Cricket is not as prominent as Football, but it is surely one of the most demanding sports. It’s not just that anyone can pick up a bat and start smashing a bowl all around. Apart from being talented, you also need to be a hard worker who is ready to polish his skills with time. All these make Cricket a demanding sport.
People often consider cricket a GO-TO sport or a game that can be played for fun and doesn’t demand much from you. But being consistent with cricket for the last 15 years, I can surely say it tests not only your physical strengths but also your mental strengths to make the right decisions and judgments.
Physical Demands
In cricket, every decision plays an important role, choosing the right batting order, which bowlers will bowl his first five players, placing the right fielders at the right position, bowling change, and the list is endless. Like any other sport, the required physical demands of the cricket game have changed drastically, especially in the last 2 decades. Players are playing relentless crickets all across the globe with an expectation to win every game from the fans make Cricket a demanding sport.
Technicalities Of The Game
Cricket is a highly technical skills-based game. The team head coach consistently focuses on improving skills during training sessions by keeping pressure on the players, their mental strength, especially workload management in their minds. In a sport like cricket, we believe that challenge is more complex as it consists of different formats, each with distinct movement patterns and physical and physiological demands. If you still believe that cricket is not as demanding as other sports.
So let’s read on to find out the top 5 reasons which establish that cricket is more demanding than other sports.
1. Playing Conditions
We are sure that there are sports as well where playing conditions play a crucial role. We have seen it many times in Football that play still goes on regardless of its raining, snowing or air blowing at high intensity. In cricket, conditions change with every ground; it’s because every cricket ground tends to have a different pitch which players don’t know how it’s going to turn out until they finally play on it. After a few overs, you get familiar and start making the decisions.
The batters in the middle understand whether they need to defend, hit or play along with the pitch. Similarly, the bowling side needs to figure out the bowling changes from time, fielding placement, and strategy to incorporate as per the playing conditions. These conditions change in the same match when the batting side comes down to the bowl.
It’s all up to the groundsmen whether he has prepared a fast, slow, swinging, or a turning pitch. An overcast situation can also alter the conditions as it works tremendously favor bowlers as batters find it difficult to play swinging bowls.
2. Protective Gear
Before we come to our next point, we need to establish how much it can be difficult playing with so many protective gears.
Starting from the bottom, a batter wears pads on both the legs, a gear to protect his private parts, a thigh guard, a chest guard, an armed guard, gloves on both the hands, a helmet to protect their heads, and of course the bat itself. Now imagine playing with wearing all these in the hot summers of India and Australia, where the temperature can touch almost 50 degrees.
A batter needs to score runs by running across the pitch while carrying the weight of these protective gears.
3. Things are Not Easy for Batters or Bowlers
We have already covered that batters have to make runs by wearing many protective gears. They also need to deal with batting for a long time, depending on the format and the conditions. They just don’t need to stand in the middle but to save their wickets in front of the world-class fast and spin bowlers who are only bowling with one intention of getting him out. Many bowlers bowl at constant 140KMPH+ bowls. It can become unplayable when swinging bowls are delivered at this pace.
If we move our heads towards bowlers, then they just don’t stand at one place and bowl these deliveries. On average, fast bowlers run in 25 yards just to deliver one bowl. Fast bowlers deliver 60 deliveries and 25-30 overs in one inning of the test match in one day. Now add the conditions like Indian and Australian heat again in the scenario. There is no denying that batting and bowling both require a lot of patience, guts, perseverance, and a great number of skills.
4. Different Formats
Most of the sports have only one format, even the famous ones. But when it comes to Cricket is played in three different formats: test cricket, one-day international, and T20 cricket. Let us explain what they are in brief and the demand of the sport to play each format.
i. Test Cricket
A Test match is played in the course of 5 days consisting of 4 innings. Do we really need to tell you the amount of patience, perseverance, and skills required to play this format? If yes, then it is regarded as the most difficult format to play among the cricketers.Â
ii. One Day Internationals
Played between two international cricket-playing nations for one entire day where each team bowls 50 overs to each other. Factors like conditions, team management, your control over the game, and how you cope with the different scenarios play an important role in an ODI game.
iii. T-20 Cricket
The shortest format of cricket is where each team bowls 20 overs to each other. The primary objective of the game of cricket is to score runs and take wickets. Understand how much it can be difficult to do both when you have limited-overs to do so.
5. Ways to be Given Out
In cricket, there are 10 ways to get out, and that’s where it gets very difficult for the batters to get dismissed.
- Getting bowled
- Caught
- LBW
- Stumped
- Obstructing the path of a throw
- Hitting bowl twice
- Handling the ball
- Being timed out
- Run out
- Hit wicket.
Now try to defend yourself when someone is bowling you at 140 KMPH plus bowls constantly ;).
Endnotes
We guess that’s enough for everyone to believe that cricket is more challenging than you think of it. And because of which cricket is getting global with time, as more and more international teams are getting interested in playing the sport making Cricket a more demanding sport. Moreover, if you plan to make cricket your career, these are some challenges ahead of you. Until next time, Goodbye! We hope you like this article.