Friday, March 23, 2007

Irish Stumped By Cricket

On the eve of Ireland's World Cup cricket game against hosts the West Indies, I listened to a sports bulletin on Ian Dempsey's Breakfast Show hosting a cricket enthusiast explaining the game to the greater Irish public and a piece by Owen Boycott in The Guardian also remarked upon this. Am I the only person that finds it surprising that Irish people are incapable of understanding a sport that is effectively only baseball (read 'rounders' for all of yous that ever took part in the Community Games) with a few embellishments thrown in? I remember learning the rules of cricket (in the same afternoon as those of chess and tennis) when I was a nine-year-old unencumbered by the cares of an underachieving lifestyle, by heaving a couple of volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica off the shelf. If comprehending the rules of cricket is beyond the Irish it's hardly surprising that very few of us have ever bothered mastering even basic elements of computing and similar technology. And, of course, 'rules of cricket' can be Googled...

2 comments:

LukeM said...

Cricket doesn't have rules, it has laws. Apparently

seanachie said...

Therein lies the rub, methinks.