The Game of Cricket - Asynchronicity

Featuring Pictionary complaints, alternating series and the ODI cricket of board games

Cricket is a sport, yes. But it’s also a game, and in this irregular series of as yet unknown length, I plan to delve deeper into some of the gamier aspects of the sport.

(What’s the difference between a sport and a game, you may well ask. Well, I may get around to spelling that out at some point, but I think as I delve into these various areas that I’m defining as part of the game, you’ll quickly get a sense of where my boundaries are. And, if not, then, heck, maybe that’s a fun little game in itself.)

This is perhaps not the right time to delve into the topic of asynchronicity. But, in a way, isn’t the wrong time for asynchronicity almost, by definition, the best time for it? Makes you think, for sure¹.

Asynchronicity is an absence of synchronicity². In particular, in this context, I’m referring to the way that two cricket teams are definitionally out of sync in the roles they’re undertaking in the game. When one team is batting, the other is bowling. And, indeed, vice versa³.

Contrast the asynchronicity of cricket with the simultaneity of, say, the 100m dash, the 100m freestyle or a myriad of other forms of races, many of which don’t take place over 100m at all. In these kind of races, the participants are all competing in the same way at the same time⁴. Every single participant in such a race competes simultaneously. Their performances are, in this sense, synchronised⁵.

Now, there is a variant form of racing in which the participants don’t compete simultaneously. Instead, they take it in turns to compete and the one with the fastest time is declared the winner. These kind of turn-based races are usually reserved for situations where it’s too dangerous to have the racers competing at the same time, such as skiing, Formula One qualifying sessions⁶ or the TV show Wipeout!. Similarly, turn-based competition is also the rule for a myriad of other individual athletic competitions. (Although, should it be? Do the high jump simultaneously, you cowards!)

The tendency to turn-based activity is even more prevalent in non-athletic games. Chess, backgammon, Monopoly, Scrabble, Battleship, poker, gin rummy, noughts and crosses, Civilization, Yahtzee, getting mad at your spouse for their hopeless Pictionary drawings (‘that’s a dog?!?’), and a myriad of other games all see players take it in turns to compete.

However, most team sports, such as hockey or soccer, see both teams competing at the same time to achieve the same goal (ie, goals). The two sides are on the field at the same time, both trying to gain control of the ball and score points. It’s not quite as clear-cut a case of simultaneity as a race, because possession of the ball defines slightly different roles for the two teams. In a sense, you could argue that a game of soccer⁷ is also turn-based, for example, since it features both teams taking it in turns to have the ball, with each ‘turn’ ‘ending’ when they lose the ‘ball’ or ‘score’ a goal.

(As you’d expect, it’s the Americans who go way too hard on this idea, with their variant of football reacting to a change of possession with an explicit swapping out of attacking⁸ and defending⁹ teams.)

But while American football tries hard, you’re really stretching the definition of turn-based if you try to apply it to other similar goal-scoring team sports. Sure, you can squint and argue the case that your soccer, or rugby league/union, or Australian Rules football or basketball or ice hockey are nothing more than a myriad of short-term turns in possession of the ball.

But no matter how definitionally wily you might be, these sports remain of a fundamentally different nature than cricket. After all, you simply don’t see cricket teams swapping batting and bowling roles because one of the bowlers managed to steal a batter’s bat¹⁰.

Cricket’s great cousin, baseball, of course, also has similarly delineated innings in which the sides take it in turns at bat or in the field. In terms of asynchronous team sports, baseball is definitely far closer to the cricket end of the spectrum. However, with these innings being both shorter in length and more numerous than cricket innings, we’re beginning to take baby steps towards the simultaneous end of the spectrum. Baseball players will swap roles nine times in an afternoon. A cricket team could be stuck in the one role for days on end.

(For those of you of a calculus bent, you might like to think of a ‘simultaneous’ game being the limit of a turn-based game as the number of turns increase while the length of the turns correspondingly decrease¹¹.)

Important hand-drawn sketches of the transition from a turn-based game to a simultaneous one. Each change of direction is a new ‘turn’ in the game, with the two teams swapping roles

But if more and more turns of shorter and shorter length lead to games of greater simultaneity, cricket goes the other direction, really leaning into the asynchronicity, as it takes the idea of the turn-based game to its (lower) limit. Except, it doesn’t quite get to that lower limit, does it? Which is slightly weird.

If we consider the purest form of a cricket innings to be a batting team trying to score as many runs as possible before the fielding team dismisses them all, then the simplest natural form of the game of cricket would seem to be a timeless, one-innings-per-side match.

However, this form of the game doesn’t exist in any meaningful way. Instead, the game of cricket is complicated by either having two innings apiece (each innings being effectively timeless - teams are more often bowled out than not) or a one-innings-per-side match where the number of overs bowled is strictly limited.

Each of these variations take us into slightly different gameplay areas.

Let’s consider the two-innings-per-side match, which peaks in the best¹² form of cricket - Test cricket. We’ll ignore the prospect of draws for the moment. That’s a wrinkle for another time.