‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ famously wrote the Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James in Beyond a Boundary, exploring not just the beauty and psychology of the game, but the unspoken layers of class, race, and politics woven into its fabric.

Imagine baseball had a charming cousin obsessed with tea, strategy, and elaborate manners—that’s cricket. Even Americans already alarmed by abrupt shifts to their geopolitical loyalties would find it just as baffling. But crack its code, and you’ll discover a sport steeped in extraordinary folklore, butterflies on the field, exquisite skill, and homemade lemonade. The present Test matches between England and India, in the cricketing counties of Yorkshire and Warwickshire, with Middlesex’s Lords in London next, showcase it all—modern clashes in historic arenas, between a former empire and its most populous ex-colony.

In England, cricket remains the last gasp of orderly rebellion—sun hats, cucumber sandwiches, and all—still ghosted by a colonial past, still pretending not to notice Westminster’s present chaos, still brilliant.

Over two billion people worldwide—yes, two billion—are obsessed with cricket. And not because it’s quaint.

For many, cricket carries the weight of history. Across continents, it’s been a stage for protest, resistance, and pride—a tool of exclusion, and later, of course, unity. In much of the postcolonial world, it’s not just a sport. It’s memory, defiance, identity. It’s really a shame Americans never picked it up.

But first, the basics: Cricket is a bat-and-ball game between two teams of 11. At its heart is a nuanced duel between bowler and batter (formerly ‘batsman’—a small but telling nod to cricket’s slow reckoning with gender and inclusion). Unlike baseball, which loves speed and spectacle—as I recall from thirst-quenching trips to Yankee Stadium—cricket embraces the long form, an almost literary protest against modern attention spans. Last time I visited Lord’s, the home of English cricket, wicketkeeper Jack Russell was waiting outside my interview with Lords chief Lt-Col John Stephenson to show his latest cricket landscape painting. That for me said it all.

If baseball is classic rock—tight and power-driven—cricket is jazz: much more improvisational. Baseball celebrates the home run. Cricket admires the art of leaving a ball just outside off-stump.

Played on a lush oval or a dusty dry patch, cricket revolves around a 22-yard pitch. At either end are three wooden stumps topped by two tiny polished sticks—the wicket. The bowler runs in—sometimes from another postcode—and delivers the ball with a straight arm, aiming to dislodge the bails or outwit the batter.

The batter sometimes over-doggedly defends the wicket and scores runs by sprinting between the two ends—or better, by smashing the ball to the boundary. That moment—a cheer erupting as the ball crosses the rope—has long carried extra meaning. When subjects beat their rulers at their own game, the boundary became quiet defiance. In cricket, domination isn’t just athletic—it’s metaphor. (In Beyond a Boundary, James uses ‘boundary’ as a layered metaphor—the literal field edge, the social and racial divides of colonial life, the cultural threshold between empire and identity, and the cerebral line between sport and politics.)

Cricket comes in formats. There’s Test cricket, the five-day epic—part chess, part spiritual quest, where endurance, psychology, and tension collide. Watching India play England—or Pakistan versus Australia—can feel like history re-enacted in white. You don’t ‘catch’ a Test, you commit. Like Fanny and Alexander or a 900-page novel, it leaves you emotionally shredded and spiritually prowessed. Harold Pinter called it the greatest thing God ever created—‘certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either.’

Then there’s the One Day International (ODI), a seven-hour narrative with more noise but still layered. And finally, T20 cricket—the Turnstile or American hardcore punk version. Three hours of fireworks and adrenaline, tailor-made for modern attention spans. In India, meanwhile, franchise leagues backed by billionaires blur the line between city and brand. National stars are auctioned like commodities. Think NBA meets baseball, with a powdering of Bollywood.

Cricket drips with charm. Players in whites break for lunch and tea—rituals echoing a genteel past, even when fans turn lulls into carnivals of satire, nationalism, and theatre. One England player named Pope inspired fans to dress as actual Popes in Leeds. In Birmingham, three men dressed as butchers chased someone in an inflatable animal costume, while dozens of Fred Flintstones did the Conga. Why not, when the country is in chaos? It’s tradition and absurdity in perfect balance—philosophy on stilts. Melancholy, if you can handle that in your sports. Don’t be fooled—the athletes bowl at 90 mph and play shots with surgical precision. Beneath the waistcoats and wigs, it’s a power game.

And behind the charm is steel.

Few sporting rivalries are as politically and emotionally charged as India vs. Pakistan. (I was once out first ball in Lahore—humiliating.) Born from bloodshed and partition, the two nations rarely find common ground. Yet cricket has several times stood in as battlefield and olive branch. In 1987, Pakistan’s President Zia-ul-Haq attended a Test in India during a military standoff—a gesture dubbed ‘Cricket Diplomacy.’ In 2004, India toured Pakistan after years of frozen relations. Thousands of Indian fans got visas. The series was hailed as a peace milestone. In both countries, cricket is national observance—matches stop traffic, alter wedding dates, and hold aloft teenage bowlers as gods.

Cricket was also a tool of apartheid. South Africa was banned from international play for over 20 years. But cricket later aided reconciliation. When South Africa returned in 1991, it did so with a multiracial team—its 1992 World Cup debut a powerful symbol of hard-won change.

In Bangladesh, cricket’s rise has been more than athletic—it’s therapy. A young nation torn by political turmoil has found rare unity in its team, especially during World Cups.

The West Indies team is a sporting anomaly—a coalition of small, distinct island nations playing as one. In the Caribbean, cricket is rhythm. A six lofted over long-on might be followed by steelpan riffs and a bowler’s dance. It’s part poetry, part protest, all pride. Legends like Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards didn’t just win matches, they redefined what it meant to be Caribbean. Even as baseball grows, such as in the Bahamas, where only a small army of English fans were reported to me last week as watching the England-India Test match, cricket remains one of the few threads binding all the islands. I’ve never experienced a more animated cricket conversation than in Trinidad’s Port of Spain over a one-pot rice dish.

Even Afghanistan has a cricket story. Its national team, born in refugee camps in Pakistan, rose against all odds. In a war-torn country, the team still offers rare hope—a cover drive as defiance. People were raising funds for their award-winning film Out of the Ashes on this subject during my fifth trip to the country. I also remember—on the edges of Kabul—more and more cricket being played on makeshift pitches.

Cricket lives in literature, too. In Swami and Friends, R.K. Narayan makes schoolboy cricket a vehicle for rebellion. Writers like Hanif Kureishi and Kamila Shamsie use it as shorthand for memory and identity. The game stretches across continents, generations, world-views—performing as everything to everyone.

So, if you’re a U.S. sports fan looking for something new—why not cricket? It has football’s intensity, golf’s finesse, baseball’s pacing, and the global flair of what we know you like to call soccer. You can even catch the odd game in New York—as I did with knowledgeable West Indies supporters and a fervent English painter—Matthew Radford—a number of years ago. Plus, where else can you find something in which the umpire wears a wide-brimmed hat and tea time is sacred?

Just ask my two Australian cricket-playing great-nephews who I am sure cannot wait for the Ashes series between Australia and England to begin in Perth—the boys’ hometown—this coming November.

The post Why Two Billion People Watch Cricket appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.