An American at the cricket

Hadley Freeman takes some time out to watch a game between Authors Cricket Club and the Shepperton Ladies Cricket Club, and is quite baffled just as she is with some other British peculiarities.

What I mainly learned, though, was that, contrary to my hopes, one cannot grasp the rules of cricket through osmosis. No, nor through flinty if squinty-eyed observation neither. So instead of talking knowledgably about wickets and stats, as I fully imagined myself doing by the fourth hour, the whole experience was somewhat akin to the (one) time I went to an opera: beautiful, to watch, rather elegant, to observe but utterly, utterly incomprehensible to me.

Cricket has also made inroads into France, and this article in the Economist captures the reaction in one French village amid signs of some underlying tension.