Watching The Cricket at The Gabba!

After watching cricket on TV for many years whenever I've been in a cricket playing nation, and following it on the internet, I finally went to a live game! A test match between Australia and Sri Lanka is ongoing at The Gabba, the cricket stadium in Brisbane, and I went to day 3...test matches can last as long as five days. A test is basically a meeting of two national dream teams...in this case, the best players from Oz and Sri Lanka. Since Australia is the top rated cricket nation in the world, and Sri Lanka's up there, I had a chance to see many of the planet's best cricket players. Very cool! If you like baseball...the two sports are cousins. If you like one, you'll probably enjoy the other. But if baseball bores you, cricket will put you to sleep.

Here Brett Lee, Australia's star fast bowler (think baseball power pitcher) is cranking up a delivery to the Sri Lankan batsman. Lee is the bloke with his arm extended straight above his head...you have to deliver the ball with virtually no bend in your arm. Lee had a good first innings...his line on the scoreboard read

17.5 26 4. This means he bowled 17.5 overs...at 6 balls to an over, that's 107 balls; surrendered 26 runs, and took 4 wickets...cricket's version of an out. Without going into further detail, this is excellent...think of Josh Beckett pitching a 4 hit shutout for the Red Sox and you have a rough equivalent. Like baseball, cricket is quite a chess game. Notice the five blokes at the bottom of the picture. These are all Australian fielders. The bloke farthest left is Adam Gilchrist, the star wicketkeeper for many years on the Ozzie test team. He is equivalent to a baseball catcher, and he's the only fielder to wear gloves, though a cricket ball is about as hard as a baseball. The blokes to his right are, from left to right, playing first, second, and third slip, and the bloke in the lower right of the pic is at gully. The fielders will change position for every batter, and every bowler. It's quite complicated and requires a lot of strategy to place the fielders in the proper position for every situation. There are position changes in baseball, of course, but except for the radical shifts used when Barry Bonds or a few other lefthanded sluggers are at bat, fielders change position much less in baseball than in cricket. Seeing this firsthand is one of the advantages of going to a game in person.

There are 11 players on a cricket team, but many more defensive positions; many are not manned in a particular situation. The names of the positions are a bit bizarre; in addition to gully, you have deep fine leg, long off, silly mid off, and silly point, to name a few. The silly positions are so named because the fielders stand almost next to the batsman, anticipating that he'll hit a little blooper that they can catch for an out. But if the batter hits the ball hard, the fielder will be, uh, knocked silly!

The Gabba is a fine modern stadium. Good concessions, clean, with an artfully designed canvas roof over much of the upper deck. Late in the day, the roof casts a stylish shadow over the ground. The stadium is named for its 'hood...

Wollongabba, just across the river from downtown Brisbane. Incidentially, the Aussies are in command of the match after 3 days, leading by 260 runs. I had hoped to see them bat...they're spectacular offensively...but they piled up 551 runs on only 4 outs during the first two days of the match (think of an NFL team scoring about 50 points) and simply played defense on the day I was there.