Richard Huggard / SPORTZPICS for MLC
Cricket is the world’s second most popular sport, with 2.5 billion fans. There’s some good news for cricket fans in the U.S. Major League Cricket has launched. The newly-formed Washington Freedom joins teams from San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and Texas in the inaugural season, which is underway now.
Cricket can be intimidating for people who are unfamiliar with the sport. You may have heard the phrase, “that’s a sticky wicket.” The metaphor is used to describe difficult situations. That expression comes from cricket, where it’s used to describe a particularly resilient wicket — a set of three stumps, connected by two smaller sticks, called bails, at either end of a cricket pitch. More about wickets later.
One of the top cricketers in the world, 29-year-old South African Anrich Nortje, is bowling for the Washington Freedom. A cricket bowler is similar to a pitcher in baseball. Nortje is a star, recently named South Africa’s cricketer of the year.
Nortje is known for his speed. He regularly bowls over 150 kilometers per hour, or about 93 mph, and sometimes even faster. He is training in Houston, and says he never thought he’d be playing cricket in the U.S.
“Never, never ever, never. So it’s really exciting to be here. It’s such a great place. I always see it in movies and on T.V. but I never really thought I’d actually come here to play,” Nortje says.
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