Today’s interactive Google Doodle celebrates the ICC Champions Trophy, and I have no idea what that is. (I’m sure many readers will!), You can play cricket yourself (as an animal) by simply pressing the button to swing when the ball approaches you, and score runs! I haven’t time to play a lot, but I’ll try later. Watch out for those googlys!
Here’s Google’s explanation:
Ah, summer: the sound of leather on willow, and the spectacle of cricket … cricket! As the tournament begins in the Oval cricket ground, something buzzes outside. A team of crickets sans tickets have set up their own wickets for a game of pest cricket! As they face their archrivals, the snails, it’s sure to be a match for the centuries. Don’t be fooled by their sluggish looks — these fielders can be fast on their feet!
To celebrate the 2017 ICC Champions Trophy, we’re inviting everyone to tap/click and take a swing at our pocket-size game!
We know that cricket is loved worldwide, so we wanted to make sure our Doodle works for everyone, including those on slower mobile networks. We kept the file size fly-sized, and the result is our smallest interactive Doodle ever — even snail networks can load it in seconds.
Go to the game by clicking on the screenshot below:
Curiously, Google’s map of this Doodle’s reach doesn’t reach the US, but I can see it fine. Note that it’s all cricket-loving nations, but. . . Cuba?????
Possibly the map isn’t calibrated delicately enough to be able to select the Commonwealth countries of the Caribbean without selecting the whole region?
I highly recommend this video on the subject of cricket:
Very funny indeed.
I noted how many cricket aficionados like to make explaining the game difficult.
It s quite simple, I’m sure I could explain it in less than half a dozen paragraphs!
Terms like Fine leg, Short leg, Gully, Googly, or Chinaman are NOT essential to understand the game (the first three are just field positions, the other two spin bowling options).
Makes about as much sense to me. There’s a funny if coarse explanation somewhere online of Jim Jefferies explaining cricket on a radio call-in show. He managed to make it sound exciting.
I’m feeling unlucky. It doesn’t show up for me.
Try clicking on Here’s Google’s explanation:
If that was yesterday’s Doodle, Google are a bit late to the party. The ICC Champions trophy started a a couple of weeks ago and we are now at the semifinal stage.
The ICC Champions Trophy is a one day cricket competition between the eight top ranked one day sides. It starts with two leagues in which each team plays the other teams and the top two from each league qualify for the semifinals.
I’m not quite sure how far to go with the cricket explanation. You might find it insulting if I explain the differences between the one day game and the (superior) test match format and you already know.
It was out on the day it started – we have not got it in the UK today…
Yes, in fact, it came out on June 1st
https://www.google.com/doodles/icc-champions-trophy-2017-begins
I think Cuba has been mistaken for Jamaica which is a large part of West Indies cricket. The Windies as they’re known!
Although, the West Indies are not in the tournament this year.
Thanks to this GD, only now do I know/understand what the players do in a cricket match.
We had this doodle 2 weeks ago when the Champion’s Trophy started… not today!
Whenever Ireland do well at cricket I’ve a little tradition, I go on Wikipedia and try to figure out what the hell the score meant
It usually means Ireland have lost – heavily.
A Cricket playing Cricket. Worked fine for me. I’m fairly good at the really easy ones.
Not the first umpire I’ve come across who’s as blind as a mole.
Cricket is a bit like baseball, but more civilised 🙂
These ICC Champions Trophy series is about 50 overs cricket (aka ODI’s: One Day Internationals), one of the shorter forms of the game. Each team can play 50 overs (=300 balls) and that’s it.
There is also Test cricket, which plays out over 5 days, the real cricket according to purists, and T20, which gives only 20 overs (=120 balls) per team per game. In T20 the IPL (Indian Premier League) is the big thing. Great cricketers are half Gods in India. BTW, nearly half of the players in the IPL are from other countries.
To my regret South Africa is out, again. Although they are the Nr 1 ranked ODI team in the world, they always do badly in these tournaments. That earned them their epithet of ‘Chokers’, an unmentionable term here in SA.
Since Pakistan -to my regret- beat Sri Lanka today, the semifinals will be Pakistan v England and India v Bangla Desh.
On the map several cricket playing nations are missing: Ireland, Netherlands (they do not have a National league, but do have a National team playing ODI’s and T20), Afghanistan, Kenya, Singapore are the ones that immediately come to mind.
I guess indeed that Cuba partially stands for the Windies (West Indies), great champions in the eighties and early nineties, but alas less so recently.
I realise now that the map only shows the Test playing nations.
Rankings are calçulated by matches playad over the last 4 years.
The ODI rankings of the semi-finalists are : India 3, England 4, 6 for Bangladesh and 8 Pakistan.
The big losers -until now- of the 2017 ICC Champions Trophy are: South Africa 1, Australia at 2, New Zealand 5 and Sri Lanka 7.
Cricket was once popular in the USA – George Washington played it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_cricket
I believe the first international was the USA v Canada. There have been recent international matches played in Florida. T20 might catch on in the USA – lasts about 3 hours or same time as a baseball match.
Yes, T20 just might. And if so, maybe the other forms of the game too.
BTW, purists sometimes scathingly refer to T20 as ‘baseball’ 😊, “just big hitting, no tactics.”