Do Go On - Beginner's Guide to Cricket (by people who don't fully understand it)

Episode Date: August 23, 2020

After the episode about Sir Donald Bradman we've had a few listeners saying all the cricketing lingo was a bit confusing at times, so we've tried to explain the basics in this mini episode! There's every chance you'll get to the end of this and be even more confused, sorry! (PS. This is not an episode for people who know and love cricket, you will hate it!)Buy tickets to our streamed shows (there are 8 available, all with exclusive extra sections): https://sospresents.com/authors/dogoonSupport the show and get rewards like bonus episodes: patreon.com/DoGoOnPodCheck out our web series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2TuMQ31VXvqqEus9Bo6FZW-dDY5ukEuh Submit a topic idea directly to the hat: dogoonpod.com/Submit-a-TopicTwitter: @DoGoOnPodInstagram: @DoGoOnPodFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/DoGoOnPod/Email us: [e-mail] out our other podcasts:Book Cheat: https://play.acast.com/s/book-cheatPrime Mates: https://play.acast.com/s/prime-mates/Listen Now: https://play.acast.com/s/listen-now/Our awesome theme song by Evan Munro-Smith and logo by Peader Thomas Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melbourne and Canada, we got exciting news for you. And we should also say this is 2026. Jess, what year is it? 2026. Thank God you're here. Right now, I'm in Melbourne doing my show with Serenji Amarna, 630 each night at the Cooper's Inn Hotel, having so much fun. We'd love to see you there.

Canada, we are visiting you in September this year. If you've somehow missed the news, we are heading up Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, and Toronto for shows. That's going to be so much fun. Tickets for all this stuff, I believe, are online. And I'm here too. This podcast is part of the Planet Broadcasting Network. Visit planetbroadcasting.com for more podcasts from our great mates.

Welcome everybody to a very special extra episode of Dugan. We're calling this one, Who Knew It with Matt Stewart? And this week we're talking about cricket. This is Cricket the basics for anyone who listened to the Bradman episode during the week and thought, what the fuck is he talking about? We got a few responses like that, didn't we? We did. So maybe it's a good chance to go through it a little bit.

One person in particular, sorry, Jess. I was in the podcast and I was thinking, what the fuck is you talking about? Yeah, that's true. But Kayla wrote to us on our Patreon group in Facebook saying, I'd love to have a quick five-minute rundown of how test cricket works, what the rules are, and if there's any unique, vocabulary that needs explaining. Great.

Ask further, like anything in particular, she said, mostly just the rules and an explanation of the important or unique terms and positions and scoring, which I guess is everything. So that's not helpful. Maybe how the leagues, tournaments work. I should want to know if there's minor leagues like in baseball and then what the local international teams and that sort of things are. And I think we can explain all that pretty quickly.

Dave is also probably a bigger cricket fan than me, actually. Is that true? Maybe we're similar. I think we're both sort of casual, but grew up with it enough that we know the basics, but I don't think either of us are like full fanatics. I played two years as a junior. I was the 13th man, which is a made-up position.

Yes, and I was off in the 12th man. Maybe that's something, maybe that's the first thing then. Teams are made up of 11 players. So knowing that Dave and I were 12th and 13th men Probably says a little something there Basically it means you are on the bench as the 12th person You go in and you can replace the people Whilst they need to take a piss and get a drink basically

While they're fielding but you can't really bowl or bat No so you can't Well we should explain also bowling basically that's like the pitcher Yes so in terms of baseball stuff that batting is batting bowling is pitching wicket keeper is the catcher yeah basically like that so the team's made up of 11 players

normally it's listed in terms of their positions it starts with the opening batsmen so they're two batsmen who are very good but normally you'll have a often have a combination of a left hander and a right hander but that doesn't matter why am I making this more complicated than needs

to be already but that's so that the bowler has two different lines they have to bowl on This is not good. I'm making it sound more complicated rather than less. All right, let's make this even more basics. Okay, so you've got two really good batsmen at the start. Then you've got the lower order. Batsman's three and four.

Middle order, batsman five and six. Then normally you've got the keeper, who to play at a high level will also have to be a pretty good batsman, generally speaking. And then positions 8 to 11 are bowlers. And often they're not that bad at batsmen as well. The middle order can often have an all-rounder as well, All-rounder is what you call a player who's a very good bowler and batsman. The cricket field, what they play on, they're big.

