Advertisement

Wickets, Googlies, Batsmen and Tea--That’s Cricket

Share
TIMES STAFF WRITER

They are the boys in white flannel suits, and every week at Modjeska Park they enjoy a game of intense concentration, infinite subtlety, arcane rules and peculiar nomenclature, and a little tea.

It is cricket played on American soil by a host of expatriates from England and a dozen other countries, who want to keep the sun from setting on a cherished pastime of the British Empire.

On Modjeska’s manicured cricket ground, the 11-man sides of the Anaheim Cricket Club steadfastly play the 600-year-old game, which many unappreciative Americans look upon as the inferior root of a higher form of sport called baseball.

Advertisement

To the cricketer, the crack of willow on red leather and the honing of skills needed to hit pitches that bounce at odd angles off the turf at 80 m.p.h. are preferable to beer and a box seat behind home plate at the Big A.

“It is a game that can never be mastered. That is the challenge,” said Grant Salisbury, 27, a player from New Zealand. “But what I really like is batting--to have someone chase after the balls you hit for two hours.”

The Anaheim club, which fields two teams, is part of the Southern California Cricket Assn., which coordinates a total of 22 clubs and 27 teams. The season, with 18 league games, playoffs and a championship match, runs from Easter to November.

The team is a virtual melting pot. Most of the players are immigrants from England and countries that were once part of the British Empire--India, Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago, New Zealand, Australia and Zimbabwe.

And for these immigrants, cricket is more than a day at the park. It’s a bit of home away from home, where expatriates can maintain a cultural tradition as well as find a network of new friends with a common heritage.

After a match, Anaheim’s cricketers often retire to the British and Dominion Club in Garden Grove, where over pitchers of ale and in a variety of British accents, they dissect the day’s match. Before too long, their nationalistic prejudices surface when they inevitably begin to rate the world’s seven major cricketing nations.

Advertisement

“When I left (Trinidad), I thought that was the end of cricket for me,” said Kamaluddin Rajab, a native of Trinidad and an ardent supporter of the West Indies cricket team. “I never imagined I would find other Trinidadians and so many cricketers here.”

At Ahaheim’s home ground at Modjeska, the pop of willow bats can often be heard over the noise of softball games, picnics or the crunch of shoulder pads belonging to Pop Warner football players.

But what English writer Godfrey Smith called “the noble summer game” rarely draws an audience in Orange County.

“It is a contest of skill,” said Roy Herbert, 54, captain of Anaheim’s first team. “You don’t appreciate that until you have played the game. If you just watch, you can’t grasp the technicalities, the strategy. It looks like nothing is happening. But we know what the batsman is going through just to stay up.”

Cricket resembles baseball, but it is more intricate and players say there are more varieties of play. There are 10 ways to be put out or “dismissed.” Batsmen can hit the ball anywhere on the field, even behind them or to the side. And, once the ball is hit, they don’t have to run if they think there is a good chance they will be put out.

The game also has an admittedly curious lexicon that has not been revised for centuries. Bowlers pitch googlies. Fielders are called a variety of odd names, including gully, cover point, extra short, slip, and silly--silly, team members say, because a barehanded fielder must be silly to want to play a few yards from the batsman.

Advertisement

The field or ground is a carefully manicured oval of grass about 180 yard across. In the center of the field is the pitch, a marked-off area of play which has two wickets 22 yards apart.

Each wicket has three stumps about 28 inches high, which loosely cradle two crosspieces called bails. Four feet in front of each wicket is a chalk line called the crease, the English version of the batter’s box.

During play, the side that is up places a batsman at each wicket. They take turns hitting after six pitches, a period known as an over. The team out in the field has a bowler or pitcher, a wicketkeeper with a glove, and nine barehanded defenders.

Like its American counterpart, cricket is a bat-and-ball game, and the winner is the team that scores the most runs.

“It is highly technical, and as far as hitting, the more you hit with style the better you are considered,” said Roger Levy, 47, the captain of Anaheim’s second team.

The batsman tries to defend the wicket by stopping the thrown ball or hitting it with his bat. If he drives the ball into the field, both batsman can run to the opposite wicket, which scores a run.

Advertisement

Bowlers can put out batsmen by bouncing the ball past them and dislodging the bails from the wicket. Batsmen can also fly out to fielders or be thrown out if they do not reach the opposite wicket in time after a hit. Both sides get 10 outs.

The average match lasts seven hours, not counting tea breaks and lunch. Arguments with the umpire aren’t allowed and neither are fights between teams. The benches never clear for a donnybrook in the pitch because the proper decorum is maintained by the prospect of lengthy suspensions.

“Arguing? That isn’t cricket,” said Aijaz Ali, a player from Pakistan.

Ali, 21, who started playing street cricket with a tennis ball, is Anaheim’s leading batsman, averaging 66 runs a game. In one match alone, he scored 96 runs. He was at bat an hour and 45 minutes.

“When you hit the ball hard,” Ali said, “and show some good shots, you will know how this game feels--good.”

Saturday, Ali and the Anaheim Cricket Club went on the road for a match at Woodley Park in Los Angeles, Southern California’s equivalent of Marylebone Cricket Club in England, the cradle of the sport.

After four hours of play on the park’s verdant ground, the score: Anaheim 40; Cosmos 41. It was a rout. But only in the odd world of cricket can a loss by one run be considered a poor showing.

Advertisement

Anaheim’s bats were almost silent Saturday as they faced Terrence Mills, a top bowler from Trinidad. The club tallied only 40 runs--”a paltry sum” a player said--before their side was retired by the required 10 outs. Ali was held to only 1 point. A more acceptable team score would have been around 200.

That left Cosmos with the relatively easy task of scoring 41 runs before its batsmen were dismissed. They attained the winning run after only four outs. Tra la, Anaheim. Good show, Cosmos.

Advertisement