It's a strange new Irish sporting phenomenon, one in which enthusiasm happily makes up for any lack of technical knowledge. It involves buying a drink, setting aside any previously held prejudices, and cheering for a successful Irish team. It's called Pub Cricket Watching.
In O'Reilly's of Sandymount in Dublin, where star batsman/wicketkeeper Niall O'Brien used to work, a group of local fanatics and cricket virgins gathered in front of the TV. I tried to explain proceedings to an enthralled GAA man who had never watched cricket before, while shouting the score down the phone to mates who'd been at the rugby in Rome. As the noise grew, so did the barrage of questions coming my way about the finer points of a sport which seems to revel in jargon and statistics.
So here's a brief Bluffer's Guide to Cricket:
The World Cup consists of one-day games, as opposed to the five-day matches of Test cricket. Each batting side receives 50 overs in which to score as many runs as possible. Each over consists of six balls, with each bowler limited to 10 overs.
One-day cricket is about batsmen trying to score runs quickly in their allotted time - and the fielding team trying to limit them. Extravagant shots for four and six excite the crowds, but the one-day game is as much about nudging the ball around to keep the scoreboard ticking over.
The batsman can be dismissed in several ways, such as bowled, when the bowler demolishes his stumps, or caught. Others include: leg before wicket or lbw (when the umpire decides if the ball hadn't hit the batsman's pads it would have hit the stumps); and run out, when the batsman sets off for a run to the far end but is beaten by a fielder's throw. Once 10 batsmen are out the innings is over.
Bowlers vary in their style. A spin bowler relies on flight, guile, and making the ball spin when it hits the pitch to defeat the batsmen. Medium pacers try to make the ball swing in the air and move off its seam, as do fast bowlers, some of whom rely on their sheer speed. A wide is where the ball is too wide for the batsmen to easily reach, and results in two runs for the batting side plus an extra ball in the over.
Silly mid off and short square leg are fielding positions, though ones not often seen in the one-day game. Each fielding position has a name. The wicketkeeper, with the big gloves, is a specialist position behind the stumps. For a right-handed batsman, everything to the right is the offside, everything to the left the legside. James Helm is a BBC correspondent based in Dublin
Terms to impress your friends with
Yorker: a full-length delivery arrowed in at the batsman's toes, which is hard to hit.
Edge: as the name suggests, is when the batsman miscues his shot and the ball squirms away from the edge of his bat.
No ball: is when the bowler oversteps the line from where he bowls.
Duck: when a batsman is out without scoring a run (it happens to the best of them).
Maiden: is not a romantic reference from days gone by, but an over in which no runs are scored.
Powerplay: a new one for the lexicon, occurs when the bowling side is restricted in where it can place fielders.
Run rate: the number of runs per over the team batting second needs to win. If it creeps up, they're in trouble.
Super Eights:the name given for the second phase of the World Cup, when each side plays six matches and semi-final places are at stake.
The Duckworth-Lewis method:How targets are recalculated when rain intervenes. It would take a PhD in maths and several pages of this newspaper to fully explain.
