Cricket

Cricket, once believed by me to be one of the boriest sports out there, actually isn't half bad. Wednesday night I went with a bunch of couch surfers down to the Basin Reserve, the ancient cricket grounds for a match against Canterbury. What made the game interesting was that it wasn't the long drawn out famous matches of 5 days, but rather 20/20 cricket which means that you have a start to finish and a victor in about 3 hours, with only 120 balls bowled to each team, thus keeping it pretty quick paced.

Having practically no knowledge about the sport before the game other than it's a batsman not a batter as in baseball, it was fairly easy to pick up. Actually wanted to get out there and have a couple of swings myself. Each batsman gets 6 balls in what is called an "over" and there are 20 of these overs in a 20/20 match, therefore 120 balls. In that time frame the team tries to get as many runs as possible, with extra runs given when it rolls out past the fielders over the boundary rope of 4 runs and 6 runs given when hit over the boundary rope. The 6's are the big boys, like home runs and we had a bunch which always gets the crowd going, whether for the home or away team.

Wellington ended up winning, by 7 wickets in fact, pretty damn sweet, not a huge celebration as just a regular season game and the cold wind had been blowing all evening and a bunch of people had already headed to a warmer place. It was defnitely fun and I'd go to another one, preferably in warmer, sunnier weather.