I wrote this article for the Scottish mass-circulation Daily Record. It was published on 26th April 2003.
A GENTLE murmur of conversation around the village green, the vicar passing on his bicycle, ruddy-faced umpires draped with spare sweaters, tea and cake in the pavilion.
Think again. Try some 20,00 baying spectators, a bowler sprinting in to aim a quarter-pound rock-hard missile at the batsman's head, a fielder diving to catch the ball as it flashes off the bat. (The umpires really do have to hold the spare clothes.)
Remember rounders? Cricket's the same kind of hitting-and-running game, and like rounders has bowlers and batsmen.
Bowlers come in three flavours - slow, medium, and fast. Slow bowlers spin the ball so that when it bounces it "turns" or deviates sideways, so that the batsman may mishit the ball. Medium-pace bowlers use an aerodynamic trick to make the ball "swing", or swerve sideways through the air. Fast bowlers swing the ball too, but often use sheer pace - often over 90 mph - to hurry the batsman into a false shot. Often the aim is to intimidate by bowling "bouncers" that pass the batsman at head level; one particularly nasty variant is the "throat ball". Cricket is not for the faint of heart.
Bowlers have it easy compared to batsmen. When a fast bowler operates, the batsman has not much more than half a second to plan and carry out his shot. This is so short that a batsman facing pace bowling has to commit himself to a shot by the time the bowler lets go of the ball, or he'll be too late. So they have to forecast what the ball will do from what the bowler does.
A batsman who successfully "reads" the bowler is still gambling on what the ball may do when it bounces. Although the pitch should start off flat and even, as the match goes on it may wear, dry out, and crack. Cracks can deflect the ball to one side, or make it bounce unpredictably. Variable bounce is a batsman's nightmare: one ball may shoot past their ankles, the next may hit their ribs.
Not surprisingly, batsmen often get hit. This is no joke - there's more energy in a speeding cricket ball than there is in a hammer-head hitting a nail. Being sensible folk, batsmen are heavily armoured. It's easy to spot the helmet, the gloves, and the pads on their legs. But under their clothes there may be arm guards, thigh guards, chest guards, and (protecting those parts that men hold so dear) the"box", sometimes coyly called the "abdominal protector". This protection softens the blows but does not eliminate them. Broken fingers are an occupational hazard for batsmen, and a player hit in the box usually collapses in an undignified groaning heap, to everyone's amusement except his own.
There's more to being a batsman than simply being cannon-fodder. The timing showed by batsmen can be quite incredible. In most ball sports the ball is hit more or less back where it came, but often in cricket the ball is played "square": the batsman hits the ball sideways as it passes him. To hit the "meat" of the bat (the "sweet spot" to tennis players), the batsman must time the shot to a few thousandths of a second.
If it's a hard life being a batsman, it's even harder being the ball. One moment you're travelling towards the bat at high speed, a split-second later you're going just as fast in the opposite direction. What does this feel like? Think of the g-forces that you feel when accelerating a car or aeroplane. A tyre-scorching start in a car might give you half a g (you're pushed with a force of half your weight). A fighter pilot pulling out of a dive can pull about 10 gs (and without a special suit, they'd black out at 2 gs). But a cricket ball hit back past the bowler can pull an incredible 12,000 gs while it's touching the bat. That's a force on the ball of about two tonnes. It's amazing that the ball survives - a human accelerating that hard would be jellified.
Being a truly British game, cricket has a truly British preoccupation with the weather. "Rain stopped play" is a phrase heard often during the summer. But the weather matters even when it's not raining. Players and spectators all agree that on a humid, overcast day a bowler can swing (swerve) the ball more than when it's dry and sunny. This causes red faces among scientists, who, even though they are pretty sure why the ball swings in the first place, have not yet managed to work out why the weather matters. It's not just batsmen who are stumped at cricket!