Hundreds of millions of people around the world are crazy about cricket. And most of them are indifferent to other kinds of sports. Thanks to them, cricket is the second most popular sport in the world after football overtaking all other team games in the number of devoted fans.
The winner is considered the owner of the Ashes, although the urn itself is always kept in the cricket temple – the London Lords Museum. It is the most famous trophy in the world of cricket. Two centuries-old adversaries are fighting for it: the teams of England and Australia. It seems there is something in this game, and the Stumped view of the Ashes one more time proves that the tournament has captured the hearts of a third of the world’s population.
Cricket in India
This is an important part of Indian culture. The Indian team shares the rivalry with the Pakistani team, and India-Pakistan matches are among the most anticipated ones. Virat Kohli, the Indian cricketer, is much more popular than Bollywood stars earning $25 million a year. Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, the former captain, has a status close to the deity.
The Premier League is considered the greatest achievement of Indian sports. Competitions last only seven weeks a year, that’s why the Indian organization is the second in the world in terms of weekly wages after the American NBA. In 2013, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the main star of Chennai Super Kings, took 16th place in the list of the highest-paid athletes with annual earnings of $3.5 million and advertising contracts with companies such as Pepsi and Sony.
Is Cricket Played All Day?
It’s only true if it’s a short match. A normal one, the so-called test, lasts five days: six hours a day with a lunch break for 40 minutes and two tea parties for 20 minutes. One-day matches often end in the evening. The classic series of five test matches take up to a month and a half.
This has its advantages: a game goes well with a picnic in the park all day long at an amateur level. And professional match spectators are always guaranteed entertainment from morning till evening. But there are also some cons:
- Firstly, not every fan will find so much free time and family understanding.
- Secondly, not every TV channel will broadcast the game since it takes too much time.
- Thirdly, sports bars, cafes, and pubs prefer to lure visitors with more dynamic and shorter sports broadcasts. The English Premier League is gaining in popularity even in India.
- Fourth, cricket has been left behind the Olympic Games since 1900 because of its format. In small and rural clubs, people are not willing to spend every second day off on these matches.
Therefore, cricket is degenerating from imposing sports into a dynamic spectacle for everyone in recent years. Instead of five-day tests, teams and clubs are now mostly found in three new one-day formats. The shortest (English novelty The Hundred) can be compared with a football match duration. The most common one (T20) lasts about three hours. And a World Cup format (ODI) usually takes all day.
This sport requires serious physical training. But this is not hockey or football, and it’s enough to just be in shape. What makes it accessible to the public straying away from a strict diet and exhausting workouts. And even professionals are no exception.
The Growing Popularity of This Sports
This sport was shown in thrillers: The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio, Syrian with George Clooney and Matt Damon; political dramas: Frost vs. Nixon; romantic comedies: Good Year by Ridley Scott with Russell Crowe; and even in fairy tales: The Chronicles of Narnia. And of course, not a single movie about modern India or Pakistan can do without a scene with a cricket game in a dusty wasteland – this is a typical picture for those places.
The game of gentlemen often appears in English literature – from Dickens to Conan Doyle. Sir Arthur not only invented Dr. Watson’s past as a cricketer but also owned the bat himself. The creator of Sherlock Holmes was the leader of the writers’ team where P.G. Woodhouse, who invented Jeeves and Worcester, Alan Milne, who gave the world an unsportsmanlike Winnie the Pooh, Rudyard Kipling that is known to the world for a Mowgli book used to play cricket as well.
Douglas Adams, who was born after the war, didn’t play cricket, but he glorified the game in the third part of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. His heroes landed from the Spatio-temporal anomaly on the perfect lawn of the Lords’ site and became witnesses of Krikkit robots stealing the cricket relic – Ashes.
