Erik Hanson

Mick Pattinson hits several strong shots, including a six that clears the boundary and the small bleachers, just missing Nigel’s car. The bench cheers vigorously and encourages him to try again.

On the first hot Saturday marking the end of the June gloom, we take over Warren Field on the UCSD campus, we aliens, we immigrants, carrying our strange apparatus, calling to each other in three or four languages, proudly odd, even un-American, in our all-white clothes, eerie music braying from our car speakers. We are the University of California-San Diego Cricket Club.

The author at bat. “It has been said that the English, not being by nature a religious people, invented cricket to give them some idea of Eternity....”

Cricket, like baseball, evolved out of a million miscellaneous, impromptu forms of stick-and-ball games played all over the world. Its clearly a universal survival skill that we need, to be able to hit something thrown in our direction. Both games also evolved in England: Jane Austen refers to baseball as an English pastime 20 years before Abner Doubleday is supposed to have invented the game in Cooperstown. Cricket is just like baseball, in fact, except for 5 major differences and 30 or 40 minor ones.

Noni Rabbani bowls. A bowler may bowl only six deliveries (called an “over”) from one end before yielding to a different bowler.

The first significant difference is that cricket is played not tucked away in the corner of a stadium, like baseball, where the batter may literally have his back to the wall, but in the middle. Consequently, there is no foul territory. The batsman can hit the ball in any direction, not just try to blast it into the next zip code, but steer it delicately past his hips or over his shoulder. The range of strokes is, therefore, much greater, the batting subtler (especially as a cricket bat has a flat face, and the batsman therefore has much more control over his shots than that baseball batter), and the skillful placement of fielders is more important. For the spectator, it also means that everything is happening at least 60 yards away, in the middle of a grassy oval. It’s not surprising that many spectators carry opera glasses. Or sandwiches. Or a good book. If you don’t understand what is going on out there, it’s not only confusing but awfully small.

Nigel Calcutt is shortish, cherrycheeked, still oddly schoolboyish, from the Black Country of the English Midlands, home of Staffordshire pottery and Burton-on-Trent beers.

The second big difference is in the bases. Baseball has four of them, though one has evolved into a plate above which a notional rectangle of air known as the strike zone hovers invisibly, growing and shrinking with each player and each umpire. Cricket has two, and instead of slouching on the ground or hovering in the air they stand proudly upright. They are called wickets. (This word, unfortunately, means four entirely different things to a cricketer, as we shall see.)

West Covina team member. When West Covina bats in the heat of the afternoon, the ball will run much more quickly. And the SDCC bowlers will tire easily, bowling in the heat.

For the purposes of explaining the game, we can ignore the first seven or eight centuries of its history and begin in early 18th-century England. At that time, each wicket consisted of a simple structure like the Greek letter pi, two vertical sticks with a third stick across the top, something like a croquet wicket. The two wickets were set up 22 yards apart. The bowler delivered the ball from beside one wicket, and the batsman defended the other: it was his home, his strike zone, his castle. If the ball hit the wicket, dislodging the “bail” laid across the top, or passed through it, the batsman was out, and would be forced to spend the next two or three hours watching his fellow teammates bat. (He was also out if he hit the ball and it was caught before it bounced or if he prevented the ball from striking the wicket by interposing his leg, a frequently painful form of dismissal called Leg Before Wicket.)

Fielding practice: Rabbani bats to (left to right) Kamal Patel, the author, Vinod Jessani, David Belprez. The Warren Field grass, pleasantly cushiony underfoot, is long enough to slow the ball down.

No wonder most cricket pavilions now have a bar. Inevitably, there were disputes as to whether the ball had passed through the wicket or missed it, and now it consists of three vertical dowels, called stumps, about 28 inches high, spaced so the ball can’t quite pass between them.

Runs are scored, as in baseball, by running the bases, going back and forth between the two rather than round the four; but here again there are a couple of complications.

Cricket being a social game, there are always two batsmen at work at the same time. One is doing the hard part — defending his wicket, trying to hit the ball, and so on — while the other lounges by the wicket from which the bowler is operating and acts as a sort of tag partner. If the active batsmen hits the ball cleanly and calls for a run, the two dash toward each other’s end, and if they reach it safely before the ball is thrown in to either wicket, one run has been scored, and the formerly passive partner faces the next ball. Runs can also be scored by big hits. If the ball is hit all the way to the boundary, some 60 to 80 yards distant, the batting team scores four runs even without running; if the ball crosses the boundary without bouncing, it is worth six.

The third major difference between baseball and cricket is that in cricket, the ball bounces before it reaches the batsman. Two hundred years ago, in fact, the ball was delivered along the ground, which is why the action is still called “bowling” rather than “pitching.” The bowler retreated some 10 or 20 yards, raced up and bowled, underhand, like Earl Anthony on speed, a small, hard ball, a nasty little customer that might race across the bumpy ground and sneak under the batsman’s blade and through the wicket or might strike a flint and ricochet upwards, dislodging a tooth or an eye. (One bowler is said to have been so fast that one of his deliveries shot past one fielder, brushed aside another’s coat held out like a bullfighter’s cape, and killed a dog.)

In the decades that followed, bowlers discovered that if they began releasing the ball not down by the ankle, but farther off the ground, using a round-arm motion (the rules were and are still very strict: the elbow must be straight at the moment the ball is released), it bounced awkwardly up at the batsman. The higher the delivery point, in fact, the more difficult the bounce. Bowlers still run up and bowl at speed, but now the ball is released directly above the shoulder, some 9 feet off the ground, making the ball rear up nastily. A baseball batter has to judge a ball coming at him at 85 miles an hour from 60 feet, but a cricket batsman has to gauge a ball rising off the ground at perhaps 70 miles an hour some 5 to 10 feet in front of him. This makes the quality of the playing surface, confusingly called either the “pitch” or (even more confusingly) the “wicket,” absolutely paramount. The professional game is played on grass that has been rolled with a ten-ton roller several times a week for several decades, so the ball’s bounce is at least somewhat predictable. The amateur game, lacking such amenities, can be bloody lethal.

As the perpetual pounding of the ball destroys the grass wicket quite quickly, this wear and tear is cunningly distributed between the two ends by requiring a bowler to bowl only six deliveries (called an “over”) from one end before yielding to a different bowler, who bowls an over from the other end. Hence the greatest bafflement to the American spectator: every three or four minutes, for no apparent reason, all the fielding team members suddenly stroll around and take up entirely different fielding positions. The spectator rubs his eyes and suspiciously examines his tankard.

