The basic things you need to know about cricket

Cricket, the British ball game seen in Downtown Abbey, is rapidly gaining popularity in the United States – here are the basics of the game.

Pickleball was developed in the last century and has taken over North America. There are 36.5 million pickleball players in the US alone. But make way, cricket is the new popular sport and the league is expanding to states around the US. Here are the basic things you need to know about cricket.

It became the national sport of England in the 18th century. In 1844, the first ever international match between club teams from the USA and Canada was played in Toronto; Canada won. In 1859, a team of English players made the first overseas tour to North America. The British played a major role in spreading the game overseas and by the mid-19th century it was established in Australia, the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, New Zealand, North America and South Africa.

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According to tradition, cricket originated as a children's game in the southeastern counties of England sometime in the Middle Ages. Today, there is Major League Cricket in the US, with teams from LA, San Francisco, New York, Seattle, DC and Texas. Around 1.6 billion people watch worldwide and it is the second most popular sport after soccer. Being in the US will increase both audience and revenue. Here's how you can play at home.

Basic Garden Cricket Set

Furnish

• The field has a rectangular playing field in the middle, 22 yards (20.12 m) long. At each end of the field, three wooden stumps with two small wooden hoops on them are placed to form a wicket.
• One team bats while the other team fields and bowls. The batting team fields two batters while the fielding team has a bowler, a wicket-keeper and nine other fielders spread out across the field.

Hit

• The bowler throws the ball from one end of the pitch to the batter who stands at the other end. The batter tries to hit the ball with his bat to score points.
• After hitting the ball, the two batters run back and forth between the two sets of wickets, changing ends. Each run completed counts as one run for the batting team.
• If the batsman hits the ball over the boundary without it bouncing, his team is awarded six runs. If the ball bounces before it passes the boundary, the team is awarded four runs.

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Exit

• A batsman can be out in a number of ways, including bowling (the ball hits the wicket), catching (the fielder catches the ball before it bounces), running out (the batsman is out of his field when the wicket is thrown away) or leg before wicket (the ball would have hit the wicket had the batsman not been on his body).
• Once a batsman is retired, the next batsman from his team takes over. The batting team's innings ends when 10 of its 11 batsmen are retired.

Bowling and fielding

• The objective of the fielding team is to knock out the batters of the batting team and prevent them from scoring runs. The bowler bowls balls over the arm to the batter while the other fielders strategically position themselves to catch or field the ball.
• After completing their allotted number of overs (sets of six legal throws), the teams swap roles, with the fielding team batting and the batting team leading the fielding team.

The team with the highest total score after both innings wins the match. Cricket matches can last from a few hours to five days, depending on the game format..