The Game of Cricket - Parity

Featuring Mr Mxyzptlk, Russian number theorists and surprise tests

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.)

Cricket is a one-dimensional game. I mean that in both a literal and untruthful sense.

Untruthful because cricket is obviously played on extremely large, two-dimensional grounds. Plus, the ability, and ever-increasing tendency, for batters to hit the ball into the air and (ideally) out of those grounds adds a third dimensional aspect to the game. Cricket is also infamously played across lengthy stretches of time, adding a fourth dimensional aspect to it, especially for those of you versed in general relativity. (Furthermore, could notorious mischief-making Superman villain Mr Mxyzptlk play cricket? If so, for those of you comic book nerds versed in the home location of this spell-check-defying fiend, there’s a fifth-dimensional element there as well.)

Having said all that, cricket is also one-dimensional in a very literal sense. Because, ultimately, the fielding aspect and the time aspect and the fifth-dimensional imp aspect are all secondary to the fundamental contest between batter and bowler. And that contest takes place along a single dimension.

Now, obviously, even that simplified claim is disgustingly untruthful. The stumps have width. The batter can move across their crease or back away. The bowler can swing or spin or cut the ball, moving it off the pitch or through the air. There are, it turns out, technically other dimensions still in play.

But the crux of the claim is true. After all, nobody can actually draw a one-dimensional line. Even the finest of pencils contains some width to it. But that doesn’t prevent geometers (those ambitious dynamos!) from abstracting to the essence of a line, the shortest distance between two points. (And no, I’m not going to get bogged down in spatial variants where this isn’t true. Pipe down, non-Euclidean geometry fans. You know who you are.) And the contest between batter and bowler, at its heart, takes place across just the one dimension, along the line that connects opposite ends of the pitch.

Now, cricket isn’t unique in this. Consider, for example, a penalty shot in soccer (or ‘football’ as the overly literal-talking folk in pretty much every other country in the world call it). Or, a better example, a pitch in baseball (aka ‘throwball’). In both those cases, two opponents face off from a fixed distance apart, with the initiator of the action trying to get a ball past whatever the opposite of an action-initiator is. The bat and ball confrontation in cricket is, in this sense, the same as those contests.

There is, however, a key aspect in which cricket differs from those sports, and which transforms the one-dimensionality at the heart of cricket into something much more interesting.

That key aspect? The non-striker.