The next difference between baseball and cricket is the delightful but cryptic English tradition of assuming that if someone 400 years ago in Yorkshire invented an utterly incomprehensible dialect word for something, then that’s what it should still be called. American sports have plain, utilitarian terminologies: Right Field. Left Field. Catcher. Pitcher. Tackle. Kicker. Cricket has fielding positions called square leg. Short square leg. Square short leg. (All different positions, none of them implying a need for an orthopedic appliance.) Silly mid-on and silly mid-off. (Don’t make the joke that these positions are called silly because you’d have to be daft to field only ten feet away from the batsman. The English expect this naive etymology from Yanks and smile patiently at you.) Silly point. (Nothing to do with debating.) Third man. (Makes no sense at all. This guy fields at one end of the ground, so he should be either first man or last man.)

Then there’s first, second, and third slips. (Actually a reference to greyhound racing, for Pete’s sake; these fielders are supposed to crouch alertly like greyhounds straining to go; before dog races had little starting gates, they had just a line where the leashes were slipped.

You knew you’d be sorry you asked, didn’t you?) The only name that makes the remotest sense is long-off, who stands such a long way off that on a good hot day, he vanishes in the heat haze. I’ve played on grounds that were on a slope, so long-off couldn’t even be seen by the batsman. Fielders have been known to volunteer to field long-off just so they could make out with their girlfriends during the dull patches.

Even the most basic words go berserk. “In” may mean the opposite of “out,” but it may also mean exactly the same thing. The opposite of “off ’ is sometimes “on,” but it is sometimes, astonishingly, “leg.” Mind you, what do you expect from a nation that gives its food names like Toad-in-the-Hole and Bubble and Squeak?

The last and perhaps most astounding difference is that if a cricketer hits the ball, he doesn’t have to run. In fact, if he thinks the ball is going to miss his wicket, he doesn’t even have to hit it. No wonder an ordinary club game, lasting one innings each side, runs for perhaps six hours, and international matches, at two innings per side, are scheduled to last five days. No wonder that even some of the English find cricket tedious. No wonder it is often seen as less like a sport and more like a religion.

And that’s cricket, more or less: bowl and bat, hit and miss, life and limb.

As a Brit living in Vermont, I first heard of SDCC through the Internet, when someone on the newsgroup rec.sport.cricket asked if there was cricket in San Diego, and the answer came back in the joyous affirmative. There is a strange congruence between electronic mail and this centuries-old game. It’s not simply that the San Diego Cricket Club sends out its game reports and announces its team selections by e-mail. The Internet has become a cultural lifeline for the cricketer in voluntary exile.

Cricket is being played up and down the median along the information superhighway, with messages zinging back and forth from MIT to the University of North Carolina to Microsoft Corporation to the University of Lahore, from Pakistan to Zambia to England, updating scores of major games almost hour by hour, bickering over whether this player should have been selected or that one dropped from the national team, inquiring about cricket history, rewriting cricket history, pleading for tickets to Test (international) matches, or announcing satellite TV channels or shortwave radio frequencies where broadcasts can be found, debating the merits of the various commentators, grumbling about one hero’s poor form or an umpire’s poor eyesight — even a cricket poetry contest.

A recent sprightly correspondence listed top-level players who shot themselves, were hanged for murder, played with only one good eye, suffered torn groin muscle while lifting a heavy suitcase, were run down by a motorized airport cart, required stitches after an encounter with a champagne bottle, were crushed to death by a crate of bananas, had a contact lens swallowed by the wicketkeeper, and “retired with measles.” Most days there are more e-mail bulletins about cricket than any other sport. Four-fifths of the postings are about the Indian or Pakistani teams or their players. It’s not surprising that one recent posting was an apology: “I’m sorry,” someone wrote, “I thought this was soc.culture.India.” (Indian cricketers have names that sound like religious epic poems: Tendulkar, Subramanian, the Nawab of Pataudi.)

The e-mail cricketers have found their voices and have found each other. This is fandom as it should be or perhaps as it will be; this is the electronic gossiping of the crowd up in the bleachers of the global stadium. This is the sign of a living sport.

At this point, I should admit that I am playing as a guest for the SDCC 2nd team (officially, the 2nd “XI,” a cricket team being made up of 11 men) because, frankly, I’m not good enough for the first team. On its day, the SDCC 1st XI is as good as any team in California, which means it is as good as any team in the U.S. Its members have played for California against Canada, one played for the West Indies under-21 team, and one played for India. (The top cricketing nations are Australia, West Indies, Pakistan, India, England, New Zealand, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, though not necessarily in that order.)

The 1st XI began the season like a whirlwind, thrashing a Pasadena team whose opening bowlers play for the U.S. team, but results since have been mixed, and the club has won three and lost three, the most embarrassing defeat being a recent game against Corinthians, when two no-shows meant that the SDCC 1st XI turned out to be the SDCC 1st IX. And because two players arrived late, the club began the game as the SDCC 1st VII. It’s hard to field with only seven players.

The 2nd XI, which plays in the fourth division of the Southern California Cricket Association, likewise has three wins and three defeats, though the team’s record is more a matter of honor than intense competition. I’ve been following its progress through the match reports on the Internet, written up by the team captain, Nigel Calcutt, an assistant professor at UCSD or, as he signs himself, THE MANAGEMENT.

The captain’s match report is in fact a crucial item in the club game. It is part of the glue that keeps people playing this ludicrously demanding sport under such adverse conditions. It should be entertaining, of course, and should offer a kind of humor not generally to be found elsewhere; it should constantly reinforce optimism and team spirit, even on the heels of the sorriest performances; and it should create the sense that the individual is no longer an individual who may or may not decide to play cricket on any chosen Saturday, but a member of the team and a part of the history of that team and the game itself. Hence the mock-heroic style, the constant use of statistics and records, the egregious comparisons between the players concerned and giants of yore. In short, the captain’s job is to continually remake all of cricket’s cherished myths, subliminally reinforcing the sense that everyone concerned — players, umpires, ground staff, tea ladies — are vital to something far greater than themselves.

“A day of gray it was, grim and gloomy gray like a well used shroud or sweaty cup,” one report began. Another included the perceptive aphorism, “It has been said that the English, not being by nature a religious people, invented cricket to give them some idea of Eternity....”

