A Beginner’s Guide On How To Play Cricket

Cricket Guide

Cricket may seem bewildering at first, but it is not rocket science. It’s an easy sport to understand and get hooked on. In this sports betting guide, you will see that the bat-and-ball game vaguely resembles the all-American game of baseball. In cricket, two opposing teams of eleven players each play with the sole aim of scoring more runs than their opponents.

Field and the Gear

When you ask an expert how to play cricket, one of the first things he’ll teach is the playing field.

Cricket is mainly played on an oval grass field that is approximately 200 meters in circumference size. The periphery has a rope or fence, often referred to as the boundary, which also determines whether a ball is live (in play) or dead (out of play).

Cricket Field Guide
Cricket Field Guide

At the center of the field is a 22-yard rectangular strip known as the pitch that has targets at both ends dubbed the Wicket. A wicket has a set of three wooden stumps with two wooden bails atop on either end of the pitch.

The gameplay

In order to fully explain how cricket works, we need to talk about its two main aspects – batting and bowling.

Two on-field umpires and one off-field umpire referred to as the ‘third umpire’ supervise the game. The third umpire’s role is to make the final decision when the two on-fied umpires can’t come up with their own.

Generally, a team is a mix of batsmen, bowlers, all-rounders, and a wicket-keeper — a dedicated player who stands behind the stump when a bowler throws to the batsmen.

It’s a must for the bowling or fielding team to have all eleven players on the field, while the batting team have two batsmen standing on either end of the pitch. Akin to baseball, players from the bowling side take positions around the playing field to catch the ball.

One of the bowlers from the fielding team throws the ball to the batsmen with the aim of hitting the stumps or taking his wicket, while the batsmen try to protect the stumps and hit the ball around to score runs. It is mandatory for the batting team to have two players on the crease (pitch) at all times.

When the bowling side dismisses all 10 players, it indicates the end of the first inning. A bowler can bowl six balls at a time known as the ‘over.’ The bowler, however, can’t bowl overs consequently. One the inning is over, the teams swap position. The team that bowled in the previous inning will come to bat in a bid to beat the target score set by the team that batted first.

Scoring runs and taking wickets

Two batsmen on the crease can score a run by running between the wickets (the distance between the stumps on either side of the pitch). A batsman can score four runs when he hits the ball to the boundary.

The maximum amount of runs a batsman can score off a single delivery is six runs, where the ball goes out of the boundary without bouncing on the ground.

Bowlers can take wickets in a few ways. The most obvious is knocking down the stumps that the batsmen are guarding, which in cricket language is known as ‘bowled out.’

Another way to take a wicket is ‘caught out‘, whereby a fielder catches the batter’s bowl in the air before it touches the ground.

The third way is the ‘Leg before wicket (LBW),’ where the ball that would hit the stump is instead interfered by a batsman.

A batsman will also lose a wicket if the wicket-keeper hits the stumps while holding the ball in his hand and the batsman is batting out of the crease.

Another way a batsman can lose his wicket is when a fielder hits the stump with the ball while both batsmen take a run (running between the wickets).

If you are hoping to improve your betting picks in this game, fully understand how scoring works, as it’s more essential than going through any cricket betting guide.

The 3 forms of Cricket

There are three forms of cricket – Test Match, Limited overs one day, and the shortened form Twenty20.
1. Test match
The duration of the test match is five days where both teams bat twice and win by scoring the maximum runs. In this form, the aim is not just to score more runs but also take all 10 wickets of the opponent. A team can only win a test match if it has taken ten wickets of opposing team in both innings. A team cannot win a test match even if it has more runs on the board than the other.
2. One-day match
In a one-day match, the team with the highest score wins. In limited overs cricket, each side has 50 overs (50x six balls per over = 300 balls to face) to bat and score maximum runs.
3. Twenty20
Meanwhile, in the Twenty20 format, teams only have 20 overs to score the maximum runs.

Bet Bitcoin on Cricket
Bet Bitcoin on Cricket

How to bet on Cricket

Cricket has become one of the most popular sport in the world without it feeding off the desire of countless number of bettors wagering on it. If you are interested in betting on Cricket, learning the basics and basing your decisions on your acquired knowledge of Cricket is much better than just randomly picking a side.

Don’t forget that cricket is a spectator sport. Get familiarized with the format, terms, teams, players, and even the weather condition, as all of those are factors in determining the outcome of any given match.

Hopefully, most of your basic questions on how to play cricket have been generously answered by this article.

As made clear in this Cricket guide for beginners, the sport isn’t as complicated as it looks once you get the basics of it. Make sure to regularly visit Nitrogen Sports Blog for more about Cricket.