Cricket in Australia

Yesterday evening (thats Friday eveing) i found some SriLankans and Australians to play cricket with. We went to this Indoor Cricket Stadium in Canberra and played a match against some other team. Boy did we get thrashed soundly...Well we lost pitifuly to say the least, but it was still fun to play anyway. Playing in an indoor cricket arena is very different from normal cricket in a lot of ways.

The fiels is fully enclosed by a net. All around you. Its probably a 35 feet X 15 feet sized net which is about 15 feet high i guess....So the ball cannot leave this enclosed area. The rules are slightly different too. For scoring any run, you must run. If the ball hits the side net and you manage to run a single then you get 2 runs. If the ball manages to hit the back net and u manage to run a single then u get 4 runs and similarly if it hits the back net full toss and u manage to run then u get 6 runs. But the ball hitting the net is not a bounce, so you could get caught after the ball hits the net and comes back to a fielder. That makes stroke playing a lil tricky. Of crse the bowler has to bowl just like in normal cricket. Wides and no-balls are two runs each. and the score is usually high...The games are all 12 overs with 4 overs for each batting pair. Moreover, if a wicket falls you lose 5 runs and the batsmen continue batting. Which again as is true in most modern forms of cricket encourages batters to lose their wickets!!!. There is no price to a wicket these days...Take 20-20 for example. With 10 batsmen to play in a 20 overs game why on earth would a batsman be worried about losing his wicket??? Anyway, fielding in the indoor field is nice fun with the ball bouncing around from everywhere. Maybe, i will go again next weekend, and maybe we will play better that time around...