Others reinforce the spirit of irony, so crucial to the English. “To end on a good note,” The Management wrote after one game, “the whole team behaved in an exemplary fashion in the face of much intimidation and provocation from our opponents, and I just hope that the five tins of laxative that we mixed into their drinks at tea took effect on the drive back to LA LA Land.”

Practice begins at 5:30 SDCC time (that is, about 5:50) on Wednesday evening. Having arrived in my cricket whites, determined to do things properly, I find that (a) the other players practice in shorts or sweats of all colors and (b) it’s distinctly nippy. It’s warmer than this in Vermont. It’s warmer than this in England, dammit. I haven’t brought my white cable-knit sweater, and I put on a grey sweatshirt, feeling vaguely illegitimate.

Every cricket ground has its character, its idiosyncrasies, like the ground at Canterbury. England, that for years had an oak tree growing within the boundary. If a fly ball ricocheted off a branch, a batsman could be caught out. If the ball got stuck up the tree, however, it was still within the field of play, and the batsmen could keep running until someone shinnied up and got it. The Inland Empire Cricket Club ground, according to The Management’s game report, is set “amongst the green fields, white toxic-waste dumps, and rusting scrap yards of smoggy San Bernardino,” where “the So. Cal. equivalent of Hurricane Andrew was liberally distributing the contents of every trash can in the city across the field.” At the other extreme, the Woodley Cricket Grounds in Northridge, in the San Fernando Valley, are among the most beautiful in the world — “cricket heaven,” as one Indian SDCC player put it.

Warren Field is somewhere in between. It’s a little bumpy, frankly, and the grass a little long, but the matting will compress the grass and smooth out the bumps a little. What gives it its character are the swallows, dipping and swooping around and between the players, and the clatter of a long hit against the chainlink fence between the field and the student housing.

In the temporary absence of The Management, the deputy management, David Belprez, takes charge of practice, hitting catches to us, working on our fielding skills. David, a genuine Yank, learned his cricket in England. He was stationed in Oxfordshire with the U.S. Air Force and playing on the base volleyball team, when he broke his leg and spent the whole summer in a cast, watching cricket on television.

“As soon as I got better, I went down to the local pub. They were a very young team, and I had a car, so I drove to all the matches.” He was struck by the orderliness of the English game, where one quickly learns not to argue with the umpire or one’s captain, and by the difference between the crudeness and violence of soccer spectators and the politeness of the cricket fans. When he left the Air Force and was relocated back to San Diego, he assumed his playing days were over. But John McMillan, a New Zealander and UCSD professor, told David’s wife about SDCC. “I’m not sure I should tell you this...” Dawn told David, knowing all about cricket widowhood.

Soon Nigel, the captain, arrives. He’s shortish, cherrycheeked, his dark hair growing the first flashes of gray, but still oddly schoolboyish, from the Black Country of the English Midlands, home of Staffordshire pottery and Burton-on-Trent beers. Nigel's Ph.D. supervisor in the UK visited UCSD and promised that if he finished his dissertation early, he too could go out to California. Rarely has a thesis been written so rapidly. He came to San Diego originally for six months, then six months became a year, then five years....”

Nigel, like many Brits, is a man of qualities that may not be immediately apparent. He’s like his apartment in Leucadia. At first glance it is ordinary and unassuming, but it has half-hidden eccentricities: a cage with a fake parrot named Mr. Slater, after a song by the Bonzo Dog Band; and two guitars, on one of which he played “Here I Go” and “Effervescing Elephant,” by the legendary Syd Barrett, founder of Pink Floyd. Nigel once illustrated a class lecture on pain by showing a slide of British soccer genius and renowned bad boy Paul Gascoigne having his testicles grabbed viciously by an opponent.

We set up the stumps and start batting practice. Each of us will take his turn, putting on the pads and gloves and batting for ten minutes or so, while three or four people bowl at him in turn, and the rest lounge in the general vicinity, pretending to field. The only fielder who demonstrates any degree of vigilance is the wicket-keeper. First David keeps wicket, then Noni Rabbani, both displaying a considerable degree of incompetence (Vinod Jessani, the regular wicket-keeper, is not here), and the ball frequently speeds past them onto the running track, though no dogs are killed.

All the same, it’s a good practice, I think.

Everyone is in fine spirits, and several new faces appear, including a young Pakistani who has played good club cricket back home. Among other players, I'm introduced to Sri, a tall and balding expert in aerodynamic math, impulsive and outspoken, excitable, bowling off a 15-yard run-up, proving there is life at 41, even for a fast bowler. Then there’s Noni, the club joker and a former international youth field hockey player,

Paul Sherwood, a Brit and the other opening bowler; and Charles Howell, tall, bearded, a pale Antiguan, no longer an active player, but clearly still capable of crafty spin bowling.

The first team has no game scheduled for the weekend, and the only member to show up for practice is Rajinder Singh Ghai, a man of medium height, becoming a little stocky, a twinkle in his eye, wearing whites, a neatly knotted black turban, and a sleeveless cricket seater. Raj, as he is known, is a genuine star. He played for India and captained his district, the Punjab, but it was the old story: Where was his future? His brother’s family owned three restaurants in Southern California, and he came over to manage first the Star of India in Encinitas and now another family business, a computer store in San Marcos.

It’s been 24 years since I faced a bowler of his caliber, and I was both fascinated and apprehensive. He bowled quick and flat, the ball coming through always fractionally before I was ready for it. The first few came through straight, perhaps swinging away a little the air, before the bounce. Then he moved a couple of balls away from the bat, cutting them off the ground with the ball’s seam, then cut a couple back in, hoping to pierce the gap between my bat and leg pad. Then he bowled the classic unplayable ball, the one all bowlers would like to have. He swung it in toward my feet through the air, then cut it back the other way off the ground.

The ball just missing both my off stump and the outside edge of my bat. Had I been a better batsman, I would have gotten closer to it, and the faint nick off the outside edge of my bat would have been caught by the wicket-keeper. Had he not moved it back so much, I would have been bowled.

Over here, Raj’s cricket is much more lighthearted, he said, and as a result, his batting in particular has become more adventurous. He has already hit more than 20 sixes since March. Imagine a pitcher with 20 home runs by the All-Star break.

But cricket has also become more demanding, especially for the family man with two young children. “Five days a week you’re working, one day you’re playing cricket in L.A. You leave at 7:00 a.m., you don’t get back until 11:00 p.m., and the next day you’re tired, you know? For me now, cricket is secondary to my profession. But listen, I’ve played this game for 15 years. I just can’t give it up. It’s a wonderful game. It’s a beautiful game.”

