As cricket league expands, players reach for wider audience

CHESAPEAKE

The Tidewater Cricket Club was in a rough spot Sunday afternoon.

It had fewer than fifty runs and had already lost five wickets. Its best batsmen were out, and there were still 25 overs to go.

Wait. Huh?

If you don't understand, you're not alone, said Dipenda Sengupta, president of the Hampton Roads Cricket Organization. But he'd love you to drop by the cricket pitch sometime.

The Tidewater Cricket Club was facing off Sunday against the Richmond Cricket Club in the quarterfinals of their league playoffs, in front of a smattering of spectators at the Hindu Temple of Hampton Roads in Chesapeake.

The club has come a long way, Sengupta said. More than a decade ago, it was just him and a friend, batting about a red leather ball in a field as their daughters took dance lessons in the Hindu temple next door. The Hampton Roads Cricket Organization now has about 70 members, making up three teams, and the group is looking at starting up another club, to be based out of Virginia Beach.

Most members are immigrants from cricket-loving parts of the world: south Asia and the Caribbean.

Sengupta and others want to go beyond that - to recruit born-and-bred, football-means-a-pigskin, ball-and-a-bat-means-baseball Americans to the game.

"It's a community sport, it's a gentleman's sport, and the more people involved, the better," said Anthony Sahadeo, captain of the Tidewater Cricket Club. "They might find out they like to play, but if they don't know about it, they don't know that they have the opportunity to come out and join."

Cricket has a reputation in the United States for being a bit baffling. Shortened games can last five or six hours. Long games can last five days - with breaks for tea.

For baseball fans, the scores in cricket seems astronomical - one batter alone can earn hundreds of runs - and accepting the idea that you can swing and miss without penalty can be a struggle.

To read the rules of cricket is to ensure confusion, said Gavin Persaud, 23. But watch a game, and it becomes clearer: The bowler is hurling the ball at a pair of sticks planted in the ground, called a wicket. The batsman is trying to protect it, with his bat. The farther he can hit the ball, the more times he can run between a set of wickets, scoring "runs."

Er... or something like that.

"There are a lot of rules," Persaud said.

Sengupta and Sahadeo are convinced recruitment is a matter of exposure.

The club got Chesapeake Mayor Alan Krasnoff to bowl - or "pitch" - the first delivery of the quarterfinal Sunday.

The group also played cricket last year with a local church with a British pastor, and church members had so much fun they invited the club back this year.

"They were very receptive," Sahadeo said. "They loved it."

The Tidewater Cricket Club lost the quarterfinals Sunday, ending their season. But that gives them the chance to start planning. They hope to start a new season soon, of Twenty20 cricket - a version in which games last a more attention-span friendly three hours.

Alicia Wittmeyer, (757) 222-5216, alicia.wittmeyer@pilotonline.com