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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

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ramraj07

Soccer and baseball are weird to compare. Do cricket!

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Cricket at least had the insight to add a format where you aren't playing for five freaking days.

But aside from that it looks a lot like baseball:

- One team is batting, two guys on the pitch

- There's a load of data about what kind of bowl to do

- Lots of separate events with measurable data

- Your main issue is risk (trying to stay in), but risk will be better and better understood: dropping the ball gives away a lot of runs, as does taking batting risks.

Not gonna end well once the data people come for it.

I regret the coming of short-format cricket. Cricket's not supposed to be a super-exciting riot of entertainment; i like that you can drop in for one day of a 5-day Test, and sit there catching some rays and reading a newspaper.

In general, I don't care much for the influence of TV on team sports. I played Rugby Union at school; Rugby League was invented to make the game more exciting for spectators, by eliminating loose rucks. For me, all these games are participant sports, and the spectators are incidental (I don't watch sports on TV).

Football (i.e. soccer) is a thug's game, played by gentlemen.

Cricket is a gentlemen's game, played by thugs.

Rugby is a game played by men with peculiar balls.

Funny, I’d heard that football is a gentleman’s game played by thugs and rugby is the thug’s game played by gentlemen.

Could have got it wrong; but I'm sure about the "peculiar balls" bit.

In NZ, I heard it in the context of talking about the UK, and it was phrased. as "football is played by gentlemen and watched by thugs, rugby (union) is played by thugs and watched by gentlemen" as rugby union tends to be closely associated with public (that is, private) schools, who would often give rather large yet dumb students scholarships if they thought they'd help the First Fifteen beat their rival school.

I don't understand how soccer ayers qualify as gentlemen. Like not at all. It is fairly ... rude environment at minimum.

They're positively dandies compared to rugby players.

> Cricket's not supposed to be a super-exciting riot of entertainment

Perhaps that’s not what the creators of the game imagined. But it’s how society has progressed. Cricket should be what the masses want it to be.

> Cricket's not supposed to be a super-exciting riot of entertainment; i like that you can drop in for one day of a 5-day Test, and sit there catching some rays and reading a newspaper.

I feel like I'm missing the point, then. If your intention is to catch some rays and read a newspaper, can't you do that anywhere? What does a seemingly-ignored cricket match contribute to that recreation?

The story my dad used to tell us about the 5 day cricket games, is that they stem from the old colonial days where the soldiers where bored senseless and just need something to do.

5 day matches where a solution to that problem.

Hard disagree on stat people coming for cricket, you pretty much have a third agent in the game (the pitch). It can change so much from field to field and the weather can also have a big impact for long form. Pretty much impossible to optimise a team aside from chucking in an extra spin bowler in India.

The field is also something you can gather stats for. And the weather.

The same pitch can change from game to game.

The condition of the pitch in cricket plays a major role too. And the same pitch can be prepared differently for each game. The other major difference is the stadium. Cricket stadiums are not standardised. Another difference is the placement of players on the field during the game. In baseball it is far more static than cricket.

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