by Simon Wright

Created on: July 13, 2009

All sports like to have their own peculiar terms and expressions but cricket perhaps has more than most. For example, what does it mean to be standing at silly mid on, or in the slips? And what does it mean if the commentator says that the batsman has been bowled LBW?

The alien nature of some of cricket's terms was brought home to me when myself and an English friend had a holiday in the US. I remember a long hot Greyhound bus trip from Vegas to Houston where we found ourselves in aminated conversation with a couple of baseball fanatics. We were trying to explain the basic concepts of cricket to our new American friends, and they were trying to explain baseball to us. What we found was that although the basic premises of both sports may be fairly straightforward, there's a lot of jargon and terminology that is used which can get in the way of understanding!

However, before going on to demystify some of those oddball cricket expressions, I think it's probably worth trying to explain the basic premise of cricket. Doing that in one paragraph may be challenging but here goes! Whether we're talking about 5-day Test matches, 1-day matches, or the new Twenty20 shortened version of cricket, the basic aim is to score as many runs (points) as possible and then ensure that the opposition team scores less. Points are scored either by hitting the ball beyond a boundary rope or, alternatively, by hitting the ball within the boundary rope and running between the wickets. Each time that a batsman runs from one end of the scoring zone to the other, 1 run is awarded.

With that summary in mind, let's start to look at some of the terms and expressions that spectators can benefit from understanding:

Wickets, stumps and bails:

Wickets are the sticks that are erected at either end of the scoring zone. Wickets are comprised of three 28 inch vertical sticks (called stumps) that are stuck into the ground, with a total width between the outermost stumps of 9 inches. There are also two smaller sticks, called bails, which are placed along the top of the stumps. The bowler will aim to deliver the cricket ball towards the wickets and if they knock any of the stumps over or the bails off, then the batsman is out. The batsman will therefore try to stop the ball from hitting the wickets, using his bat.

The crease:

Within the scoring zone, there are lines marked that represent demarcation points and which are referred to as creases. There's a bowling crease, which effectively is a line

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