Cricket has become cool again. They have revitalized the sport and are introducing it to a whole new generation of youth. They tried to do this with basketball a while ago and that sport actually has people that don't fall asleep watching it (I however am not one of them). Basketball's experiment was called Slamball! Yeah it actually had an exclamation point in it! No it didn't but it might as well have. There idea was to put trampolines on the court thus allowing people to catapult themselves towards the net (take that Michael Jordan) and eliminate any sort of athletic skill required. Thankfully that never took off despite its prestigious spot on Spike TV, the network for manly men, and in no way overgrown nerds who need to live vicariously through television. And so gone were Slamball superstars Rob Wilson and Kevin Whogivesacrap, relegated to their previous positions of prestige shooting crumpled up taquitos wrappers into trash cans as night shifts at 7-11.
Well have no fear because cricket has seen its biggest resurgence since it was invented 800 years ago, when its only competition as a recreational sport was trepanning, and the Black Death. These new players are "fast and furious" and show how extreme they are by having extreme qualities like long hair and athleticism (according to the article Indians participating in this "sport" are not characteristically athletic). This new version of cricket has the following changes, apparently...
- Both teams have a single innings and a bat for a maximum of 20 overs (this makes no sense grammatically but it is from Wikipedia, the bastion of awesomeness and in no way ever has any mistakes ever, cause it community and why would a community ever be wrong)
- A game is completed in about three hours, with each innings lasting around 75 minutes (again with the pluralization of "inning" when speaking of something as a single entity, but I shouldnt argue with them cause its an English game and they invented the language... what do I know)
- Bowlers may bowl a maximum of only 4 overs per innings. (why are there bowlers in a baseball stadium?)
- If the fielding team doesn't start to bowl their 20th over within 75 minutes, the batting side is credited an extra 6 runs for every whole over bowled after the 75 minute mark; the umpire may add more time to this, if he considers the batting team is wasting time. (alright I give up I have no idea what any of this means)
If nothing else this moves Cricket up a few spaces to somewhere between competitive curling and recreational badminton. No one in America can ever complain that Soccer is a boring sport. Just reading about Cricket has taken 10 years off my life and this is the "non-boring" version. I say the New York Times should stay away from international sport lame stories and focus on all the great sports heroes we used to have in this country before they got arrested.
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