My Philosophy on Cricket...

Well, it is looking a lot like I may get to come home sooner, rather than later.  Not sure 100% yet, but odds are I shall be home before October, anyway.  If they make me stay, I am prepared to, but I just won't fill anything out to stay.  If the Army has taught me anything, it is "Never Volunteer for Nothing!"  So I won't.  Now I just have to wait and see.

There is only so much that a person can watch soccer.  Soccer is on every channel every day, all day, and it is always the same freaking games.  So when the Camel races are not on I tend to watch Ten Sports, which is ALL CRICKET, ALL THE TIME.  At least trying to figure out what the heck was going on was fun.  That took me about a week.  There are all kinds of weird rules, but the one that I had the hardest time figuring out was the LBW law.  Leg before wicket.  I finally figured out that if the ball hits your body and it would  have, otherwise, hit the wicket, you are out anyway.  How exciting, right?  I have figured out a few things why we don't play cricket much in the states.  I will bore you with those thoughts now.

1.  Cricket is way to BORING!  I thought that Baseball, when you really have no interest in the teams, was boring, but they actually have lunch and tea breaks in Cricket.  That should clue the spectator in a bit...if they players need to stop (even before an innings is over) for a break, that the sport probably is not moving too quickly.

2.  The don't use Mitts.  They have this ball about the size of a Lacrosse ball, and looks about as hard, too.  I just don't think that it would feel very good on our Mitt-trained hands.  There is a guy who acts like a catcher, but he wears these gloves that look like they got them out of Aquaman's garbage can.  Notice the Aqua Man gloves in the picture.
3.  These guys DO NOT know how to celebrate.  The only real celebrations that go on are by the bowler when he gets a guy out by knocking over the wickets or by the aforementioned LBW, or by the catcher dude when he catches what we would call a foul tip...only there is no foul territory.  These celebrations fall into two categories.  The first being the gay trot after the wicket, the second being the extremely high ball toss after the foul tip with the Aquaman gloves.  Totally stupid looking on both accounts.

4.  You have to bat and run wearing goalie equipment.  This is the funniest thing I have ever seen.  These guys dressed like hockey goalies have to run back and forth to score runs.  I think that you can get either runner out by knocking over the wickets before they get their body or their bat over the line...and you can over run the area.
5.  You can't wear your hat while "Bowling."  Apparently they don't let you wear your hat while you are the bowler.  I see them hand it to the referee dude, so he must be temporarily confiscating it or something.  I don't know if this is an official rule, but I will choose not to find out to maintain some sort of "Mystery" to the game.
6.  The game looks EASY.  I swear that if the worst baseball player in single-A ball where to done the goalie equipment and grab a bat he would be the greatest Cricketer of ALL TIME.  So far I have yet to see a serious athlete play this game.  I think that there is a reason that India, Pakistan, and Sri-Lanka love this game...they put all their best athletes into it (which are the equivalent of little-leaguers), and it is all they got.  The Aussies and the Kiwis are about the only exception, but all their real athletes are playing Rugby and Soccer...so they probably get the people that we send to Basketball or ping pong, or something meaningless like that.
7.  You have to know math to figure this stuff out.  Their rules are complex, and there is an end to this game.  If you are ahead and get 10 wickets, the game is over.  If you don't get 10 wickets, you can end the game by running out of overs (an over, I have found out, is 6 balls).  I think that some games have limited overs (one day matches) and some don't, not sure, have not stuck around for a 5 day marathon session to verify, and I am too lazy to read that far.  SO in these limited over matches, you have to maintain a certain run production per over in order to ensure victory.  They even have some strange variation in the case of rain where they predict what you need based upon what the other team would have gotten had the rain not spoiled their fun-in-the-sun.

Enough of my Cricket ramblings...you get the point.

How about them Hawks?  Awesome game last night.  Glad I stayed up and watched it.  Now that the Cubs are pretty much mathematically eliminated, the hopes and dreams of every Chicagoan resides in them.  I think that they can do it if they get past the Sharks.

I need to get to dinner.  I bet I have a dream about Aqua Man getting caught in a hockey net tonight...

Later