The boy had been loitering for about 15 minutes, edging steadily closer to the waiting batters seated around the nonexistent boundary edge, when he eventually plucked up the courage to ask who was winning.
It was the type of uninformed query that ordinarily prompts eye-rolls in cricket’s complex spheres. But the match situation – 60 for one, chasing a victory target of only 86 – made the response quite simple on this occasion. Besides, he was just a kid; an American one, at that. How was he to know that cricket’s ebbs and flows rarely render it condensable into such binary terms?
