Cricket

I’ve finally decided to give in and write a page about cricket. Let’s start things off with an inflammatory quotation:

Cricket’s considerably better than life, and if you don’t like it, you’re factually wrong.

[…]

I prefer cricket to … life … I think it's better in most ways. It's better than reality: that's one of the great things about cricket; I mean if you look at the news, it's really bad, really, really awful, and cricket gives you an escape from that, for an extremely long time. Five days off, from news, from any form of personal difficulties, from disputes with your loved ones, tax demands, legal summons: you can just set them all aside, and allow yourself to be enveloped by the sinuous narratives of Test Cricket.

[…]

A lot of people compare a Test Match to a novel: unfolding stories, characters, subplots, but I think Test Matches are better than novels, because with novels you can just read the last chapter, can't you? Test Match, you've gotta wait five days to see what happens.

That pretty much covers it. Cricket is to sport as Mathematics is to the Sciences: most people think they’re very similar things, but to those in the know, one is so much richer and deeper and just better and more interesting, that it’s just not the same at all.

The Mathematical Connexion: G.H. Hardy

G.H. Hardy (Hardy, even to most of his friends) was one of the three pre-eminent English mathematicians of the early twentieth century,^[1] and reportedly had two great passions in life: mathematics (obviously), and cricket. (Indeed, Hardy seems to have been one of those people who simply talk in cricket most of the time.) The ultimate union of the two perhaps came in the original paper on what is now called the Hardy–Littlewood maximal function:

The problem is most easily grasped when stated in the language of cricket, or any other game in which a player compiles a series of scores of which an average is recorded. […]

There are three main sources of details of Hardy’s life, and in particular, his interest in cricket:

• Various places in Littlewood’s A Mathematician’s Miscellany.
• C.P. Snow's preface to later editions of A Mathematician’s Apology.
• The essay on which the preface is based, which is called The Mathematician on Cricket, and appeared in The Saturday Book, Eighth Year. Unlike the previous two, this is hard to find in print, so I have a transcription here.

Test Match Special

It's impossible to talk about cricket in this country without talking about the institution of TMS.

Interlude: an old advertisement

Because nothing assures potential passengers of reliability like a rock-solid forward defensive. (Full disclosure: my mother has flown on this airline. History does not record the influence of this advert on this.)

Links

Here we have a collection of excellent cricket-related links:

• The main page of the BBC's website. Or at least, so it seems. Maybe there are other sections on less important things, like news and weather and television?
• Cricinfo Live scores for everything you care about, live ball-by-ball commentary on some things, interesting articles, and more numbers than you can shake a stat at. (StatsGuru is lethal if you can teach yourself to use it.) And they didn't even bribe me to say that.
• Fred Boycott's Twitter account. Fred will explain to you why, among other things, Yorkshire is God's Own Country, you should keep away from London, and that the only two shots you need are the block and, more importantly, the leave. To learn to be a professional Yorkshireman, start here.
• Andy Zaltzman’s Twitter account and Cricinfo blog, The Confectionery Stall.^[2] Hilarious fellow, and seriously into his stats.