Column: Exploring a different kind of World Cup

The reason cricket is so fantastic for thesis work (or any work, technically) is twofold. First, the Cup is being held in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, meaning that most matches start at 4 a.m. EST. Second, cricket is extremely slow and boring and almost nothing ever happens.

You can wake up around 5:30 a.m. around the middle of the first batting team’s innings, work for a few hours while keeping the game open in another window and before you know it you’ve gotten a good four or five hours of work in before it’s even noon.

Some might respond with the question, “If cricket is so boring, why on earth would we want to watch it?” The answer is, simply, because cricket terms are just so much fun. Commentators with accents from all over the former British Empire (because really nobody else plays cricket) talking about wickets and overs and boundaries and spin bowling and such things never fails to bring a smile to my face. And when cricket is exciting, it’s really exciting, as in the match the other day when England mounted an incredible comeback in the last few overs to achieve an amazing tie with India, 338-338.

Most Americans, if they know anything about cricket at all, know it as “that sport that takes all week,” and it is true that test cricket, the “purest” form of the sport, usually stretches over five days.

In more recent years, however, the organizers of the sport have sought to make the game more adaptable to tournament play like the World Cup with short-form versions, such as the variant played in the One Day International World Cup.

Among popular American sports, cricket is most similar to baseball, which is one of several sports derived at least in part from aspects of cricket. There are 11 players to a team, of which two are active for the batting team at any time. These batsmen attempt to defeat the wicket and score runs, which are accumulated by switching places one or more times after one of them hits the ball before the ball can be thrown back into the wicket area, or by hitting the ball past the boundary in any direction (four runs on the ground, six on the fly).

Six balls thrown are known as an over, after which the bowler (the player throwing the ball) is rotated out for the next over.

A player can make an out in a number of ways, including hitting a ball that is caught, failing to prevent the bowler from hitting the wicket behind him, being “run out” by being outside of the batting area when the ball is thrown back in and hit against the wicket or called out “leg before wicket” for blocking a ball with his leg pads that would have hit the wicket. When he is out, he is replaced by the next batter in the order and cannot return for the rest of that innings.

In ODI Cricket, a team’s innings lasts until there are 10 outs or until 50 overs have passed. After the first team bats, the second team comes to bat, knowing exactly how many runs they need to surpass their opponent.

Bowing to stereotype, the top nations in cricket are all former colonies of the British Empire or, of course, England itself. This year’s tournament contains 14 countries, the 10 full members and four associate members, who qualified out of the many associate members of the International Cricket Council.

The 10 full members — Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies (an amalgam of Caribbean nations) and Zimbabwe — automatically qualify for the tournament and are of drastically higher quality than the associate nations, who are represented in this World Cup by Ireland, Kenya, the Netherlands and Canada.

As I write these very words, associate nations have not won or come close to winning a match during the World Cup. New Zealand held Kenya to 69 runs all out (meaning they got 10 outs before 50 overs) and then surpassed that total within the first eight overs without surrendering any wickets at all. Even the worst full member nation, Zimbabwe, defeated Canada by 175 runs during their match.

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So cricket is kind of boring, and only a few random countries are good at it. There’s nothing else I can really say except that you have to see it and listen to the commentary to appreciate how awesome it is.

You might think I’m crazy. Heck, even I think I’m crazy. But if getting up at 5:30 a.m. to watch cricket and simultaneously be productive for an extra four hours or so is wrong, I don’t want to be right.