Tuesday, February 16, 2010

A Spot of Cricket

For the first couple days I tried to get the 8 members of our AIDS curing crew to get together to discuss our extracurricular activities for the next couple weeks. Eventually I gave up on such foolish notions as a coordination of information and interest and the value of team work. Instead, I'm just going to do the things I want to do.

One thing I wanted to do was go to a Cricket game. I'm sure this is surprising to many of you, as I have long expressed a total disinterest in sports. However, there are several important loopholes that this fell into. First, I like unpopular things, and cricket is certainly not popular in America (though quite popular in ZA.) Second, I'm all about celebrating things to the greatest extent that they can be celebrated, and a trip to South Africa should include such ZA sports standards as cricket, soccer and rugby. And third, the less I know about a sport, the more I like it; and I know nothing about cricket. When I watch football I get bored because I know what's going on, more or less. When I get to figure out the rules during the game, it makes it much better.

So, I organized a trip to see the Nashua Dolphins take on the Titan Eagles. It did in fact take the entire 3 hour game for us to figure out what was going on, so that was ideal timing. I won't explain the rules to you because if you're really interested you can wikipedia it. But generally speaking it's kind of like a baseball game and croquet match had a baby.

We had some sports food, some familiar, some unfamiliar. We enjoyed the game, didn't enjoy the halftime rock band, and greatly enjoyed the cricket hotties. Every time someone got a wicket or out they'd pump the typical stadium-anthem type music (though one song was the Glee version of Golddigger, which was a little odd) these dancers would pop up in the corner of the stadium and start doing a heavily choreographed dance number. Imagine if the Pussycat Dolls were at a baseball game with you. Doesn't that make it more enjoyable?

Anyway, it was really our first foray into exploring the Durban nightlife, and I considered it quite a success.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since Cricket is older than baseball, let's say that
cricket + rounders = baseball.

Baseball is the baby.

Janet said...

But he does have a point about croquet--I think that should fit in there someplace. Unless croquet is the French version of cricket--that almost makes sense!