A New Year’s Resolution for Jerry

January 1, 2015 • 5:45 am

by Matthew Cobb

Jerry is in India, one the countries in the world that is most obsessed with cricket. Jerry’s New Year’s Challenge is to learn the names of all the fielding positions. Who said cricket was complicated?

NB The red positions are for a right-handed batsman. If he (or she) were to score a run, and their batting partner were to be left-handed, the positions would have to change, in the middle of the over. Compulsory positions exist for the 20:20 and one-day versions of the game. Are you still with me?

PS Despite being English and following cricket, I don’t know all these positions, though I do know the names, which is pretty useless.

87 thoughts on “A New Year’s Resolution for Jerry”

  1. Despite being English and being forced to play cricket in PE lessons throughout school (along with a many other sportball games) I didn’t even know a cricket field was round.

    1. It isn’t necessarily. Lords, for instance, is square with rounded corners. I suppose oval would be the ideal shape though. The Oval is oval.

      1. Actually, although the external shape of the ground is more or less an oval, since the recent building work The Oval playing area is more of a circle.

    2. 3 milliarcseconds per pixel is likely to be a more useful resolution. Unless you’re stuck for some thing to talk to the rickshaw driver about. In which case you can practice for London by complaining about the bloody Indian monkeys, living like animals, breeding indiscriminately, don’t pay no bloody taxes . . . . [descends into UKIP-typical rant].

  2. The wonderfully named “cow corner” isn’t mentioned. According to Wiki it is “the area of the field (roughly) between deep mid-wicket and wide long-on. So called because few legitimate’ shots are aimed to this part of the field, so fielders are rarely placed there – leading to the concept that cows could happily graze in that area.”

  3. A Scottish friend of mine was daughter of one of the few Scotsmen interested, nay obsessed, by cricket. He made her learn all the field positions so that when she got home from school she could phone him up at work and give a ball-by-ball description of the match on TV, and who was standing where on the field.

    1. Both include Long Stop. I’ve been watching cricket longer than I can remember and I have to admit I don’t remember ever hearing Long Stop.

      There’s a story in NZ cricket of a well known player (whose name currently escapes me) who was fielding at Third Man against a left/right combo. He had to change from one side of the field to the other, at least between overs. Eventually he borrowed a bike from a crowd member, and rode around the oval whenever he had to change over.

      1. Long stop is a seldom used position but in junior cricket, where young wicket keepers may struggle, it may be deployed to sweep up missed deliveries

      2. I’ve seen a long stop occasionally in T20. IIRC towards the end of the game with a fast bowler bowling, to prevent deflected boundaries. And perhaps because the WK wasn’t having a great time.

        Regardless of being used, it’s still a “grammatically valid” position so should be included.

    1. The best Brian Johnston on-air gaffe was surely
      ‘There’s Neil Harvey standing at leg slip with his legs wide apart waiting for a tickle!’
      I have no idea what his composure was like after that

          2. Sorry but its definitely apocryphal. I heard Brian Johnsons son interviewed on TMS and he conformed there was no evidence that his father had said it but that a myth had grown up around it. Blowers not a very reliable source!

  8. At the risk of opening a can of worms, I will share that I have in fact been banned from commenting at the Guardian for criticizing the captain of the (men’s) English cricket team. Or rather for criticizing a journalist who was failing to criticize him.

    1. That’s hilarious 😀

      Maybe cricket is the British version of “Don’t mention the war”?

      1. Some people treat cricket as if it were a matter of life and death. But fans think it’s more important than that.
        Incidentally, cricket is moderately popular on the Moray coast ; partly thanks to a suitable climate, but mostly because of the chance of beating the Gordonstoun boys at their own game, literally, and because they take losing so seriously and may even cry if laughed at hard enough.

        1. So basically it’s a good excuse to engage in some posh ridicule? 🙂

          Geordie Shore roll over.

      1. Yes it is. Relieved of his duties for exactly the same reasons as I was criticizing him for. And I’m not even English — usually I love watching England lose in farcical circumstances, but things have gotten so bad that even I can’t take watching it anymore. Their poor fans….

        1. I admit to sharing both not being English and the enjoyment of watching the team lose farcically.

          I feel bad for the players as long as they’re just trying, and they can’t help being put out there even when they’re clearly not good enough.

          It’s for the management and selectors that i enjoy seeing them lose, and i never tire of it. What a load of incompetent hot air.

