Cricket comes to Iowa City

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) -- Cricket, the quaint game parodied by Monty Python and others, is taken quite seriously in many parts of the world -- Iowa City, for example.

"It's not technically the national game (of India), but it's the most popular game," said Ganesh Venkataraman, one of a group of University of Iowa computer science and statistics graduate students who play at Willow Creek Park. "It's almost a religion. It's like soccer, in Brazil."

Several Indian and Pakistani students have banded together to play the game that is largely a mystery to Americans. They chipped in $600 to buy a cricket kit on the Internet that supplied them with wickets, balls, a bat, a helmet, pads for the batsman and wicket-keeper (sort of like a catcher in baseball), and gloves for the keeper. The game isn't equipment-intensive, but proper equipment is still costly and not easy to find in the American Midwest outside of areas where the Indian/Pakistani population is large.

Cricket is a British game that was spread to colonial outposts and has remained wildly popular in Australia and India. Professionals in the sport are cultural icons, just as football, basketball and baseball players are here. It's not unusual for 100,000 spectators to fill stadiums for cricket matches.

"We started playing last year," said Aditya Sehgal, a doctoral student. "We were playing with a tennis ball at first. There's a league in Des Moines, and they play serious cricket. They've got a stadium, and they've got a proper pitch (field). They pooled in $15,000, and they maintain it every year. We heard of them and we wanted to play against them. They don't play with a tennis ball."

It's not exactly a tennis ball. It's a lighter substitute for a proper cricket ball, a hard leather ball with seams that weighs the same as a baseball. Venkataraman likened it to the difference between softball and baseball.

Sehgal said as many as 20 students played when they first organized. A regulation match provides for 11 players to a side, but you can play with fewer. The Indian student association held a tournament in July, and the group played in a tournament in Cedar Rapids.

The game itself resembles baseball, sort of like a Volkswagen resembles a Porsche. The inner workings are there, maybe, but after that it's a different animal.

"It's like if an Indian or a Pakistani came here and tried to follow football," Sehgal said. "Football has it's own quirks. You run so many yards and then you stop and then what's one, two, three, four and so on. Once you get past those nuances, that's it. It's a simple game like baseball. You hit the ball and you run hard. That's it."

The field at Willow Creek Park is grass and is uneven, which affects the bounce of the ball as it is delivered to the batsman. There is no maintained cricket pitch, which would be more akin to a golf green, in this area. They've thought about asking the university to help.

"But we need more people to support this game for the university to take interest," Sehgal said.

The pitcher is called the bowler, and the ball is delivered with a straight arm in a windmill motion into the ground. The batsman is protecting the wickets, three sticks stuck vertically into the ground behind him about where a catcher would crouch in baseball. The wicket-keeper is several yards behind the wickets and fields the bowled ball if the batter doesn't put it in play. If the batsman swings and misses and the ball strikes the wicket, the batsman is out.

If the batsman hits the ball he has the option of running to try to score runs. He doesn't have to run but if he does he (and the other batsman at the other end of the field) runs to the other side of the pitch with his bat and touches the bat to the ground. They can continue (back and forth) for more runs, but the fielding team will be retrieving the ball in an effort to make an out or at least bring the play to an end. There's no such thing as a foul ball, but there are equivalents to home runs. Bowlers can throw fastballs or the spinning equivalent of curves or knuckle balls.

"It's not really a game of strength; it's a game of artistry," said Imran Pirwani. "It's really mastery of deception. The bowler's arm is too fast for the human eye to catch what's going on. There's a lot of psychology involved too."

"It's a lot more difficult to play for the batsman," Sehgal said. "It's more crafty."

Cricket is not an Olympic sport, but 10 nations play the game internationally and others, such as the United States, are termed "associate" countries.

"The United States has a cricket team," Sehgal said. "Not many people know about it. It's mostly Indian- and Pakistani-born American citizens. The international cricket council is trying big-time to push cricket into the United States."