It all began with a trip to Goa, India, in
early December 2007. I didn't realize beforehand I was going to a cricket-mad
country smack in the middle of a Test series against Pakistan. It turned out to
be a vacation that changed my life. Literally.
I became curious about cricket when I saw that
the Indian newspapers were full of reports of the Kolkata Test – and found that
I didn't understand anything of what had happened during the previous day’s
play despite being fluent in English. Despite, in fact, being a translator.
Returning home to Finland, I decided to learn enough cricket-speak to
understand what was going on. Then I meant forget all about it.
But one thing led to another. As I read cricket
reports online, I blessed Wikipedia daily. It has taught me pretty much
everything I know about the Laws of Cricket. But it took more than a year of
intermittent study, as understanding one term just presented me with more new
words. Or, often enough, old words that proved to have entirely new meanings.
There are the classics, like duck and
beehive, but I was stumped (yes, stumped) by words like crease (clearly not a reference to
ironing gone wrong) and beat (as in beating the batsman). And so many
cricketing expressions leave big chunks of the action unsaid. Leg before, of course. But also It was going to hit the middle of middle and off. Imagine for a moment that English is your second language (or third, as
it is for me) and you are faced with middle
of middle and off. Trust me, you start looking for the word you missed on
your first reading.