  9. Of course, the rules of cricket can be simplified:

    1. There are two teams. One out, one in.

    2. The team that’s out try to get the player that’s in, out.

    3. When they do get him out, he goes in.

    4. Then the next player goes out. As long as he’s out, he’s in.

    5. The object is then for the team that’s out to get the second player out. When they get him out, he goes in.

    6. This process is repeated for each innings until the team that’s out gets the team that’s in all out.

    7. When the whole team is out, the team that was in goes out, and the team that was out goes in.

    8. Then they play a second innings until they’re all out. Except one player. He remains not out.

    9. The team with the most runs wins. Unless two members of the team that are in remain not out, in which case neither teams wins.

  10. Yes, but you don’t ever admit to placing a Long Stop (your wicketkeeper would hit you). It’s Fine Third Man, regardless of how straight he is.

    And 9 slips? Seriously?

    1. If the batsman could avoid edging it, that field would offer plenty of scoring opportunities!

    2. Zimbabwe v Aust … 23 Oct 1999: The Australian team fielding nine slips, during the second one day international between Zimbabwe and Australia at Harare Sports Club

    3. IIRC I saw 9 slips in a test between NZ and Oz in the mid-70s. Dennis Lillee was bowling superbly for the edged catch to the NZ number 11 batsman, who was far too slow to get the edge. Had Lillee bowled at the wickets, the batsman would have been bowled or LBW Almost immediately.

  11. it is slightly different with women’s cricket. Instead of “third man” it is simply “third”, and instead of “fine leg” it is simply “fine”.

    1. Would that be a holdover from Victorian times when one said, “limb” instead of “leg” as the term, “leg” was considered smutty?

  12. “Square Leg Umpire (Sq L U)”. I like the sound of that. His leg has got to be made of wood and hollow, don’t you think?

  13. Is it cricket to suggest the inventor was batted over the head when he approached the “Silly point”?

    Because while sports are jolly fun, there ought to be some regard for the public.

    1. It’s silly because it’s a silly place to stand. It can intimidate a bad batsman, and then an easy catch is likely, but you’re also likely to be hit by the ball with no time to react. Helmets and boxes are de rigueur.

  14. This covers a large chunk of What Americans Don’t Know when tackling the Times cryptic crossword. The rest consists of place names, tree species and characters from Coronation Street.

        1. My wife, who completes the Telegraph puzzle most days, describes the cryptic crossword as “one warped mind trying to beat another”. I can look at a completed grid and still not understand how she got there.

          1. Cryptics are pretty much the only crosswords I’ll do anymore, but I can’t do the English ones–too many cultural references I haven’t a clue about (heh).

    1. There are wickets at each end of the pitch, on the diagram the pitch is the brown rectangle and the wickets (aka stumps) are the rows of three very small black dots at each end. Mid wicket is so-called because it’s where the ball goes when the batsman hits the ball midway between the wickets (think in terms of the angle the batsman hits it) on the on side – the on side being the left side for a right handed batsman.

      1. My games master used to banish me to the cross – country course for changing hands after the bowler had started his run up. So I did that.

          1. I suspect that I wasn’t the first of many independent inventors. Judging from the delicate shade of blue-purple the games master turned. But since he’d been banned from hitting me with a stick, he didn’t have a lot of options. That wasn’t long before I simply stopped attending “Games” after the taking of names.

  16. A friend of mine was in England on holiday and took in a cricket match. After sitting there for 4 hours he asked the person next to him, “Doesn’t anything bore you people?”

      1. Yes, similar to the situation with sophisticated theology. You must be patient, little grasshopper, until you understand crickets.

          1. Or a cat…crickets singing together in an open field are lovely, but a lone one resonating in some corner of the house is beyond annoying. Fortunately, all I have to do is pick up Baihu, aim him in the general direction, set him down…and, no more than a minute later, the only sound is the quick quiet crunching of a carapace as he noms his wiggly treat….

            b&

  17. After spending more than three years in England many years ago I could say I knew slightly more about cricket than rugby. It was not much.

    I recall seeing cricket matches on the TV, usually BBC2 when they were not working in the garden. No wonder they would spend so much time at the pub.

    Just kidding, I loved it over there.

  19. This is a perfect example of how a foreign, completely fabricated belief system can insinuate itself into a culture to the point where, over a century later, people would take great affront to anyone disputing its “validity” in the culture and go so far as to riot and kill each other over differences about it. It’s interesting that India cast off many of the attributes of British colonialism, yet hung onto this love of cricket, as well as their Byzantine bureaucracy- it shows that there’s something going on here outside the realm of rational thinking.