They're bigger than a baseball field, bigger than a soccer pitch or a gridiron field. They're big ovals. The MCG, which is the big professional cricket ground in Melbourne. MCG stands for Melbourne Cricket Ground. It's 161 metres long by 138 metres. wide. They're big fields. It's also what Australian rules football is played on cricket fields, which is no coincidence. They were cricket fields were the only things available for football to be played on. So they've sort of just evolved into those pitches, those grounds. The pitch itself,

Dave, that's the centre strip where the bowler bowls the ball. Batsman stands at one end, the bowler comes in from the other runs in, bowls the ball, bounces once on the pitch, and then the batsman can either hit it or leave it. If they hit it, they've got a chance to make some runs. If they leave it, it'll probably bounce through the keeper. If it hits their wickets, then they're out.

That's the equivalent of a strike in baseball, only you don't get three options at it. You don't get three strikes and you're out. If it hits the stumps, you're gone. So that's one ball, and the ball goes back to the bowler. They bowl again, same again, and that happens six times. The bowler gets six balls, and that's called one over.

and then the ball goes to another bowler, an elbow, and over from the other end of the pitch to the batsman at the other end. So it all switches around, the whole field does. Yeah, the pitch is about 20 metres long by 3 metres wide. And the pitch is basically just really shortly moaned grass that's been rolled down flat. And the ball, we could also probably describe, it's a leather ball field. with cork, a cork center, and then strings wrapped around it. It's fucking hard. It's a real, really hard.

A rock hard ball. Yeah, it has, it literally kills people very rarely, but sometimes it does happen. Yeah. Yeah. So there's two kinds of bowlers. I guess if you're breaking down the bowlers a bit further, you've got the fast bowlers and the spin bowlers, the fast bowlers run in, try and bowl as fast as they can, you know, basically.

And then the spin bowlers are trying to make the ball move. from off the pitch by just putting work under the ball spinning it. The way, I guess now we should talk about the game a little bit. You've got two teams of 11. Normally there's a toss of the coin to start the game. The winner of the toss gets to choose if they bat or bowl first. And we're talking about test cricket mainly here. Test cricket goes for five days.

It's a huge advantage to win the toss, which is a weird thing about cricket. The toss of the coin gives you a little bit. gives you a big advantage. And for the most part, teams will choose to bat first, but it can depend on the state of the pitch and the weather and other things. But generally speaking, the team will bat first, I believe. And then they bat until they're bowled out, basically. And each batsman, if you're out once, you're out for the whole innings.

How do you get them out, Dave? Either the bowler hits the stumps. Yeah, so they're the wickets, the three. wooden little pillars that are nailed into the ground behind them and if you basically if the batsman swings and misses or if you just beat them because you've bowled such a good ball that they can't hit it and it hits the stumps then they are out that's right so that's one way the second most common way would be the batsman hits the ball and a fielder so you've got one one player in the fielding team's bowling one's the wicket keeper the other nine players are spread around the field there's rules

around where they're allowed to be, but basically they can be spread anywhere. And if the batsman hits it and is caught on the full by one of the fielders, including the wicket keeper or the bowler, then they are out. That's the second way you can be out. The third most common way would be leg before wicket, LBW. If the bowler, oh, if the batsman is hit where it's likely the ball would have gone on to hit the stumps and they've blocked it with their leg or body rather than their bat, then that can be called out as well.

There are intricacies around that as well where the ball pitches, but to put it basically, if you block the ball from hitting the sums with your body and not your bat, then you can be called out leg before wicket. In professional cricket, though, do they not play one hand, one bounce? No, that's right. That's more of a backyard rule. Or tippity. It's not that I don't play tippity run.

