Pondering cricket on a stranded Amtrak train: why isn’t there a five?
Cricket, if youâve grown up watching and playing it, is not a complicated game.
Two sides, a maximum of four innings, 11 players per side. The side which scores most runs in total wins as long as they bowl the other side out. And thatâs about it. Simple.
Or so youâd think.
But try explaining this to an American while youâre travelling from Sacramento to Chicago on an Amtrak train for four long days and it will provoke something of an existential crisis in your belief in the rules of the game.
We thought itâd be a bit of an adventure as we clambered aboard the sleek, long, silver carriage in the capital of California. There wasnât a platform to stand on, you just had to jump on it from trackside, like a modern day hobo, but weâd booked a sleeper carriage for the 72-hour trek and did not think for a moment we were returning to the 19th century. But a day later, as the dead train was motionless in the Nevada desert for a whole day, having just broken down outside of Reno, it very much felt like weâd gone back in time.
It now felt like we were living in the middle of a Johnny Cash song, as first the toilets blocked up, then the food ran out and finally the water. We were going to die in the desert, our bleach bones destined to be found by future travellers along with the decrepit remnants of the Amtrak.
Then news arrived that some sort of repair team was on its way to fix the stricken engine. There was nothing to do but sit around and talk to other travellers. Remarkably we appeared to be the only foreigners on the train, the others were all Americans from the midwest returning home, or left coast wanderers heading east “just to see whatâs out there, man,” as one put it to me.
And it turned out to be a brilliant trip, for all that it took over 96 hours, because we were treated like visitors from an alien planet. Our train compatriots were gentle, interesting souls who simply wanted to know more about the distant world we had come from.
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We were quizzed on everything British/English (they usually didnât know the difference) from the actual location of Scotland (âI heard itâs the town in Ireland that the Mel Gibson movie was aboutâ) to the NHS and whether it truly was the ghoulish Victorian horror movie theyâd been told. Someone wanted to know whether Norway and Iceland were part of the UK! Quite why they hadnât yet looked this up in a book or on the internet was only one of the puzzling things about the gaps in the knowledge.
A couple in their early 60s, devout Methodists from Wisconsin, sat down opposite us and said the fateful words. “Iâve always been fascinated by cricket. Can you tell me all about it?”
It was only as I was launching into an explanation of the difference between Test cricket and other versions of the game that I began to realise, by the astonished looks on their faces, just how bizarre this all sounded.
“It lasts five days!” the chap exclaimed to his wife, and they both laughed like this was the funniest, most eccentric thing theyâd ever heard. When I explained that there was a good chance no-one would be declared the winner at the end of all this, they collapsed in fits again.
They found the sheer amount of detail, from the run-scoring system, over-throws, no balls, byes and wides to be some sort of advanced mathematics. The fact there was a crease that you had to be in most of the time, while wearing huge padded leg guards and a helmet, seemed to them to make batting almost wilfully complex and hard. LBW made absolutely no sense. âBut the batsman wants to stop the ball hitting the wicket, why canât he use his legs to do that?â I didnât trouble them with the habit some batters have of âpadding upâ to a ball.
On and on it went. “Why is the ball made of cork?â “How can you be ânot out?â” “Why canât you score five in some way? Why does it go from four to six?â âWhy is one man allowed to have gloves and no other catcher is?â
I began to try and explain Duckworth-Lewis to them but as I donât really understand it myself that was very tricky. The very idea that after all of this palaver not only could there be no winner but the weather could and often would intervene and render the whole process impossible to complete.
While it was an often hilarious couple of hours, the great thing about it was that trying to explain a sport to someone who knows literally nothing about it, makes you question exactly why some of the rules exist and why the game is as it is. They found the lifting of a foot off the ground allowing you to be stumped to be incredibly petty and unfair. âItâs hard enough, already, now you canât even lift a foot off the ground?!â
They didnât understand why the last batsman standing couldnât be allowed to keep on scoring. Nor why the bowlerâs landing foot had to be behind the crease line. Nor why you can score without hitting the ball via a wide or a bye. âIf you donât hit the ball – and thatâs the whole point, right, to hit the ball – how can it be right it still adds to your total?â
I just didnât have good answers to many of these questions. How had we settled on all of these rules and why? Afterwards I realised that they had accidentally raised some really good points. Extras in general mystified them and seemed unnecessarily complicated and I ended up agreeing with them. It did seem crazy that your team scored even if you didnât make a shot. That you got one added to the total for a wide, even if the batter played a shot. And finally, why isnât there a five? At least, a five without some kind of overthrow shenanigans. If you hit the ball to the boundary, with it only bouncing once, that could be a five. Why not?
All of which just goes to show that maybe, just maybe, the Americans could teach us something about the glorious game. I just wish we could teach them something about how to run a railway.