Navtej Kohli

Navtej Kohli

A couple of days ago, an American friend of mine expressed the opinion to me that cricket was a rather silly sport. She did not understand how the sport had become so popular in former British Empire nations such as Australia, India and South Africa. She said that, to her, cricket appeared to involve a group of guys standing around on a big round field, rocking back and forward on the soles of their feet all day long.

Ricky Ponting, a famous Australian cricket player

At first, I was a bit offended. Cricket isn’t stupid! I played cricket for my school and it’s a highly technical, skillful game that requires high levels of physical fitness and endurance. The name “Navtej Kohli” has appeared in several record books for the sport and I’m defensive about it! But I digress…

It’s not like this is the first time I’ve heard people talk about how they do not like or understand cricket, but this instance made me think about the sentiment more than I do usually. In thinking about it, I have come to the conclusion that, rather than just cricket, all sports are inherently stupid.

This is not to say that I don’t like sport. Far from it. I love sport. When I visit Digg, I usually digg nothing but sports stories. I love NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball. I’ll try and watch as much of the summer and winter Olympics as possible. But yes, friends; sports are silly. Let me elaborate…

Cricket
Cricket is enthralling. As I mentioned in my introduction, it’s involves physical fitness, mental endurance, natural talent and practiced skill. But despite my love of cricket, I can see why it is indeed silly.

Firstly, let’s look at the names given to the positions in cricket. There are about 92471 positions that players can take on the field (okay, more like fifty), but some of them have names that make even true cricket fans crack a grin. Here are some of the best:
• Silly mid-off
• Silly mid-on
• Fly slip
• Short fine leg
• Straight fine leg
• Wide long on
• Fine leg
• Short third man
• Square leg
• Fine leg
• Short leg
• Straight long off

Try explaining that to an American who’s used to hearing “center field” and “pitcher.” Even the position that baseball would name “catcher” is called a “wicket keeper”, which means very little if you don’t know what a wicket is.

What’s a wicket? Three sticks, stuck into the ground with two little sticks on top of them. If the ball hits the sticks, the batter is out. If the batter doesn’t manage to hit the ball and the batter’s leg is in front of the sticks, the umpire (referee) can decide that the ball would have hit the sticks had the leg not been there, and the batter will be out. You look up “subjective” in the dictionary and there’s a picture of this offense, known as “leg-before-wicket” or LBW.

Cricket is best served in one-day format, which means that the match only takes one day to complete. Old-fashioned cricket matches take three to five days and often end in a draw. The draw, however, does not involve both teams arriving at the exact same score, but rather indicates that neither team can win due to the time constraints of the game. That is, the game would have to take even longer in order to determine a winner. This is always very frustrating if your team is the one that’s been doing the best and, given a chance to finish, your team would undoubtedly win.

One-day cricket was invented to negate the traditional lengthy matches. This form of the game involves both teams being bowled to (or pitched at, in baseball lingo) fifty times. The only instance in which a team would not face all fifty balls is if their players were all out before fifty balls had been bowled.

So, I can see why many people think cricket is silly. It goes on too long, its names are very traditional British labeling masterpieces (i.e. silly) and many cricket outfits look like preppy boys’ schools’ uniforms. However, I still love the game and would love to have my American friends sit down and watch a closely-contested international one-day game with me. Once you’re hooked, cricket’s silliness doesn’t matter anymore.

Check out some of the questions I’ve answered about cricket at here – Navtej Kohli – Answers Profile

Swimming
Swimming is the most passive aggressive of all sports. Every competitor is isolated in their own lane, unable to tamper with competitors’ races. This immediately makes swimming less interesting than sports like running, where shoving your competition off the track and attempting to cut the backs of their legs with the spikes on the soles of your shoes is a well-loved pastime.

For a sport that involves racing (as opposed to accumulating points), it seems very odd to have people sprint up and down a body of water in order to get back to the place where they started. Running is often guilty of this, too. Some events, such as the very short sprints, make more sense, as the swimmers’ goal is to get from one end of the pool to the other as quickly as possible. It would make even more sense if there were treasures, money or tasty snacks at the other end. However, there usually aren’t.

The dumbest thing about swimming is the four different styles in which a swimmer can compete. “Freestyle” (more accurately called crawl stroke or over-arm) is the fastest style, but someone invented three others, including backstroke, butterfly and breaststroke. Why would you invent slower ways of getting back to where you started from? Including a style (butterfly) that no one apart from national-level swimmers can do properly? And why invent breaststroke – the least hydrodynamic way of traveling through the water known to man?

Netball
Netball is, like cricket, a sport that is primarily played by former British colonies. It’s especially popular in England, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the West Indies. Its defining characteristic, however, is that is almost always played by women and not by men. The reason for this is ambiguous; I’ve heard a couple of stories about boys not being allowed to participate in netball in various schools in which the game is popular. While this doesn’t seem fair, one has to ask, “why would they want to play in the first place?”

Netball is a dumbed down, rule-intensive, whistle-blowing version of basketball. Some examples of netball’s ridiculous rules include that which prohibits players from running with the ball. You may say, “So what? You can’t run with the ball in basketball, either!” You would be correct; however, one can dribble the ball when playing basketball. So long as the ball is bouncing up and down in between your hand and the ground, you can take it wherever you so choose. But not in netball.

The furthest a player can move when in possession of a netball-ball is three steps. That is, if a player catches the ball mid-air, they can land, put the other foot on the ground, and then step with the foot on which they landed. After that, they have to either bounce or throw the ball to another player, otherwise they are sited for “stepping.”

Needless to say, this makes for a game that resembles a badly composed, staccato-laden piece of music. Another very annoying thing about netball is the rule that prohibits obstructing another player. I never understood this. Seeing as the point of the game is to stop the other team from scoring goals, it confused the heck out of me why it was wrong to jump up and down in front of someone who was trying to throw the ball into the net. All of that dancing and waving that you see in basketball is not allowed in netball. The most the defense can do is stand there and hold up a passive arm in front of the opposing player.

Combine that with the constant whistle-blowing from the referees and the fact that spectators are also primarily girls (and girls scream) and you have the makings of a thoroughly annoying game.

Soccer (Football)
The game of soccer, which many countries refer to as “football”, is best known for its brawls. English fans, in particular, are infamous for fighting each other and for picking fights with foreign nationals when they travel across the Channel to Europe. Hosting the football World Cup is an honor; however countries’ police forces must shudder upon hearing the happy news that their nation is the next to host the competition.

There are three things that are ridiculous about soccer. First is the fact that players can’t touch the ball with their hands. The goalkeeper can, but no one else is allowed to lay a hand on the ball unless they’re chucking it into the field of play from the sidelines. This makes soccer the Irish Jig of sports. I’d love to see a soccer game played where the players’ arms must be stock-still at their sides. That would be fun to watch.

The second silly thing about soccer is the Hollywood aspect. Upon falling over, many players love to grasp their ankles, knees or various other delicate body-parts and pretend that a) a player on the other team is responsible for their fall, and b) that they are inconsolably injured. Other sportspeople have been known to engage in similar tactics, but soccer players are the prime offenders when it comes to Hollywoods.

The third thing that makes soccer silly is actually one of the things that people like about it the most. No one ever scores. When someone does score, it’s like the second coming of Christ. Many games, especially ones involving top-level teams, end in scores like 0-1, 1-2 or, one a big day, 3-2. Thus, fans spend ninety minutes watching an average of three goals take place. It’s not wonder they go nuts when someone managed to kick the ball into the net.

Navtej Kohli