Tipity run is a backyard rule where if you hit it, you got to run. That's how baseball played, isn't it? Pretty much if you hit it into the field of players, you have to run. Yeah, I don't think you get the choice to go, no, nah. Whereas in cricket, you can block it, just hit it right at your feet and not run. And in test cricket, that happens a lot. Yeah, that's right. So it's really a much more of a battle of attrition, patience, whereas there's short.

of versions of cricket like 20-20 and one days where you're much more likely to see people go the tonk. To score run, so every time you hit it and you run to the other end, both batsmen, so there's two batsmen out there at the same time, one at each end of the pitch. You hit it and both of them run to the other end of the wicket without. That's probably the fourth most common way of going out is being run out. So if you hit the ball and run to the other end and the fielding team gets the ball and knocks over the wickets at the end you're running towards before you get your bat over the crease,

the line to mark that you're in, then you're out as well. But if you do make it in time, that's one run. You run back again, that's two runs. You know, you run back and forth as many times as you can before they get the ball to the wickets. They all count as runs. But to get even quicker runs, you hit it all the way to the fence at the edge of the field or a rope if there's a rope that's been laid down. But basically you make it to the boundary. That's called four runs a boundary. If you hit it over the rope or the boundary on the full, that's six runs,

which is your maximum score. I think that's, I mean, they're all the real basics, Dave. You think of anything else other than that? That sort of thing, just a couple other terms where, when we talk about Bradman winning, getting centuries,

that means he scored a hundred of those runs. And on the way there, if you get 50 runs, you call that a half century. And, yeah, he basically scored 100, more often than anyone else. Yeah, basically his career average was every time he bat,

or every time he went out, he'd made 100. So, crazy. The average is how many runs you make per time you've been out. So you don't have to go out, you can play and be not out at the end of an innings. When the team then changes over it, once the team's bowled out, or if the batting team

declare and they say, we think we've got enough runs, which happens occasionally for time, they'll swap, and then the bowling side will bat, and every player on the team bats, and then the batting side will bowl, and then they'll switch again. And the general, you know,

the simplest way to say is whoever has the most runs at the end of each team having two innings, they win. Yeah, so you both get to have a bat twice, and it's whoever's got the most runs after two goes each, basically. If you run out of time and one of the teams hasn't gone through

and batted twice or made the amount of runs that the other team made in the fourth innings, then the match is called a draw. And that happens a bit, especially if it rains and they lose time. But there's all these quirks that go along with it as well. The longer the test goes on, the pitch itself, the conditions of it all change. It'll start cracking up, which will make batting more difficult. Spin bowls will get more spin. fast bowls will get more varied bounce,

which will be harder to play for the batsman. I'm trying to think of any other terms. When you say century, people will say ton as well. That's sort of a colloquial time. Ton up. And when you get your 50 for your half century or 100 for your century or your ton, the batsman pauses usually takes their helmet off and holds up their bat and the crowd applauds to be.

That's how it's like, well done. You've made it this far. Yes, that's right. Yeah. Interesting. Is there anything else you think, Jess, we might have missed? Or anything that you're like that's confused you as a casual observer? Well, how, like, it seems like a game that can just go forever.

Like, what's the time? Like, when you say in innings, there's no real time limit on that, is there? No, there's not. So sometimes, I mean, if you bowl them out quickly, it could be over very quickly. But innings, if the team's batting well, they should bat for longer than a day in the first innings especially. And so a day is three sessions, two hours each. There's a lunch break after the first session. Then there's a tea break after the second session.

It's a very civilised game. Yeah, it's so old school. I was reading a bit about it because I didn't really know about the origin, but no one's exactly sure where it came from, but it sounds like it started as a kids game. Oh, right. Like in the middle ages or something, centuries and centuries ago. Oh, wow. That's time, not runs there.

See, this is where it gets confusing. The idea of a test match, the first one of those was played between Australia and England in the 1800s, and it was played at the MCG, which I only just found out. Oh, that's one thing I wanted to mention. Someone commented saying, what the hell are the ashes,

which we kept talking about between Australia and England, long-running thing called the ashes. What are they, Matt? Okay, so to put it very simply, I actually think that maybe it would make a good do-go-on report, so I won't go into it too much. But very simply, the Ashes is the competition between the Australian test cricket team and the English Test cricket team. Whoever wins it, they get the Ashes, right? That's what they're winning.

