Well This Is TWO Firsts.

The first of the two firsts is the simple fact that for the first time I'm posting something on my blog about cricket.

When I lived in the Middle East back in the last century, one of many things I missed was baseball.  At the time that I was there, Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa were chasing homerun glory and I could only follow it on dinosaur slow dial-up supplemented by (very) occasional updates on the BBC when I was lucky enough to catch them.

It wasn't just baseball but sports in general.  Anyone who's lived outside of North America will tell you that in certain places, it's almost as if what we think of as the "big" sports (football, hockey, baseball and basketball) don't actually exist.  In the United Arab Emirates, at least when I was there, that was certainly the case.  Televised in English sports were soccer (yeah, they call it "football" but as logical as that is, I just can't), soccer and soccer. 

I would actually carve out time on Monday evenings to sit down and watch the BBC news because they would actually follow it with half an hour of NFL Football highlights.  Now, I absolutely NEVER watched NFL Football before this and haven't since, since good Canadian kids grew up on CFL Fooball with it's correct three downs and extra 10 yards of field.  The thing is, while not a fan of NFL Football, I actually understood what was happening and could follow the action.  While it wasn't baseball or even the Professional Football I grew up with, it was a sport I could make sense of.

The same cannot be said for the other sport one could find on television in Dubai in those days.  

Cricket.

Given how similar it looks to baseball, I figured I could sit and enjoy a match now and then.  No such luck.  I tried several times, honest.  Most games were broadcast in Hindi, so the play by play wasn't much help, but even in English it just never made any sense to me.  I'm pretty sure I could hit a ball with that club they use and I might even be able to run up and throw the ball so it bounces before it gets to the batter.  Sadly, I shall never, ever be able to decipher how one scores or why they have the little three legged stand on the field.

So now we come to the second of those firsts I mentioned.  If you watch the below video you will see the first cricket play in history that I actually understand!

That's Dazzle, the cricket playing dog.  I would happily watch cricket regularly if they played it with random dogs released to chase the ball every now and then.

Good Dog!