Lords

Today I walked to Lords Cricket Grounds to watch MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) play. There was a tiny crowd of about 100 people there. The match was very interesting and I learned a lot more about the game from Stephen, a guy from Trinidad who sat near me and explained a few things I didn’t know.

WARNING: FROM THIS POINT ON, THIS POST IS EVEN MORE BORING THAN THE AVERAGE POST. (unless you need to learn about Cricket)

MCC is the club that owns Lords and basically rules the cricket world.

Here is a picture of the scoreboard.

This says that the current batters are Plumb and Southgate. Plumb has scored 4 runs, Southgate zero. Their team has scored 20 runs while having two wickets taken. The last wicket was just taken at 20 runs and Southgate has just entered the game. Ballard, who scored 4 runs, was the batter who was just dismissed. He was out by LBW with Mottram bowling. LBW is leg before wicket, meaning Ballard got himself between the ball and the wicket and prevented the ball from hitting the wicket.

Mottram is currently bowling to Southgate (asterisks) and is halfway through his current over. An over consists of six balls. After six balls, the teams switch to the other side of the pitch and another bowler bowls. In this case, Mottram and Jones are the two bowlers.

Mottram has bowled 3.5 overs (3 balls into his 4th over) and has 1 maiden, has allowed 13 runs and has taken one wicket. A maiden is an over in which the over team does not score a run. You can see that Jones has pitched 4 overs and has 4 maidens with 1 wicket taken. He ended up bowling 7 overs and getting 7 maidens.

Extras are runs scored without hitting the ball. Examples are, the bowler can step over the line while bowling, or the ball can get past the wicketkeeper and the batters can run between the wickets while it’s being chased down, kind of like a passed ball in baseball. I saw two runs score that way.

In this case, Hussain was out after scoring 5 runs when he popped the ball up and the bowler caught it. C and B Jones means Caught and Bowled Jones. Most batters I saw who made outs had the ball caught in the air. I saw a couple of LBW and one player was bowled which means the bowler got the ball past him and hit the wicket.

I watched from the time the game started at 10:30 until 12:45 when the teams broke for a 40 minute lunch. At that point I went and bought my own lunch and walked home.