Inside Vancouver
Going Platinum
By Timothy Taylor published Sep 1, 2007
I could die out here. It's that hot. We're at Jericho Park. It'd be a hundred in the shade if there were shade. There's a crowd of tanned beachies having a party over there, beer on ice, bikinis, burger smoke. They're staring like we're mad. And we're not even wearing long white polyester pants and acrylic cable-knit sweaters.
Let 'em stare. I'm satisfying a longstanding curiosity here. I've admired the loping, easy grace of the cricket players at Brockton Oval. I'm drawn to arcane sports generally-jai alai, skeet shooting, trebuchet human catapult. So when Anosh Irani, the esteemed local novelist and crack batsman with the North Shore Cricket Club, offered to teach a bunch of us writers to play, I took the liberty of visualizing myself as something of a natural.
But, as it's turning out, I'm quite bad. In fact, I'm falling into rarer and rarer statistical categories of badness as the game progresses. Indeed, I'm what they refer to in cricket as a "Duck." Worse, a "Golden Duck", although thankfully I have not yet descended as far as either "Double Duck" or "Diamond Duck" (which is also known as a "Glass Duck"). But then, we're only in the first inning.
Let me back up and explain. While cricket shares with baseball a set of innings and hit-run, batting-fielding architecture, the differences are vastly more important. For instance, while batters in baseball do face the entire fielding team, focus is really on the pitcher-batter duel. In cricket, everybody on the fielding team pitches (bowls), each fielding player tossing a set of six balls known as an "over" in rotation as long as it takes to get the batsman out. It might take a single ball. It might take 10 "overs" involving 10 fielding players.