When he puts it like that, adding that America is, after all, the place of working three jobs to get ahead, Raj’s dedication to cricket seems almost a natural part of that first-generation immigrant experience, that overdrive that pushes you through every aspect of your life.

My batting practice ends when I play a hollow-sounding shot and discover I’ve split my bat. Two cracks run up the grain a good six inches from the toe. I am devastated. The blade of a cricket bat is made of the best seasoned English willow, the handle from bamboo cane, and a good one will last you five years or more, unlike a Louisville Slugger. It seems to mold to your personality as you mold your stroke-play to its weight and lift. A bad bat feels stiff or sluggish, like hitting with a rod of concrete or a stick of rhubarb. A good bat is a friend.

This is no ordinary bat. For my 40th birthday, all my family and my wife chipped in to let me have my choice of bats at a store in England, and I chose this one, handmade, skillfully balanced, with all its weight in the meat, the sweet spot, so the pickup was light, but the punch very heavy. The top players have their bats custom-made, and, like this one, they cost more than $200. I take off my gloves and pads, and stare at the broken bat disconsolately. Later I discover two bruises the size of oranges and the color of plums on the inside of my left thigh and the inside of my right knee. Cricket is not a sissy game. Fielders have been killed chasing balls over cliffs, through fences, and over railings; batsmen struck by the ball have suffered heart attacks, broken skulls, swallowed and split tongues, and have had eyes knocked from their sockets.

After practice, we stow away the gear and Mutesa, Noni, Charles, David, Paul, Nigel, and I stroll over to UOiU’s Porter’s Pub, where we run into Satish Eraly, the club’s student president. Most players undergo a period of Americanization when they first arrive in the U.S., and it takes a while (several years in Satish’s case) before they discover that they miss cricket. But cricket, existing outside the mainstream flow of information in the U.S., is curiously invisible.

When Vinod arrived in L.A., he knew there was cricket somewhere, but it took him more than two months of asking around in Indian shops and restaurants, of stopping passersby who looked Caribbean or sounded Australian, to find it. And then it turned out to be just around the corner.

We talk about space and time. Cricket in America is virtually defined by the relatively small number of players and the relatively vast distances between teams. SDCC might be the most isolated team playing league cricket in the U.S., possibly even the world. The team’s closest away game is in Anaheim, 100 miles north. The other contender for this title is the Seattle Cricket Club, whose entire league away-game schedule is played in British Columbia.

SDCC’s longest away trip used to be Santa Barbara, four hours. By then it wasn’t so much a game as a vacation in itself, and the players would overnight en route. One year three or four of them chartered a light plane and flew up, because one had a pilot’s license. The only flaw in the plan: no means of getting from the airport to the grounds. Took them longer than it had been to fly up there.

And it’s not just a question of traveling to away games. Each season, every club has to provide umpires for eight other club games. This year SDCC is scheduled to provide umpires for five games in Ventura. Twenty bucks a game if you’re a qualified umpire, ten if you’re not. “A three-and-a-half-hour drive to be hated by everyone,” growled Paul.

Charles, sounding like a seasoned administrator, talks about corporate sponsors, marketing, and recruiting, and remarks affably on the club’s growth and the health of its finances, predicting a third team within the next couple of years. Judging from all the new faces at practice, he could be right. This year he’s planning a West Indian-style family-day fundraising party, with reggae and calypso music, dancing, and Caribbean food. ‘‘A lot of people are very attracted to our culture,” says the former Antiguan, “both from inside the club and outside.” He hopes for 120.

Mutesa Tendolkar played at the University of Goa, came to UCLA on a student visa, and then down to San Diego to work with an architectural firm. He heard about the team by spotting a flier at India Sweets and Spices on Black Mountain Road. “I have played a higher standard of cricket here than in Goa.” He doesn’t complain about the wickets. “We didn’t play on any better wickets in Goa. The wickets at Woodley are better than any I played on in India.”

The Southern California Cricket Association season runs from the end of March to the end of October. “Two years ago I played all the games — 17,” Mutesa said. “By the end of the season, I didn’t want to play. It was very tiring.”

Paul, on the other hand, came to the U.S. with his American bride, whom he met in England, and works in the UCSD bookstore. They play soccer together on a co-ed team. He took in cricket by osmosis. He lived in a classic small English village with a classic English pub that was the home of the cricket team.

Speaking of pubs and cricket, a serious discussion ensued concerning the role of drinking in the cricket subculture. For the British, a game of cricket isn’t complete unless everyone goes to the pub for a drink afterwards, and perhaps a game of darts. British and Dominion, a hard-drinking team in the fourth division, is based at a pub up in Orange County, but some of the non-Anglo teams don’t even know where the nearest pub is, a sure sign (in British eyes) of serious organizational dysfunction.

Charles opines that the Caribbean teams are more likely to throw parties, though it must be said that some Caribbean matches are virtually indistinguishable from parties, especially what are called fete matches. In India, Mutesa said, the tradition was to eat nihare — a curried beef dish with goat brains — and drink lassi, a yogurt drink, and sugar cane juice. In the U.S., the need to drive long distances cuts down on the social drinking. Nigel’s team in England had the perfect social appendage: a licensed clubhouse. On weekends when the club had two games, “Quite a few of [the players) would sleep in the clubhouse and play on Sunday. Their wives would know exactly where they were. They’d be passed out in the clubhouse.”

No discussion of wild and crazy cricketers is complete, it seems, without stories about Noni. Last year the club bullied Mutesa, a quietish young man, into letting them hold its awards evening at his place, with his very Indian mother, dressed to the nines in her best sari and jewelry, hovering anxiously in the background. Noni acted as ringmaster and clown, insisting on as much applause for the 37th award as the first, chanting his trademark cry of “Everyone! Everyone!” and leading the clapping. When the dancing began, he threw himself into an extraordinary performance, dancing a good 15 laps around the room (“to this absolutely, absolutely appalling Indian music,” Paul said), then a couple of laps on his knees, then more laps trailing a huge piece of silk. “It was extraordinary,” Paul added. “Yet we weren’t shocked by his behavior.” Every club needs a Noni. Cricket is like a long trip in a bus, and if you don’t really enjoy the company of at least four or five of your fellow players, you start to wonder why you’re making the trip.

All this effervescence adds up to an atmosphere at many of the games in California that is festive and unrestrained, soaked in the game’s cosmopolitan roots as if in rum. “The first [team) used to play to calypso music all the time,” said David Belprez. They were good enough to get away with it.”

