There was a time (when I lived in my home country) when I thought baseball was the most boring team sport EVER. I mean, seriously, you sit and watch nine innings of … well, not much, really. Occasionally you get a pretty exciting game but, in my experience, that isn’t very often. Usually there is a whole lot of waiting for one or two exciting moments … maybe. Add to that the privilege of watching lots of men in tight pants scratching their balls and spitting a lot. It does nothing for me (baseball players tend to have oddly developed thigh muscles that totally put me off perving on them).
Then one day, I went to Australia and encountered cricket. The. Most. Boring. Team. Sport. EVER! Basically, as far as I can figure out, cricket consists of a bunch of bored looking dudes in white clothes standing around, throwing balls in the weirdest looking pitch technique I’ve ever seen, hitting said balls with an equally as weird looking bat and occasionally running back and forth between what appears to be two dismantled baby gates sticking up from the ground. And here’s the kicker: They sometimes do this FOR DAYS ON END. I’m not kidding. A single game of cricket can last for days.
As far as I can tell, cricket seems to only be popular because it is possible to play while drinking a beer and because the people “watching the game” can drink copious amounts of beer for days on end all the while using “watching the game” as an excuse. This is the only explanation I can come up with for the popularity if cricket because, otherwise, I have no freaking clue. Seriously, cricket makes me miss sitting on my ass waiting for something good to happen at a baseball game. It makes the seventh inning stretch look like some sort of genius, innovative moment of awesomeness … instead of a weird tradition. Yes, I realise there are probably nuances to the rules that I am missing (or, you know, all the rules) but, frankly, I’m not sure I want to be enlightened.
The Ausmerican 