“I had researched before I came here about the cricket clubs in the college,” said Yadav, a computer science major. “I went looking for them specifically on Quad Day.”
Yadav signed up with the Cricket Club of Illinois – not the university’s largest student organization by any measure, but probably one of the most passionate.
Established in 1985, CCI represents Illinois at tournaments across the Midwest and occasionally as far away as Colorado and New Mexico, playing a sport few Americans understand.
Cricket dates to 16th-century England, and spread throughout the British Empire. In the U.S., the game was modified into what is now known as baseball, but the original sport remains immensely popular elsewhere, second only to soccer in worldwide popularity.
The Cricket Club of Illinois belongs to the Midwest Cricket Conference, and competes in Division II against teams based in Chicago; Madison, Wis.; Milwaukee; St. Louis; Springfield, Ill.; and West Lafayette, Ind. The season begins in April and officially ends in late August, meaning most league matches are played outside the academic school year. CCI also competes in invitational tournaments throughout the year.
Membership is open to anyone interested in the sport, which yields a small but fervent pool of mostly international students, like Yadav, who is from India.
“I have been playing cricket since the age of 4. I have grown up playing it every day of my life,” he said. “Having followed the Indian cricket team with passion for 12 years and played competitive cricket for the last five or six years, cricket is not a hobby anymore. It’s an integral part of who I am.”
Pranav Chava, a junior who transferred to the UI, had been captain of his high school team and played on his college team in India. Like Yadav, he searched for CCI on Quad Day, signed up, and began playing with the team.
“Cricket is a passion and all my life it has been a great joy,” Chava said. “I am in love with this game and continue to enjoy it every moment. It is a game that is almost a religion in the country of a billion. It would have been disappointing to miss the game after coming here.”
One man who is responsible for about half of the current CCI squad is Safdar Khan – an adjunct instructor in the College of Veterinary Medicine, an expert cricket batsman and the father of four CCI team members.
Like Chava, Khan describes cricket as “like a religion” in his homeland – Pakistan – where, he says, the game “is played day and night.”
He discovered CCI in 1988, while he was in graduate school at the UI. His American roommate, having heard Khan pining for his sport, mentioned that he had seen people playing cricket near Orchard Downs (a university housing complex that is home primarily to graduate students and their families, with more than 70 nationalities represented).
“I said, ‘You’re kidding me! Nobody plays cricket in the U.S.’ But I went there and sure enough, there were a few students playing,” Khan said.
Still, he wasn’t sure they would want him to join the team since the students playing that day were Indian, and the tense relationship between India and Pakistan has naturally seeped into their beloved sport. Khan was surprised when the Indian players told him that CCI had been founded by students from Pakistan, and that he would be welcome to join the team. Khan said that’s because of the power of cricket.
“It’s a bonding force,” he said. “People from different faiths, different colors, different religions, different cultures – cricket doesn’t care where you come from. You play as a team. It’s not Indian or Pakistani or Sri Lankan; it’s really politics aside. There may be tension between the two countries, but not on the cricket ground. Not in the Cricket Club of Illinois. No way.”
Khan played with CCI until he completed his Ph.D. and his family joined him in Urbana, where Khan, a board-certified veterinary toxicologist, works as the director of toxicology at the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center.
One day, his son Imran came home and excitedly told Khan that he had seen cricket being played in a park just behind his school. Khan discovered that CCI had moved its ground to where the Urbana Park District had installed a cricket pitch. The players persuaded Khan to rejoin the team. Eventually, Imran and his three younger brothers began playing too.
“This tradition goes back to when I was growing up,” Safdar Khan said. “My dad used to play with us all the time, so I wanted to be able to continue that. It’s contagious. If I have it, it would be impossible that my kids don’t get it, because it spreads very fast.”
Imran, now 25, is in medical school in Chicago, but travels to wherever CCI is playing to participate in weekend matches. Hassan Khan, age 21, attends Indiana University; he also plays for CCI on weekends. Salman Khan, who is 18, attends Illinois and Parkland College, and scored 41 crucial, final stage runs to help CCI defeat a Chicago team in August. Khan’s youngest son, Nauman, is 15, and is the team’s expert “legspin bowler,” having mastered the art of throwing a ball that bounces away from the batsman and is almost impossible to hit.
All the Khan kids grew up playing baseball, in addition to cricket, but Salman said there’s no debate about which game is their favorite.
“There won’t be a day when I won’t prefer cricket over baseball,” he said. “Cricket has become so much more than just a sport. It’s something that my brothers and I all share in common. When we’re on that cricket field, it’s not even a sport to us, it’s in our blood, really.”
Cricket, explained
Cricket is played on an oval field, called a ground, about 150 to 180 yards across. In the middle of the ground is the pitch – a rectangular strip of clay about 70 feet in length, that roughly equates to the baseball diamond.
At each end of the pitch stands a wicket, consisting of three wooden stakes, called stumps, topped with wooden spools, called bails, and arranged like a lower-case “m.” The wicket stands about 28 inches tall and 9 inches wide.
Each side (or team) has 11 or 12 players, traditionally dressed in white (colored uniforms are used for some shortened matches). After a coin toss, one side sends out a bowler, a wicketkeeper, and fielders, dispersed around the ground in whatever arrangement their captain recommends. The batting side sends out a pair of batsmen, one at each end of the pitch.
The game is similar to baseball, in that the bowler throws a leather-bound ball (approximately the same size and content as a baseball, with stitching around its equator) toward a batsman, who tries to hit it, and then runs toward a safe base to score. But in cricket, there are more variables to each of these elements:
The bowler’s delivery usually (but not always) involves the ball bouncing on the ground before it reaches the batsman.
Bowlers who specialize in throwing fastballs start the game, taking advantage of the new ball’s smooth surface.
Spinbowlers, who employ a variety of techniques to make the ball curve, take their turns later in the lineup, to exploit the torque added by the rougher surface of a ball that has been in use for some time. Unlike baseball, where a team may field only one or two different pitchers, bowlers switch out after only six throws (six throws is called an over). A bowler can throw multiple overs, as long as they’re not consecutive.
The batsman can send the ball in any direction, including behind himself.There are no foul balls in cricket.
Runs are accumulated by batsmen running back and forth, from one end of the pitch to the other, touching their bats behind the crease marked in front of each wicket. Both batsmen run simultaneously, and fielders can get either one of them out by throwing the ball and knocking down the wicket when a batsman is not touching the safe area behind the crease.
For this reason, batsmen may elect not to run on short hits.
A ball that clears the boundary of the ground in the air automatically counts as six runs (similar to a homerun). A ball that clears the boundary after hitting the ground automatically counts as four runs.
A batsman continues to bat until he is out, but once he’s out, he doesn’t bat again. When 10 batters have been dismissed, the innings (the same word singular and plural) is over and the teams trade places.
Professional cricket matches involve two innings per side (each side bats twice) resulting in matches that can last as long as five days. A more practical form of cricket, called “limited overs,” allows only two innings (each side bats once) with only 20 or 40 overs per inning. Midwest Cricket Conference matches are limited to 40 overs, resulting in about seven hours of play per match.