Most amazing achievement 99.9% of Americans won't care about

[cognito20]

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What's crazy is I've watched cricket a couple times and I've read all about how to play and I still have no [censored] clue what is going on. Has there been a more complicated game in the history of the world?

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Any American baseball fan who actually -watches- a cricket match for 1 hour with someone who knows both sports and is explaining as they watch will know basically what's going on by the end of that 1 hour. There are some subtleties (the differences in strategy between Test and one-day cricket, pitch analysis, terminology for the various fielding positions, the 569 different meanings depending on context of the word "wicket", etc.) that will take longer to grasp, but the basic rules and procedure of play will become self-evident very quickly when you watch a match with a knowledgeable fan. Cricket is much better understood when the rules are being explained to you -while- you are watching the match; in print it seems a hell of a lot more confusing than it actually is. This is coming from an American who had read the rules of cricket before moving to Australia and could make neither head nor tails of them, but after watching one day of the 2000 Perth Test between Australia and the West Indies (the one in which McGrath got his 300th test wicket vs. Lara as the 2nd ball of a hat trick) with some mates of mine Down Under (and the incomparable Richie Benaud, maybe the greatest commentator on any sport, ever, in the Channel 9 broadcast booth), I knew what was going on, and by the end of the Test (which wasn't even that good of a match, an Australia blowout like all but 1 of the 5 Tests of that series), I was hooked for life.

Does anyone else who's a cricket fan find it amazing that Jason Gillespie, a world-class fast bowler but a serviceable night-watchman type at best as a batsman, now has a higher top score than Steve Waugh? Trust me, someone like Gillespie scoring 201 not out is a feat akin to.....I would say probably the closest baseball parallel is when Braves pitcher Tony Cloninger hit 2 grand slams in 1 game in 1966. It's that kind of fluke feat.

--Scott