Rockstars of Cricket

Before I left for New Zealand a few grad students working for the ITS Help Desk (where I am the supervisor) kept telling me that I needed to go and see the India v. New Zealand matches because India (their home country and their favourite team) was touring New Zealand in March. I said I would think about it.

So we are in New Zealand and one of the main sports played is Cricket. We had to go see a match right? Jackâ€™s teacher reminded his class that there was the match here in Christchurch on the weekend and it would be fun. I was also primed from the talking to from my student employees – so we were off to the match.

But we had no idea how cricket was played, so after a quick google, we had the answer – the long answer: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/hosking/cricket/explanation.htm We figured we could also ask someone around us in the stands if we needed to figure anything out…

The day was a nice warm sunny day after a few days of rain, thank goodness. Jack, Will, Sarahâ€™s uncle John, and I headed out for the afternoon match.

After watching the first 25 overs (you will have to read the rules, I am not going to explain it…) we started wondering just how long would this match be anyway. It had already been 2 hours and Jackâ€™s teacher said it should be only 4 hours… So we asked a nice Kiwi behind us and he informed us that the 50-50 match, or â€œOne Day Internationalâ€ could go until 9 or 10 PM! Whoops. Apparently Jackâ€™s teacher thought it would be the much shorter 20-20 match.

We stayed until New Zealand was up batting, around 7 pm, they had a really large target to hit, as India was hitting extremely well. For all those cricket fans – the â€œ6â€ signs were held up a lot. 🙂

All, in all we and fun. The boys got some helmets, we had lots of fries and I had a few beer. A good day.

Here are some pics of the match.

Later,
Jonathan