Two Ducks and a None
This past weekend, I played in my first ever cricket matches. There is a club at MIT that holds cricket sessions that is mostly made up of Indians and Pakistanis. They ran a little four team tournament over the weekend, which gave me the opportunity to play for the first time ever. As a batter, I did not fair very well. I did not score a run in either match, hence the two ducks ( in cricket a batsman who does not score is given a duck on the the scoreboard, I have no idea why this came about but I bet its quaint). Then in our third match, the top of our order played so well that when the designated number of overs were finished, I was not called to bat, neither were three other batsman from our team.
An over consists of six balls that are bowled at the wicket by the bowler. The batter then tries to strike the ball in order to protect the wicket and also to be able to score runs by running back and forth between the two wickets. There is another batsman at the other wicket and they communicate with each other about the running, which is exactly what did not happen very well in my second batting in our second match. The other batsman did not tell me he was running when I struck the ball very poorly, which left me with the decision to either let him get run out or to try to make it to the next wicket, which I did not do.
Since I did not bowl any during our matches it was not tested to see how well i would fair against these people who grew up playing the game. But I did prove to be quite decent at fielding, making a couple of significant stops that prevented the other side from scoring a lot of runs, and even at the end, I picked up a ball on the run and threw it at the wicket to knock the bails off the stumps in an attempt to run out a batsman; he got his bats just inside the crease before the bails flew but it was quite fun to have a go! I look forward to playing in a longer and larger tournament in September.