“It’s great,” Nigel said, sounding thoroughly un-English in his enthusiasm. “I love it. When I played in England, it was all so suburban — clean whites, sandwiches, polite applause. I actually like it when there’s a bit of noise and music and shouting.” The unrestrained spirit has its dark side, though. A fair number of games, especially those involving the usually polite and restrained Indians and Pakistanis, erupt into arguments, and one team was thrown out of the league after a brawl that resulted in one player pulling up a stump and another invading the field with a knife. This is not without precedent, however. International games have been abandoned due to rioting, and at least one dispute on the field has been settled — fatally — by a duel.

On the evening before our game, Charles invites me over to his house, an immaculately kept ranch-style home in Mira Mesa. Dozens of mounted photographs of Trinidad-Tobago and Antigua decorate the walls or are stacked on the floor: an old mill on a sugar plantation, palm trees, boats, ancient faces in windows. He wants me to meet Dennis Heath, who has played cricket in Jamaica, England, Bermuda, and San Diego and is now a league umpire.

Dennis puts his finger squarely on the importance of cricket to the émigré. “I see it as still staying in touch with home and the things I did in England,” he says, “taking the things I’ve picked up, taking them out on a weekend and being proud to flaunt it, thumbing our noses in the face of baseball and football.”

It’s very hard for a third- or fourth-generation American to understand that even the egalitarian and libertarian culture in which he takes such pride seems monolithic and oppressive to an immigrant, who is not officially called a resident alien for nothing. “We take great pride in watching them walk round the field, scratching their heads and wondering what we’re doing,” Charles says.

We discuss migration patterns in the cricketing species. The Indians, Charles and Dennis agree, are the most organized, and often have a three-generation plan. One generation scrapes up enough money in India to send their children to England for a good education, which is also heavily subsidized. They in turn send their children to the U.S., where the job market is better. Once established, they bring over their parents and grandparents.

The West Indians in the club have often arrived by a military route, offered green cards if they will sign on with the Navy or the Marines, and ending up in San Diego. For this reason, they are more transient than the Indians, and several of the club’s core Caribbean players have since left.

“That was a problem with our team,” Paul Sherwood had sighed the night before. “If there was a war, half the team vanished.” I am only half sorry that, in practicing with the second team rather than the first, I have only seen the quiet, slim, small, Asian-British side of SDCC. The Caribbean-military side is spoken of in awe and a little fear. Frank Belmar is described as “the club’s own lethal weapon,” and Ron, the fastest bowler anyone around the table in Porter’s had ever seen, played for a West Indies youth team and is now thought to be somewhere in northern New England, with some Canadian club paying him to cross the border and play for them.

This sounded like pure superstition to me, knowing that there were no professionals in Canada, but I was assured that money changed hands everywhere, even in the Southern California league, when the player was good enough. Someone mentioned $200 a game. It might be called gas money or appearance money, it might be a way of helping out a recent immigrant who still had no means of getting around, but it was there. Two of SDCC’s first-team players had been approached with offers.

Saturday, game day, proves that San Diego has the perfect cricket climate: sunny without being blistering, a cooling breeze moving in from the ocean. This could be the cricket capital of the world if only all the fields weren’t being used for soccer. In the last three years, only one game has been rained out. That alone is enough to make an Englishman emigrate in an instant.

Nigel is at the ground an hour early, having worked until 2:00 a.m., then gotten up at 8:00 to make two cubic feet of sandwiches. Also here early is another good servant of the club, the legendary Harry.

Harry Gobin was born and raised in Trinidad, where he and his wife had good jobs and a nice house. But their son Rishi was born deaf. Trinidad, he told me, has no sign language, so they gave everything up to move to the U.S. so the boy could learn American Sign Language. Rishi is now at Mesa College, but Harry’s wife, despite getting her master’s degree, can’t find much of a job and works as a substitute teacher. Harry works for Loomis Armored Inc., and, just as importantly, is SDCC’s groundskeeper. In the United States, a groundsman who understands cricket is the rarest and most precious of commodities. Most clubs only dream of one.

Our opponents, the team from West Covina, have already arrived. One of their organizers, Harry tells me, has included his two American-born mid-teen sons on the team to give them a taste of cricket. Harry knows the family off the field. When his mother passed away in Trinidad, the father and his sons came to Harry’s house to sing devotional songs. “Nice fellows,” Harry said. “Very, very decent people.”

Harry had been the first person at Warren Field, hauling the thick, rolled-up, coconut-fiber matting strip from the shed and laying it out in the middle of the field, setting out six-inch nails by each grommet so that when Nigel, David, and I arrived we could go around with hammers and pin down the edges of the mat until it was stretched flat and rectangular. It’s all set up in half an hour, a darn sight easier than the work it takes to play on bare grass, as the pros do. Grass wickets, like grass tennis courts, sound and look lovely, but they take much more upkeep, without which they are the worst surface imaginable. The matting wicket costs around $500, and almost every California team has one.

The Management loses the coin-toss that precedes the match, and Krishna, the West Covina captain, asks SDCC to bat first. He is perhaps thinking that it is better to know how many runs his team will have to chase and how many risks he needs to take. But there are other advantages, too. The Warren grass, pleasantly cushiony underfoot, is long enough to slow the ball down, and the extra sap and dew of the morning will slow it down still more. With SDCC hatting early, even the hardest hit shots will screech to a halt far short of the boundary. When West Covina bats in the heat of the afternoon, the ball will run much more quickly. And the SDCC bowlers will tire easily, bowling in the heat. These are some of the things a captain ponders when he wins a toss.

The match will be played to 40 overs per side, with the winner the team that scores the most runs. “On the pitch, we’ll beat them if we make 120 (runs),” Nigel says confidently, “with the bowlers we’ve got today.” He sends out our successful opening pair of batsmen, Sandeep and Vinod. But today they fail to establish a bridgehead, and Vinod is bowled.

“What happen, man?” Harry asks sympathetically.

“It kept low,” Vinod says in frustration. “Dropped in a hole.”

“It drop in a hole?” Harry cries, cursing. “I put two bag of manure in all them hole and fill them up!”

Mick Pattinson, hatting number three, turns up in his Jaguar just in time to bat. Someone on the team makes the gesture of money being rustled between Fingers and tells me in a whisper that Mick is loaded, that he owns a huge construction company, which turns out to not be true, though he is an executive with the giant international developer Barrett.

