The Spin | ‘It makes the Hundred look like croquet’: a cricket fan on the World Series

The sports both evolved from the same ancestry, and threads link the American national pastime' to cricket fandom

At first, it's likely to be some surface-level inclination. Maybe the way an evening ballpark illuminates the hyper-greens and the browns that it sits next to. Maybe the way the floodlights bounce off the hitter's helmet, pronouncing a ghostly stillness each time the pitcher sets up to throw. Maybe it's the first sight of a short stop receiving the ball drilled towards them, skipping while transferring it from mitt to throwing hand and - stretching time to their will in the same elasticated stride - throwing out a runner at first base.

Honestly, it could be any of the motor skills sunk into a player's being - unthinking, sweet execution borne of the repetition of a lifetime, hiding any actual competition and instead presenting a kind of alpha ballet of all the pleasing ways a body moves. Maybe it's just the clothes that do it for you. A walking, breathing map of implied American history. Or the sound - the congregated conversation behind the gently pleasing way a ball lands in a mitt. It could be as trivial as the breathtaking amount of chewing and spitting on view.