    Though many people seem to acquire a love for, and even an obsession for “sports fan-dom” without a childhood upbringing in this milieu, the parallels between this phenomenon and the inculcation of religion in children are inescapable. When I see a photo of a family headed to a football game, with the young children wearing the team jerseys and even perhaps sporting the same, “team-color” face paint as dad and mom, I kind of cringe as I see a young mind being forced into a particular arbitrary belief system.

    I see a person hysterically exclaiming, “OUR team won!”, and I think, “It’s not ‘your’ team; you don’t own it- you don’t even KNOW any of these people.” A good reminder of the malleability of the human mind.

    1. Not a sports fan, I take it. 🙂

      Though many people seem to acquire a love for, and even an obsession for “sports fan-dom” without a childhood upbringing in this milieu, the parallels between this phenomenon and the inculcation of religion in children are inescapable. When I see a photo of a family headed to a football game, with the young children wearing the team jerseys and even perhaps sporting the same, “team-color” face paint as dad and mom, I kind of cringe as I see a young mind being forced into a particular arbitrary belief system.

      The teams and games are real, though.

      What do you think of the prospect of sport maybe one day replacing conflict as an outlet for tribalistic instincts?

      Not many days ago a lot was written about a friendly game of football that occurred in spite of some horrible circumstances.

      http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/11291421/British-and-German-soldiers-to-recreate-WW1-Christmas-football-match.html

      1. What do you think of the prospect of sport maybe one day replacing conflict as an outlet for tribalistic instincts?

        If my games master had tried making that argument he could have had a good debate and probably not have been treated as an irrelevant dinosaur by myself and increasing numbers of the pupils. But he couldn’t make an argument to work his way out of a wet paper bag. So we went our separate ways.

        1. As long as we don’t bring back Gladiatorial lethal combat back on sundays, it’s cool with me.

          Some of the Japanese game shows looks promising, imo.

          Surreal appeal that grows on you.

    3. The typical Indian would love cricket but hate the “Byzantine bureaucracy”.

      They are hardly in the same category.

      Cricket also played a small but significant part in the Indian Independence Movement. One of the basic premises of British colonialism was a “White Man’s Burden” inspired notion of “racial superiority” (This is not post hoc psychoanalysis: references to notions of Indians being an “inferior” people abound in writings of British politicians well into the twentieth century, all the way up to Winston Churchill). Achievements in fields ranging from sports (mainly cricket and hockey) to science or even literature and art were seen by many Indians as avenues for showing the British rulers that their ideas of racial superiority were blatant myths.

      1. Cricket also played a small but significant part in the Indian Independence Movement. One of the basic premises of British colonialism was a “White Man’s Burden” inspired notion of “racial superiority”

        Too right. Today, of course, the Indian cricket team is up there among the best in the world, thanks to leaders like Kapil Dev and, most recently, MS Dhoni and now Virat Kholi. For a wonderful movie about the transition, see Lagaan; it was nominated for but, if I recall aright,. didn’t win a Best Furrin Language Oscar.

  20. By coincidence I’ve just forwarded some wildlife photos taken on a trip to watch cricket in India!

  22. The field map is a bit of a cheat, though, to exaggerate the complexity of it all. If you take out all the fielding positions bearing qualifiers (“long”, “backward”, “deep”, “silly”, etc.) the map suddenly looks a whole lot simpler.

    Do also remember that everything about a sport becomes a lot simpler if you’ve grown up with it, and especially if you’ve played it.

  23. Cricket surely is a weird game! There is almost no cricket in Germany,only very few people play, mostly immigrants from Pakistan and India.

    I have friends near Durham, their son’s friend was playing for the University team and he invited me to see a game. Luckily for me his grandfather was visiting too and he explained what was going on. I had an enjoyable afternoon, despite understanding not much about the game.

  24. I’m just wondering if there has ever been a cricket version of Mornington Crescent? Of course the Rules would have to be heavily modified.

    1. I’m just wondering if there has ever been a cricket version of Mornington Crescent?

      I’d imagine so. If I recall aright, both Garden and Brooke-Taylor are cricket nuts (like moi).

    2. The rules of Mornington Crescent cover all cricket in less than 5 dimensions under the AggersBottham Convention if you’re playing Swindburn with side. Googlies can only be played from stops beyond Barking though.

  26. Silly mid off is a feilding position I can relate too, a little dangerous and a bit quirky..

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