Word: crickets
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...many Americans who don't know what they are talking about, cricket is a British eccentricity hardly less pansy than croquet. Americans condemn the game because it moves too leisurely, has too much ritualistic etiquette, and the players actually knock off for tea at 4 o'clock. One ex-G.I. who had seen a game summed up: "Believe me, in New York we'd have thrown pop bottles just to wake things...
...Irish. In the imperial scheme cricket has followed the flag (some Englishmen argue that there would have been no Irish problem if the Irish could have been induced to learn the game). And, contrary to U.S. curbstone opinion, cricket is not to be confused with croquet...
...about the size and hardness of a baseball, none of the fielders wears gloves except the wicket keeper (catcher), whose gloves resemble a hockey player's gloves, with less padding. Batsmen wear leg pads something like a hockey goalie's, and thumb and finger guards. When cricket immortals like the late, great, bearded William Gilbert ("W.G.") Grace smote the ball, it practically tore a fielder's hand...
...foul line, so batsmen can hit in all directions. In placing fielders to take advantage of a batter's weakness, the bowlers can move a man up as close as ten feet from the batsman, in suicidal positions known as "silly leg" and "silly mid on." Cricket moves at less than half the pace of baseball, but-say its partisans -demands more science and judgment...
...British, seeing G.I.s play baseball during the war, generally regarded it as a sissy game, like the one played by little girls & boys and called Rounders. When Babe Ruth tried his hand at cricket in a visit to England in 1935, he swatted the ball so hard that he broke the bat. He glowed: "I wish they would let me use a bat as wide as this in baseball...