The fact that Mick and Harry play on the same team is part of cricket’s appeal. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the gentry might deploy serving men as fielders to toil at their lordship’s beck and call or as bowlers to lob gentle deliveries that they could strike with lordly impunity. Soon enough, such players became good at their trade, good enough to be paid for their skills, especially as cricket matches were often the object of very heavy betting. Hence the centuries-old distinction, abolished less than 50 years ago, between amateurs (gentlemen) and professionals (players).

This may sound like entrenched snobbery, and there are still plenty of snob teams, but in fact the game has a history of starting out by imitating social distinctions and then turning them upside down as the players, by dint of practice and sheer necessity, soon became at least as skilled as the gentlemen. The same pattern would he repeated in colonial terms. The British taught the sport to their empire, thus giving their dominions the opportunity, in time, to come back and beat them at their own game. In no other sport have the squire and the blacksmith, the viceroy and the outback sheep farmer, competed so frequently and on such equal terms.

Mick hits several strong shots, including a six that clears the boundary and the small bleachers, just missing Nigel’s car. The bench cheers vigorously and encourages him to try again. He does and is rather unlucky when a wideish ball hits his leg pad and rolls onto the stumps, barely dislodging a bail. He’s out. And Mutesa follows, almost at once. SDCC is badly stalled at 35 for 3 — that is, the first three batsmen have scored only 35 runs. I join Sandeep, who is looking confident. I’m feeling rather nervous.

At this point, the game is at its most opaque to the uninformed observer. Instead of the baseball spectacle of batters cracking hits or pitchers blowing smoke, almost nothing seems to be happening. Some of the bowling is allowed to pass the stumps harmlessly; straight balls are blocked with the broad face of the bat; every fourth or fifth ball may be deflected between the fielders, and the batsmen will cross for a run, sometimes two, but this is a crucial period of retrenchment, and everyone knows that for SDCC to win this game we mustn't lose another batsman until a good many more runs are on the board.

Out on the field, meanwhile, the game is both a competition and a social event. With the fielders gathered close for a catch — one is barely six feet from the bat — everyone can talk to and hear everyone else, and an almost constant flow of comment takes place when the ball is not actually being played. In some games this might involve trash-talking (the cricket term is “sledging,” and the Australians are particularly good at it), but today’s match is a far more lighthearted affair. Even the umpire joins in the chat and the joking.

No league umpire has appeared, so in each innings the batting team takes turns umpiring, a potentially sticky situation that will survive only by goodwill. An umpire’s authority holds a lot more weight in England than in other countries, and in California it depends almost entirely on who is playing. Both sides work quite hard to establish goodwill, exchanging jokes and observations during the game, sharing a water bottle that appears on the field and stays out there in the umpire’s custody for several hours, steadily approaching boiling point.

While running between the wickets, Sandeep makes the mistake of bumping into a West Covina player wearing an L.A. Raiders cap. A brief spate of in-your-face, chest-to-chest yelling ensues before everyone moves in to calm them down. The fielder is still aggrieved. “Look at this guy,” he says, pointing at me. “He doesn’t shove me out of the way.”

“That’s because if I did, you’d break both my legs,” I tell him.

He grins. “No, no, man.” The moment passes, and in general the game is played in excellent spirits. When one ball, delivered at top speed by the visitors’ fastest bowler, hits a hidden bump and just misses my nose, West Covina crowds round the shaken writer. “You all right, man? Sorry, man. It was the pitch, man. Sorry.”

In this genial fashion, the score progresses to 100 before I get sick of hitting balls that stick in the long grass and hit one in the air instead, and it is caught. Noni, too, is out almost at once, and it looks as if a dreaded middle-order collapse might take place. (A story is told of Sir John Barbirolli, the great conductor, that when he first arrived in London, speaking little English and knowing nothing about cricket, he saw a newsstand placard that read “England Collapses!” It took him weeks to recover.)

We are now well past the 30th over and badly need to accelerate the scoring. This is no longer the time for finesse; it is time for Harry, who is built like a brick outhouse and can hit a ball into a different time zone. He plays the first couple of balls cautiously, measuring the bounce.

“Harry, brother, I love you!” Noni cries from the bleachers. “Go airborne!” Harry obediently aims a vast heave at the next ball, and the bat, despite its rubber grip, shoots out of his hands and whirls down the pitch. Three or four times he connects, though, and when he is finally caught out, deep in the country, he has added 24 precious runs.

David, the deputy management, comes in, holding his bat in a curious, self-taught grip and then crouching over it as if trying to break the bat under his left knee. His first ball seems about to sneak under him and take out his leg stump when he leaps in the air, his bat descending from an impossible direction at the last moment, and squirts the ball off toward the fence for two runs. A flurry of such silliness ends San Diego’s 40 overs, and we come off the field having scored 148 for 6. Sandeep ends up with 54 not out (a 50 is reckoned to be a good milestone for a batsman, 100 an outstanding one), and The Management is quietly confident.

Nothing about cricket baffles Americans more than the tea interval. It seems to be quaintness for quaintness’ sake. Nothing could be further from the truth. The tea break is so important that a game without it is a major step backward in comprehension, reduced to nearly a mere contest of skill. Conversely, a good tea will make undecided players show up for the match and will attract a strong team to play a weak one, or vice versa. Wednesbury, Nigel’s team in England, was renowned for its clubhouse bar and its teas (cakes, cheesecake, strawberries) and as a result could attract the best opponents. “They knew they would get a phenomenal tea and drink until three in the morning.” The SDCC tea is often curry, but with Nigel standing in as tea-maker at the last minute, we have slices of oranges, cookies, sodas, sandwiches (half cheese and cucumber and half turkey, bologna, and cucumber; for religious reasons, every tea, even when it is curry, has a vegetarian option, and the meat is always turkey). The deputy management’s contribution is a strange pasta salad consisting largely of vermicelli and chickpeas. “It’s a pool of carbohydrates,” Kamal observes. Ice for the drinks came from the pathology lab.

From under the table, Sri produces a sheet cake with “Happy Birthday Srihari” and four small balloons on top, for his son. (It surprises nobody that Sri should choose to celebrate his son’s birthday in the middle of a cricket match. They also had a celebratory cake when Vinod got engaged, and the club is actively pursuing other cake opportunities.) The team and assorted guests sing possibly the most ragged version of “Happy Birthday” ever voiced, and little Srihari is handed a plastic knife to excise the first piece. “Look!” Nigel says triumphantly. “Square cut!”

