicates the number of batsmen that have been bowled out by the opposition team. So if you see a score of 122-4 or 122/4 this means 122 runs in total have been scored and 4 batsmen have been dismissed.

The team that scores the most runs at the end of the match is the winner.

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With this post I have tried to cover very basic aspects of the game, so that next time you watch it, you’ll get some idea of what is going on. With my future posts I will try to dig deeper and share more rules of the game.

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Attention: This post has been written by @unrealisback

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