Why cricket is beautiful

There’s a running joke among cricket fans across the world that cricket sucks, it’s the worst sport in the world, and all of us who play the game are wasting our lives playing this stupid sport.

Take the Grade Cricketer, for example, who have made a living off this joke. They have almost 95,000 likes on Facebook and have written two books, and their fans are full of fed-up cricket players such as myself sulking about how much cricket has ruined their lives.

How could someone enjoy this sport? If you’re a batsman, you get one single chance to succeed and if you make one little mistake, or sometimes if you’re just really unlucky, you’re sitting on the sidelines for roughly six or seven hours watching other people do well in the same conditions, rubbing salt into the wounds.

If you’re a fast bowler, you run more than a half-marathon each day, putting five to nine times your body weight through your front leg every single delivery, and getting multiple injuries in the process, only to have good deliveries somehow not get wickets, teammates drop catches off your bowling and some old, blind and deaf umpire who’s retiring in a month give every decision against you.

When you’re fielding, it’s 40 degrees and the sun is accelerating your mental and physical exhaustion, plus you’re feverishly dehydrated. You resort to verbally abusing a 13-year-old, a mere effort to boost your ego, but he ends up smacking your bowlers to all parts en route to a century.

You’d have to be utterly mad to spend your Saturdays playing this tiresome game.

Yet, for me at least, this is what makes cricket such a beautiful sport. Cricket is not a game of who can succeed the most, it’s about who can fail the least.

(Photo by Adam Pretty/Getty Images)

It took me a while to understand that to do well in cricket, I needed to love the game unconditionally, because I could never succeed while expecting constant enjoyment. I couldn’t embrace only the attractive parts of cricket, but instead the entirety of what it is.

I needed to love carrying drinks for my teammates after getting dismissed for a score of below ten. I needed to love standing in the field all day, getting belted to all parts of the ground by the opposition and then losing by 400 runs. I needed to love getting out directly after sledging the opening bowler and then taking the humbling walk of shame while getting a send-off.

Most importantly, I needed to love the sick feeling brewing inside when I had done poorly, knowing that my countless hours of effort throughout the week had amounted to nothing. A piece of indispensable knowledge I obtained from cricket was that its nature was much less a sporting endeavour than it was a metaphor for life. If we lived in a constant stream of success and enjoyment, how would we grow as sportsmen, or even as individuals?

As Japanese author Haruki Murakami states, “When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” Is it possible to understand what success is if you haven’t experienced failure?

When you fail, it’s simply another’s turn to succeed. There will be countless opportunities to see the hard yards pay off. For now, however, you put on your blindfold and trust the process, and unfortunately, that probably means plastering on a smile while running out a fresh pair of gloves for your teammate, who scored your deserving century.