This is, in fact, a joke. A square cut, one of the 30-odd cricket strokes, is one in which the ball is hit slightly downward and away to the batsman’s right, a kind of opposite-field line drive, and then some. Nigel’s atrocious pun is, in its own little way, as much a part of cricket as the tea. Cricket is a verbal game. Any team sport that takes up so much time also promotes conversation, or else we’d all die of boredom. Being such a traditional game with such a richness of terminology and of anecdote, it also provides a wealth of common reference. Everyone here, no matter where they come from, can understand his joke and groan at it and recycle it a month or ten years from now. Probably all cricket jokes have been made at least once before, in Zimbabwe or on the Isle of Wight. There are probably ten billion of them, like the ten billion names of God, and if someone were to tell them all, one after another, the game would end, and darkness would descend.

After tea, West Covina comes to bat needing to score 149 in 40 six-ball overs in order to win. This is a run rate of less than 4 per over, which should be within their reach if they keep the score ticking along and don’t lose batsmen early. Their innings begins inauspiciously, with Sri knocking flat one opener’s middle stump. But today neither Sri nor Noni is bowling with the accuracy he would like. One ball an over arrives without bouncing and is easily dispatched to the boundary. After a while The Management puts himself in to bowl and reveals an endearing habit of shrieking in disgust as soon as an errant delivery leaves his hand. This endears him especially to Krishna, who, thus alerted, hits the ball for six over the chainlink fence and into the student housing.

“Who’s winning?” ask a pair of students. It’s a question rarely asked by cricketers and one that often has no clear answer. Advantage in cricket is more like the movement of forces in a fluid or a field. Momentum builds up in a team doing well, putting pressure on the opposing team or even on one person, while the other team relaxes. In doing so, they may squander their advantages. Changes in momentum happen gradually or very suddenly. At 75 for 2, the momentum edges toward West Covina. The batsmen are seeing the ball more clearly, the fielders are looking less eager — yet one out would shift the advantage dramatically, because a new batsman will have to spend crucial time settling in and learning to read what the bowlers are doing. Above all, SDCC is hoping that West Covina has little depth in its batting.

Three young women sun themselves beyond the fence, wearing bikinis of the minuscule persuasion. Noni suddenly seems to spend a lot of time fielding in that area and appears to be helping them with the finer points of the game, an educational act whose nobility and selflessness are lost on his teammates. They make more cricketing puns too complex to explain and too coarse to print.

When Indian television first started carrying Test (international) matches live from Australia, Vinod and Raj tell me, everyone on the subcontinent was stunned by the sight of women in bathing suits watching the games in the hot Australian sun. “Back home you never see a woman in a bikini,” Vinod says, “not even at the beach.” Australian cricket became the Baywatch of ball sports. “People in Punjab who had never shown any interest in cricket were getting up at 5:00 a.m. to watch the Test matches,” Raj says with a chuckle.

I, too, decide to be an ambassador for cricket, and when a sandy-haired young man pauses, perplexed, beyond the fence, I offer him a six-pack if he can figure out the rules. Or any one of the rules, for that matter. His brow wrinkles. “I can’t figure out who’s on which team, because they’re all wearing the same color uniforms,” he complains. His ignorance is deeper than I feared, but he’s raised an interesting point. The lack of team uniforms is central to the sport. The game itself has its uniform, and highly distinctive it is, and pleasing to the eye. One’s dedication, it implies, is not to a team and its colors, but to cricket itself.

The next three hits by Krishna are dropped, first at mid-off, then at cover, then at long-on. People who normally hold catches everywhere else drop them at Warren. The Management has a theory that involves vicious fluctuations in local gravity. I think it has more to do with the light, which by early afternoon is brilliant, overbearing. The shadows have vanished; there’s nothing against which to gauge the distance and depths of objects. Especially when the ball is mishit hard, it corkscrews up into the blinding sky, and panic and uncertainty descend on the fielder circling underneath.

Suddenly, the crucial breakthrough, and as is often the case in cricket, it is a mental as much as a technical weakness that brings SDCC back into the game. Harry’s pinpoint-accurate bowling has bogged Krishna down, and the batsman’s blood pressure is rising visibly. Harry swings one ball a bit away, another one a little in, and Krishna can wait no longer. He swings hard, and the simplest of catches lobs off the top edge of his bat, into the wicket-keeper’s gloves. Major shift in momentum. Krishna stomps off the field, furious with himself, looking temporarily less like his celestial namesake and more like Shiva the Destroyer.

More wickets fall, but two batsmen seem to be fending off the collapse when the game suddenly turns SDCC’s way, thanks to a hilarious act of self-destruction. Mick bowls a loose one, which the guy in the L.A. Raiders cap thumps hard toward the bleachers. Kama! sets off after it without much hope, and the batsmen stand where they are, assuming it will roll over the boundary for four. After a few seconds, it becomes clear that the ball has stopped short, and Kamal is bending, picking it up, and turning to throw. The Raider yells at his partner to run and sprints up the pitch toward the bowler’s end, only to discover that his partner has already got halfway down the pitch, changed his mind, and is now running back. Both batsmen are now heading at top speed toward the same end. Deep in the outfield, Kamal throws toward the bowler’s end of the pitch, where both batsmen are arriving neck-and-neck. Even as the ball is in the air, it must occur to both that one of them had better be at the other end, for they whirl round and shoot off, side by side, toward the other end even as the ball, which seems to have taken an hour to arrive from the boundary, reaches Mick.

The batsmen realize the enormity of their error. If one of them had stayed at the bowler’s end, he, at least, would be safe, buying his partner time to scramble toward safety at the other end.

Both batsmen turn a third and final time, one of them slipping, one lunging back toward the vacant bowler's end, only to see that Mick has gathered the throw and knocked a bail from the wicket. It remains only for the umpire to decide who the hell is actually out.

The remaining batsman hits San Diego’s bowling with increasing vigor. The game approaches its climax, and a weirdly hallucinogenic quality creeps in. The glare off the grass is blinding. The SDCC players look less alert; some are visibly drooping. Twice in the last three games, the team has knocked off the top of the opponents’ order, only to relax its grip and see the match slip away. Catches are dropped left and right. Sandeep of the safe hands finds himself setting up for a long catch on the lip of the field, thinks too much about the ground falling sharply two or three feet behind him, and the ball leaps through his hands and over the boundary: six runs instead of an out.

