Department Of Things That Will Not Work
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No, cricket will never catch on in America.
It’s slower than baseball.
It’s weird.
It’s not something any American kid plays.
It’s weird.
Cricket could not handle the Redskins cheerleaders.
22 Responses to “Department Of Things That Will Not Work”
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The views on this site are mine and mine alone, and do not reflect the views of my employer, Media Matters for America
© 2000-2011 Oliver Willis
If golf can be a televised event in the US, there isn’t any reason one-day cricket matches couldn’t be. It won’t draw a big enough audience for a broadcast network, but I’m sure there’s a niche cable channel that could use something to fill up a Saturday or three, especially if the Indian Premier League is willing to see it as a “loss leader” for a while.
Nobody here will ever accept the likes of an international Test match, however. I mean, a game where you can play for 5 straight days and still end up with a draw? That’s not even like kissing your sister….
Yeah, but in the case of golf, there’s no complexity: Hit the ball in the hole with as few hits as possible. Thats about 7 billion times less complex than cricket.
In a land of 500 channels, I’d say a little Cricket fits in fine. Me and Bob Harris are both pretty big fans.
The more South Asians and West Indians there are in the US, the more popular Cricket will become here.
I got hooked on it when I spent two weeks on a job on Barbados — and that was Test Cricket.
Anything is possible OW; there are sports networks in the states that routinely broadcast darts and billiards competitions, which are not even sports but might more accurately be designated pasttimes, albeit ones which require a demonstrable level of skill.
I personally don’t have much interest in Xtreme sports like skateboarding or wakeboarding, but obviously some people do.
As for the complexity of cricket, try explaining baseball box scores to a Romanian; they won’t have a clue what the Hell you’re talking about, because he or she grew up on football (soccer), which is in essence, booting a ball into a giant net.
Besides, as Douglas Adams explained, cricket is a metaphor for the most fundamental ideals of civilization! And/or a twisted racial memory of the most horrific war in the history of the universe!
The Dominican Republic loads up MLB with tons of players but meanwhile in Jamaica, it’s cricket.
We’ll have regular cricket matches as soon as we get ESPN8 (the ocho!). Until then, maybe a rebroadcast of a match on Versus, I figure if you can carry the NHL, cricket isn’t too far away..
Excellent Adams reference, Rheinhard. Not too many people made it to book 5…
[A]s Douglas Adams explained, cricket is a metaphor for the most fundamental ideals of civilization!
The Kinks did too!
I saw some cricket highlights when Sky Sports was an all-sports rather than all-soccer channel, and it’s entertaining enough. It beats televised snooker or darts.
I think sevens rugby would be the international sport that could make it in America on some level.
Come on, OW – cricket isn’t really all that complex, either.
You and another guy from your team take these big bats with flat-ish ends and defend a couple of targets (wickets) that guys on the other team will throw a ball at. If they hit the wicket, you’re out. If, while defending, you hit the ball with the bat and somebody catches it before it hits the ground, you’re out. If you block the ball from the target with your body instead of the bat, you’re out.
If you hit the ball far enough away from you that you think you can run to the other wicket safely, you and your batting partner run back and forth between them until you judge it isn’t safe to run anymore, or until somebody hits one of the wickets with the ball before you get back to it, in which case you’re out.
Your innings is over when 9 of your 10 men are out, or (when batting first) if you declare you’ve scored more runs than you think the other team will be able to score in their innings. You score a run every time you make it safely from one wicket to the next, 4 runs if the ball rolls all the way to the boundary without somebody catching it, and 6 runs if you hit the ball in the air over the boundary. At the end of the match, the team with the most runs wins.
There are obviously more rules that govern how the match proceeds (just as there are rules covering different situations in golf other than “just get it in the hole”), but that’s the nutshell. If you can explain baseball much more succinctly, I’d be surprised.
Forgot to say – the main reason golf is popular enough for television is because Ike and Arnold Palmer turned it into a pastime for a lot of Americans wanted to play as well as watch.
Despite arguing in its defense, I honestly can’t see cricket getting that sort of celebrity appeal to make it a great American sport. Heck, the old North American Soccer League had the best-known players in the world, Pele and Franz Beckenbauer, and still folded, and it was another 20 years before we got professional soccer in the US again.
Rugby is too close to American Football , but it’s a much better game, IMO.
As long as the US has an Olympic cricket team that competes ok, I’m satisfied with that level of involvement.
i love cricket, and even I don’t fully understand it. I’ve even played the damn game, and live near 15 minutes drive from a first-class cricket ground (Edgbaston).
I do think that there’s room for cricket on your TV. One day matches are good. 20-20 is fater still. There’s still Duckworth-Lewis with this however.
Test Matches are great, and wouldn’t do well on US TV. Sometimes you don’t get play for a day due to rain.
A friend of mine used to say: Americans took the bits of cricket that they could understand and made baseball.
Even being a True Blue Aussie, I can honestly say that cricket is boring as all hell. I’m not a baseball person either (or a sports person), but at least baseball games move along at a quick and dynamic pace.
On the other hand, cricket is a bit like soccer – huge chunks of the world’s population loves it more than the American knock-offs, so there is a probably a sizable market for it amongst ex-pats.
Here’s the real reason golf is on TV. I know it’s true because I read the tale years ago somewhere. Besides — well, judge for yourself:
So. some marketing guy was trying to sell the idea of golf on television. The smart network exec pointed out that people won’t watch because nothing happens for long stretches of time, and even then nothing really happens. No action. Subtle points of good form and smart play, and who cares about that or understands it?
The advocate replies, “They know that if this guy sinks the putt, he gets $100,000. That, they can understand.”
The rest is history, and I really think that anecdote is, too.
Yeah, but you left out the googlies and silly mid-on.
In sunny california, the folks at the local park play cricket nearly every day on the baseball field. I have only seen that field used for baseball once.
I would actually watch a rugby match.
…and square leg, fine leg, fast bowlers vs. slow bowlers and Yorkers and how you aren’t allowed to bend your elbow when you’re bowling and ducks and what an “over” is (maiden or otherwise). But do you really need to know all of that to understand what’s going on the first time you watch a match?
It beats televised snooker or darts.
What wouldn’t?
It’s pretty hilarious to watch Americans try to play cricket for the first time. They tend to cock the bat like in baseball and they usually forget that practically every ball is in play–no foul territory!
The British spread it, the Australians and West Indians improved it, but the BELGIANS invented it.