How to Play Cricket

A brief guide to cricket rules

When a field game requires more time to produce a result than the Battle of Waterloo, you might say it has complicated rules. Napoleon Bonaparte's last battle took a single day. Test matches, the highest level international cricket games, take five days to play, with each day containing a six-hour playing session. Tea breaks alone could have their own individual cricket rules section. Nevertheless, we will now attempt a world's first: a brief guide explaining how to play cricket.

Cricket rules in brief

Cricket is played by two opposing teams of 11 players each. Cricket bears some resemblance to baseball, but the similarities can be misleading. For example, innings, a plural term in baseball, is a singular term in cricket. Each batting turn for a cricket team is called an innings. There are at most two innings per team in a single cricket match, and often only one.

After a coin toss, the 11 players of the fielding team take defensive positions in any formation their captain chooses. Measurements for a cricket field are not fixed. The field is elliptical or ovular, with a diameter of 450 to 500 feet. In the center of the cricket field is a strip of short grass known as a pitch. This is where the bowling and batting take place. The pitch is usually 10 feet wide and about 66 feet long, 5.5 feet longer than the distance in baseball from the pitcher's mound to the plate.

At each end of the pitch are three wooden stumps. These stumps, inserted in the ground and joined together by two wooden crosspieces known as bails, are known collectively as a wicket.

Standing at the wicket on each side of the pitch is a batsman for the hitting team. The pitcher for the fielding team is known as a bowler. A wicket-keeper, i.e. catcher, assists him. Unlike baseball, cricket rules require a new bowler after every "over" is completed. An over consists of six bowls. When a new bowler begins, he bowls from the opposite end of the pitch as the previous bowler. In this way, the two batsmen for the hitting team alternate turns as "striker" and "non-striker."

Both cricket bowling and hitting styles vary greatly, and unlike baseball, the cricket ball is usually bounced once before it reaches the batsman. If a ball is struck, the batsmen are not required to run. If they choose to run, each batsman runs to the opposite end of the pitch, and touches the ground behind the batting crease area with his body or bat to score a run. The cricket rules equivalent of a baseball home run is a ball that goes over the field boundary, counting for six runs, or only four if it bounced first. An out is recorded if a fielded ball is thrown and knocks the bails off the wicket stumps before a batsman reaches them.

An innings is over when 10 batsmen have been put out, or in some longer cricket matches, when the team captain finds it advantageous to declare an end to the innings. There are numerous ways a batsman can be put out, including a caught ball or a bowled ball that "breaks" the wicket: the cricket equivalent of a strikeout.

A cricket match can also end in several different ways, but the most common is when both teams have completed their innings. In two innings cricket matches, a team ahead by a designated margin after the first innings may ask the losing team to bat their second innings first and thus avoid prolonging the match.

Of course if you're unable to find 21 friends willing to play cricket with you, you can always go online and play stick cricket.