Weird little spots and lines dance in my eyes, and for once in my life I find myself hoping the next catch will go to someone else. Indian music cranks out of someone’s car speakers, sounding like Grace Slick played backwards, and someone has found an air horn and sets off a volley of trumpet-like parps whenever West Covina scores a run.

The visitors need to score 6 runs an over, then 8, then 10. Surely, San Diego can’t lose now. Once again, everything changes in six minutes. Mick, whose bowling has looked solid and reliable, is suddenly hit for 20 off an over. The Management thanks him for his efforts, takes him out of the attack, and turns to his guest player, and I promptly bowl one of the worst overs in the modern era of cricket — slow, erratic, wobbling deliveries that the batsmen fail to hit only because they can’t believe their eyes.

Twenty-eight runs needed off two overs. Difficult, but under the current circumstances, all too possible. Noni bowls the 39th over tightly. A huge, cyclonic swipe of the bat misses the ball altogether, then another, the ball just missing the wicket. The ring of fielders around the boundary clench and relax like a sphincter.

The whole game has come down to the final over and a dilemma of captaincy. West Covina needs (a certain amount of long-distance communication with the scorers, here, in two or three languages...) 25 runs to win, normally an almost impossible task, but who is to stop them? Mick, who has given away almost that many in his last over? The guest player, who looks as if he could easily give away 100? The maximum number of runs that can normally be scored off an over is 36 — if each of the six balls is hit across the boundary for 6 — which has happened only twice in the history of professional cricket. But if the bowling includes “wides” (that is, balls bowled so wide they’re out of the batsman’s reach) the batting team is credited with I run for each wide and given an extra ball. So theoretically, if bowled badly enough, an over can last forever and yield an infinite number of runs. In a club game in New Zealand, a wide-plagued over recently cost 77. Frankly, on this day, I look capable of exactly such a disaster.

The Management ponders the situation, taking thoughts and advice from all quarters. “If I were captain,” I say helpfully, “I wouldn’t bowl myself.” I don’t add that if I were captain and had just bowled so badly, I’d have shot myself.

The Management decides, wisely, on Mick. He retires to the end of his run-up; we retire to the boundary. West Covina essentially needs a four or a six from every ball.

The first ball, clouted vigorously, rockets to the fence. A West Covina win is still possible. Deafening volleys on the horn, cheers, shrieks of advice. Mick trots up again. Another whirl of the bat — and a complete miss. Every ball would now have to go for six. The third ball is hit, but only along the ground to one of the distant fielders. The batsmen don’t even bother to run. Barring wides, the game is now San Diego’s. The last three balls are also accurate, and at six o’clock, about seven hours after it began, the game is over, and SDCC has won by 20 runs.

Both teams applaud each other, pats on back and shoulder are exchanged, and the bleachers are surrounded by the steady denouement of players taking off pads, chatting, and (for a surprising number of the SDCC players) having a quiet cigarette.

Raj has dropped by to see how the game is going, offer quiet advice, eat cake. Rugby Mathur, an Indian gentleman apparently in his 50s, has turned up to watch the club for the first time and looks delighted. He adds another document to the growing history of cricket in the city. He played for Pasadena from 1960 to 1970, back when there were fewer than 20 cricket clubs in Southern California, and he remembered playing a game in San Diego in 1960 at Robb Field in Ocean Beach, where rugby is played now. Cricket, rugby. East and West Indians. English beer is on tap in the Hotel California. Calypso music echoes from a distant corridor, and the smell of curry wafts down the elevator shaft.

The captain and vice-captain are the last on the field, going down with the sinking day, collecting coolers, chairs, litter.

We pick up David’s wife. Dawn, and head over to Shakespeare’s Pub for the obligatory pint or five after the game. It has been quite a day. Every square inch of my exposed skin smarts, I’m crusty with sweat, covered with bruises, and every muscle from my neck down is sore. Amazingly, I find myself longing for a cup of tea.

In the pub, I’m reminded why I hate English pubs abroad. The selection of beers is a welcome sight for alien eyes, but we are immediately addressed by a blotto fellow former-countryman at the bar who realizes that we must have been playing cricket and who insists on blearily telling us an old, coarse joke and getting it wrong. I do what the English always do in pubs when they want to avoid each other. I head for the dart board.

Over darts and Abbott Ale, David and Dawn explain their plans to go back to England. David will graduate soon with all sorts of advanced skills in cutting-edge communication technologies, and their plan is to look for a place to live somewhere in Devon, though frankly, cutting-edge communication technologies are not expected to arrive in Devon until 2038.

At the Star of India restaurant, we meet up with Vinod and his fiance Robin and are waited on by Noni, for whom this is one of a bewildering variety of part-time jobs that he juggles in order to keep one day each weekend free for cricket. Despite the long game, Noni is as irrepressible as ever, taking charge of us, knowing what we would like better than we do. In a sense, this entire adventure has been about the issue of where people feel most at home. Mick is introduced to biryani, samosas, pakuras, naan, popadum and a variety of entries, all of which he gives serious attention and pronounces highly satisfactory. The Star serves wonderful Samuel Smith’s beer from Yorkshire, which several of us order and lay audible side bets on whether Noni will drop them. We say our good-byes at the curb at 11:30 p.m. The cricketing day, which began with Nigel making sandwiches 15-1/2 hours earlier, is over.

Americans tend to see sports as simple, intense, active competition, Shaq going head-to-head with Hakeem, pitcher trying to overpower hitter. And that is, of course, a part of virtually every sport, but only a part. To see sport as competition is actually a metaphor, all the more common in a nation that sees competition at the heart of business, even of education. A more European perspective is to see in sport a metaphor for civilization itself, a framework of rules within which the individual expresses himself (for cricket is, lamentably, almost exclusively male) in as many different ways as there are players. The jokes, the conversations, the anecdotes, the arcane trivia are all means of establishing and confirming that everyone involved is on common ground and that an old, universal story is being advanced by yet another chapter.

Every cricket game offers the chance to confirm a community between those who otherwise look different from one another, would barely be able to understand each other, and would have nothing to say to each other. At the United Nations, the common topic is crisis; in cricket the common topic is the group experience in, of, during, before, and after the game, a topic that is harmless, even trivial. But if the events of the game and the topics of conversation may be trivial, the chance to share them is not.

“If everyone in the world played cricket,” Mick philosophizes, happily full of curry and good beer, “there wouldn’t be any wars.” Well, not quite; after all, India and Pakistan are not the best of neighbors, despite their long history of playing the game. But after this game and around this table, at least, an unlikely community has been confirmed.