That's the trophy. But it began way, way back when Australia beat England over there. And I think a journalist said Australia is taking home the ashes of English cricket. Like English cricket's dead. and the Australians had taken home the ashes. And then the next time when the English one, someone gave the English team a little urn with these burnt bales and said,

you've won the ashes back or something like that. Yeah, and they still play for a replica of that earn today. That is what the ashes trophy is. Yeah. Yes, the only thing I will say is the bales that you're talking about that are burnt. They're the little pieces of wood across the top of the wicket that basically prove whether or not the ball has hit the stumps hard enough,

hit the wood hard enough. So they took the little bales off the top and supposedly burnt them down and put them in the year and said, these are the ashes of cricket. And then every year, or every couple of years now, England, Australia, play again.

And whoever wins the series gets to either win or retain the ashes. Yes. So you retain the ashes. You can win them by winning the five-match series by just winning more tests to the other team, obviously. Or if you draw,

whoever has the ashes already, they retain the ashes. and that's probably still kind of the biggest tournament in cricket is Australia versus England. Certainly from an Australian cricket fan's perspective. There is now one-day World Cups, the shorter form of the game and the 2020 World Cups, which are also huge, which England won last year. In very controversial circumstances, they beat New Zealand. New Zealand were absolutely ripped off.

But in terms of club cricket and how it compares to like major leagues and minor leagues and baseball, that sort of stuff, for the longer form, for test cricket, the entry level is, you know, your local cricket, that sort of stuff. Then you've got representative cricket. And then you get up to first class cricket. So in Australia, that is the state competition. So if I was real good at cricket, I'd end up playing for Victoria probably because that's where I'm from. and then from there, from that state level cricket, which is the Sheffield Shield competition in Australia, you get selected to play for Australia,

and that's the highest level. Playing for your country in test cricket, that's the highest level of cricket. The nations that have test match status in cricket, Australia and England, of course, and South Africa, the West Indies, who are actually a multinational team. They're made up of a bunch of different countries. from around the Caribbean, including Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago on a bunch of others,

and they've been a long been a power of world cricket. You've got New Zealand, India, another one of the major powers, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Ireland and Afghanistan. down. They're the only 12 test teams in the world. Then you've got other levels of cricket. There's to try and sex it up in the late 21st century they started, sorry 20th century they started playing around with the format. There's one dayers which each team gets 50 overs only and they just make as many runs as they can. There's a few extra teams that are able to play and that at the moment, including Scotland, United Arab Emirates, Nepal, Netherlands,

Nabibia, Oman, Papua New Guinea, and the United States of America. Then, even more recently, in the 21st century, they came up with this idea called 20-20 cricket, which is, there's a lot more rules to make it faster and that sort of stuff, and each team only gets 20 overs, but the same amount of players.

So you basically go out and just hit and try and make as many runs as you can, as fast as you can. And there's world, Cups and whatnot for both of those competitions. As well as with the 2020, there's a lot of sort of big money competitions around the world, like the Indian Premier League, which will have players from around the world getting big multi-million dollar contracts to play 2020 cricket there.

In Australia, there's the Big Bash League, which is the equivalent of that, which is pretty big in the summertime. Yeah, anyway, if you've got any other questions, let us know. I don't know how I'll answer them. I don't think we'll do a second cricket explainer of Sirb. Who knew with Matt Stewart? The clarification of cricket. But it's something that I thought maybe we could do every now and then.

Because this is sort of the, Who knew it with Matt Stewart podcast idea I've had for a while. I was just doing some either topics that are too big or too small for DoGo on. You could do episodes about it separately. Little fact question. So maybe if there's any other questions, you've got, yeah, tweet apps. me or something and maybe we'll do some more of these mini episodes in the future.

But yeah, it was interesting. I just, I mean, even just saying bales then, that slipped right by without even thinking, hang on, people who don't understand cricket aren't going to know what bales means. Yeah, they're probably imagining bales of hay being burnt in. Yeah. Yeah, good point. Cool. But yeah, that was fascinating and to find out that cricket is so little known by a lot of our

listeners. Yeah, totally. And thank you so much for tuning in, everyone. Jess, how do we sign off here at Who Knewit with Matt Stewart again? And like we always say here at Who Knewit with Matt Stewart? Well, now you know it. Bye. Bye.

I love it. Later. Bye, everyone. This podcast is part of the Planet Broadcasting Network. Visit planetbroadcasting.com for more podcasts from our great mates. I mean, if you want, it's up to you. Don't forget to sign up to our tour mailing list so we know where in the world you are and we can come and tell you when we're coming there.

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