Recently though, I managed to sneak down to watch my son have a little bat. It's a brave thing I thought, him standing in front of a hard af ball thrown at his face by an over-eager 10-year-old wannabee-spin-bowler with little accuracy and shedloads of enthusiasm. And he's got such a pretty face. Yes there's a helmet, but shit happens. Even with a helmet. I couldn't help but wince at each ball. I closed my eyes in fact. After he was bowled out, mercifully soon for his mother's sake, less so for his, I said "well done Ol, cracker innings that was." From what I saw. Which wasn't much. He went straight to his dad and started talking about how confident he was feeling with his glance and that he'd like to start working on his hook. I was like, err what? "It's just cricket talk mum." Well my boy, challenge accepted. I decided to decode the sweet baby cheesus out of cricket talk and blow their minds. First though, I've had my mind blown. Cricket terms. My god. I thought I was strange calling my daughter by the nickname moose-alpaca-unicorn-kittykat-dinosaur-donkey-pony or moose for short. Cricket terms are way weirder. I promise.
I'll start with the dibbly-dobbly. Nope, not the term for privates of any description. Or the thing that covers the privates. This I've established is the box. It's a slow paced, not particularly good bowling style. "He was a dibby-dobbly bowler". Not high praise. Even though it sounds pretty cool. To me anyway. Try saying it. D-i-b-b-l-y d-o-b-b-l-y, I know, right.
A beamer: No, this is not the term shouted when someone's posh car is parked on the pitch. Or when a ball hits a posh car parked on the pitch. It's also known as a 'bean ball' which isn't a ball that's been left in the shed for so long that it's sprouted some dirty fuzz. They both refer to when a bowler bowls the ball at the batman's head. Which apparently is not allowed.
A duck. This one I know. It's a score of zero. I didn't know why it was called that though. I thought it may have something to do with the batsman ducking out of his duty in a sucky way. Nope, it's named duck because the zero is shaped like a duck's egg. What an intelligent deduction. A duck on the first ball is a golden duck. Two ducks in the same game by the same batter are a pair. Two golden ducks are a king pair. I think the people who thought up cricket terms were pissed when they started and got progressively more so. You'll see why.
More duck now, except not quite. Duckworth-Lewis is a really complicated way of working out which team won if a match is called off due to rain. It was devised originally by two English statisticians Frank Duckworth and Tony Lewis. They've since retired, probably due to exhaustion after all the mental exertion they suffered after devising the most complicated scoring system known to man. Professor Steven Stern has inherited the method, lucky for him (not) and it's been renamed the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern Method. It may as well be the dibbly-dobbly method for all I understand of it. We'll leave it there. You'll thank me.
Googly. No, this isn't someone who can't spell Google. Neither is it related to the privates. Nor is it something that you can't quite believe you're seeing that's got you all googly-eyed. Nope. A googly is when a leg-spinner bowler bowls an off-spin delivery. Go figure that googly, eh.
A leg-spinner bowler. Not a bandy legged chap with an alarming arachnid-esque gait. No siree. It's a bowler with a fine set of pins who bowls right-arm with a wrist spin action that results in the ball spinning from right to left on the pitch.
A doosra. Well, now here's a doozy. Except that's not what doosra means. At all. A doosra is when an off-spinner bowler bowls a leg-spin delivery. Doosra ya get it? Good. Me neither.
An off-spinner bowler. A right-handed spin bowler who uses his fingers to spin the ball from a right-handed batsman's off side to the leg side (that is towards the right-handed batsman, or away from a left-handed batsman). This contrasts with leg spin, in which the ball spins from leg to off and which is bowled with a very different action. Holy mother of all the spins and legs in the world, anyone for a gin? I could spin the leg of a gin delivery that's for sure.
The leg side. Or the on side. This is the area to the left of a right-handed batsman (from the batsman's point of view – facing the bowler).
Off side. The off side is a particular half of the field. From the point of view of a right-handed batsman facing the bowler, it is the right-hand side of the field, or the half of the field in front of the right-handed batsman when they assume the batting stance.
A Nelson. This is when a score tallies 111, which you'd think would be like whoop whoop, what a score. Not so much. It's considered unlucky because legend has it that an Admiral called Horatio Nelson had only one eye, one arm and one leg. Poor bloke. So scoring a Nelson is considered unlucky. For obvious reason.
Rabbit. Nope not a quick-witted, spring-like cricket superstar. The complete opposite in fact. The rabbit is the worst batsman on the team. Besties with the duck methinks.
Silly mid off. A close-in fielding position on the side opposite the batsman. Not to be confused with the dozens of other fielding positions, including fine leg, gully, fly slip, extra cover and cow corner. Definitely don’t confuse it with silly mid on. That’s on the other side, silly!
Yorker. Not like corker. As in something good. The bowler may think so. The batsman not so much. This is a ball that hits the pitch around the batman's feet or at the popping crease. The term is said to come from 18th or 19th century slang to "pull a Yorkshire" which means pulling a fast one.
The popping crease. This phrase makes me think of those YouTube videos where someone (usually a hairy-backed man) is having a cyst lanced by a woman in a mask wielding a scalpel and a towel. Eeeuuww. You can't help but watch through the gaps in your fingers. It's called so because under the rules of cricket in the 1700s, a batsman had to place his bat into a hole cut in the turf to score a run. The name popping hole then became popping crease. Now a popping hole, well that's a whole new tangent that I could run with, but I won't.
From popping creases, rabbits, googlys, yorkers, dibbly-dobblys, doosras, beamers and all the silly mid, leg on and off associated with the respectable game of cricket, I'm not only over, I'm out. Bowled. Stumped. Caught. Cricket can keep its crazy terms. I'll stick to sitting leg-side-ways on the field, ducking from the serious, uncorking a crisp Sancerre while I beam(er) with pride watching my helmet-ed son at the crease while he hooks and glances to his heart's content, loving every second of it all. That's all the cricket I need to understand. That's all the cricket anyone needs to understand.
PS - Just in case you give a toss (*the toss is the flipping of a coin to determine which captain will have the right to choose whether his team will bat or field at the start of the match).
A glance: is a shot played by a batsman with a vertical bat, deflecting the ball behind the square leg area of the field.
A hook: is a term used to describe a shot played at shoulder height by the batsman against any short delivery.
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