The defence against hating cricket

In response to my first post from Australia, some of you have told me to quit my bitching about cricket (and other Aussie sports), that I'm in their country and that I should heed the very motto of my own blog and just deal with it.

To those people, I argue that you don't understand what you're talking about. Why don't you get into your car on a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon, drive over to a field in your local Pakistani neighborhood, prop down a lawn chair and sit through hour upon hour of the most boring sport ever? Then, and only then, can you truly appreciate my misery.

I'm not saying that Australians (or the English or South Africans or Indians or, yes, Pakistanis) are somehow wrong or stupid for liking this sport. I'm just saying that I can't see how I personally could ever warm to it. But there are a lot of things out there that we as a culture can't understand. In China, they eat some ungodly animals. In Russia, a man once offered my family a spoonful of the lard he was eating out of a jar. In the Utah desert, Bear Grylls once ate two bird eggs: one that was raw (followed by the shell) and one that he cooked on a rock. (Or maybe he didn't eat those. But that's an entirely different topic, and if we went down that path, it would only infuriate me.) Or perhaps more aptly, Australians love vegemite.

In fact, I'm going to hang my hat on that last one. Liking cricket is akin to liking vegemite. It's not something you can learn to love; any appreciation for it simply comes from growing up with it. Now if any American out there can actually swallow a whole piece of toast with a nice layer of vegemite on it, then maybe I'll have to revisit this theory. But until that time comes, when yeast extract is at all palatable to an American, I'm okay with not liking cricket on the theory that I wasn't raised on it.

And this argument goes both ways, too. I can understand how Australians don't like baseball or football (gridiron, to them). They already have their own (bastardized) versions of both of these sports, so for them to appreciate our (perfect) versions is probably impossible.

There is one caveat to this argument, and that's the introduction of alcohol. For as we all know, alcohol makes everything better. I learned this firsthand the last time I was in Australia, in December 2004, when I went to my first professional cricket match. And while this game was going on in front of us, most of the crowd was intent on drinking their watered-down beers, collecting the plastic cups and building these:

That's right, BEER SNAKES! One section of the crowd would build their beer snake, hold it triumphantly over their heads and scream like the Scottish army in Braveheart after the They make take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom! speech. Then another section would follow suit with a slightly longer snake, so the previous section would respond with a snake, such as:

And this went on. For hours. And in between, the crowd heckled anyone who walked by in a suit, viciously booed anyone who didn't participate in the wave and joined in a very drunken rendition of Waltzing Matilda, as this man walked by:


So lest you think I'm giving up on cricket, rest assured that that's not happening. For once the season starts, I will be heading out to the Sydney Cricket Ground for some grog, a few more beer snakes and some Matilda.