DALLAS — For many in the Dallas area, Thursday’s Major League Cricket opening night will be their introduction to the sport.
If you are in that number, The Dallas Morning News has you covered.
Cricket has been a global staple for almost 200 years in the sports world. The first international sporting event of any kind was a cricket match between the United States and Canada in 1844. Today, the sport still draws hundreds of millions of viewers from across the globe. India, Pakistan, England and Australia are just a few of the countries that drive that viewership, and India is set to host the upcoming 2023 Cricket World Cup.
With America’s early British influence, cricket was once the most popular bat-and-ball sport in the U.S. before eventually getting beaten out by baseball.
With that historical context, here are a few things to know when watching cricket for the first time.
Major League Cricket
This summer is Major League Cricket’s inaugural season, and most of the games will take place at Grand Prairie Stadium. The league includes six teams — the Los Angeles Knight Riders, MI New York, San Francisco Unicorns, Seattle Orcas, Texas Super Kings and Washington Freedom. Even though the teams are attached to different regions, they will all play matches in either Grand Prairie or Morrisville, N.C.
Each team is backed by a bigger cricket entity that runs teams in T20 leagues around the world, many of which in the ultra-popular Indian Premier League.
— Los Angeles Knight Rider — Knight Riders Group
— MI New York — Mumbai Indians
— San Francisco Unicorns — Cricket Victoria
— Seattle Orcas — GMR Group
— Texas Super Kings — Chennai Super Kings
— Washington Freedom — Cricket New South Wales
The matches will be played in the T20 format, meaning they will last around three hours and be limited to 20 overs per innings (more on that later).
Many high-profile international players and investors will take part in the inaugural Major League Cricket season. Each team is allowed up to nine international players, and no more than six are allowed on the field at a time.
The basics
Cricket involves two teams of 11 playing each other on an oval-shaped field trying to score the most runs. Two batsmen stand in the center of the field, called the pitch, where one tries to hit the ball delivered by the bowler. On each end of the pitch is a wicket, a set of three stumps and two bails. Each batsman stands in front of the wickets and will exchange places if the ball is hit. Each exchange equals one run.
If the batsman hits the ball to the boundary of the field, it’s worth four runs — hit it over the boundary and it’s worth six.
The other team tries to get them out by knocking the bail off the stump of the wicket with the ball before the batsmen complete an exchange.
The fielding team can also get a batsman out by catching a hit ball in the air or if the bowler hits the wicket, knocking the bails off the stumps. A batsman can choose not to swing or swing and miss at the ball, but is only out if the ball knocks the bails off the stumps of the wicket.
To put it in basic terms, the most excitement and cheers come when the ball is hit far, similar to baseball.
Formats
There are a few different forms of cricket but they all fall under two categories, First-Class Cricket and Limited Overs Cricket. The difference is in the name.
First-Class Cricket is the original form of the sport, and takes multiple days due to there being no overs limit. Each team has two innings in First-Class Cricket and bats until the entire team has recorded an out in each inning.
The two most common forms of Limited Overs Cricket are One-Day International and T20 Cricket. The difference between the two is how many overs there are. One-Day International, which is played in international cricket, has 50 overs, while T20 has 20 overs.
T20 is the form Major League Cricket will play and is the format played by most professional leagues.
Each form features a single inning per team, and the inning is complete when either 10 of the 11 batters are out or the set number of overs has been reached. One-Day International matches usually last around nine hours and T20 matches usually last around three.
Scorekeeping
The weeds of scorekeeping can get confusing, but the most important thing to know is that whoever scores more runs wins. When looking at a scoreboard, though, you may see numbers indicating the wickets and overs.
How exactly the scoreboard reads depends on which form of cricket is being played, but for T20 cricket, the runs, overs and wickets are what you’ll want to pay attention to. A scoreboard will often display the batting team’s runs next to their wickets in the innings. Then it will display how many overs and deliveries there have been in the innings and the opposing team’s score which may be labeled as the target.
Overs
A bowler can only bowl six deliveries at a time, which is called an over. After a bowler completes an over, the fielding team must switch bowlers. A player can bowl multiple times in an inning, but can’t bowl consecutive overs.
Think of overs as at-bats, except the change from player to player between each over happens with the bowlers, not the batsmen. The batsmen do not change until they get out.
Outs
There are several ways a batter or runner can get out, and they can be mostly categorized in two categories: a batsman can be caught out or the fielding team can knock the bail off the stumps of the wicket.
While being caught out only comes from a ball being caught in the air, there are a few ways a team can get a batsman out by knocking the bails off the stumps of the wicket.
Here are the most common ways an out can be recorded.
— The fielding team can knock the bails off the stumps before the batsman reaches the crease that defines where they are safe (the bat is considered part of the body).
— A batsman can be bowled out, which is where the bowler delivers the ball past the batter and knocks the bails off the stumps.
— A batsman can be stumped out if they move past the line in front of the wicket called the popping crease and the wicketkeeper (think of this as the catcher) gains possession of the ball and knocks the bails off the stumps.
— A batsman can be called out if they allow the ball to hit them, and the umpire determines that the ball would’ve knocked the bails off the stumps. This is called a “leg before wicket.”
The fielding team must appeal to the umpire if they believe they got a batsman out who will confirm the out. If one of these occurrences happens and no one notices, the out won’t be called.
