Quick, Somebody Teach Me This Game

Even though the World Series ended only a couple weeks old, I already miss baseball. Tonight there's snow on the ground for the first time in months, which, cutting to the quick, means there are months of it to come. Three days ago I played golf. Driving home tonight I felt for the first time all year that I should be listening to a basketball game. You see, it's not just the game of baseball I love, but the daily joys of following it. Once a week football is okay, but it's not daily and besides, football, especially in these parts, is not much fun these days. Who knows when basketball will return. So I'm jonesing for a sport to follow day in and day out.

I don't know a thing about cricket. Don't even know if it's much of a daily sport. When I was in England for a summer I read about it in the papers, but never really understood it. And once I saw an exhibition of it where they tried to explain the rules, but they might as well have been explaining colored fractals for all the sense it made to me. But I was thinking of a beautiful song, Roy Harper's "When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease," and I started wishing I knew the sport, to understand the song better, and so that maybe I could follow it in this fallow, wintry time. So if anybody out there knows anything about cricket, please let me in on the pleasures. Until then, I'll just count the hours until spring training and hum this song.