The rules of worship are simple:
for one month you must sacrifice your life, your career,
your family, and your powers of reason to sit in front
of the television like a zombie and watch one day
matches all day long. Capitalism, that other great
religion, has tried to get a piece of the action by
offering free trips and lucky prizes for its minions
to go to South Africa and watch in person, but failing
that you can sell your soul to the devil and lease
out a big screen television which will take you twenty
years to pay off (but you will get another four World
Cups out of it).
You must swear allegiance to
one team, usually the team of your country of origin,
and buy the T-shirt and pants that your team wears,
even if it is in disgusting colours like lime green
or neon blue and makes your legs look like pipe cleaners
dipped in fluorescent paint. Finally, you must tithe
your earnings to this faith by placing bets on your
team’s performance which you are unlikely to
ever win, given the fact that on any day your team’s
star player will probably injure himself in the pre-game
warm up exercises and be dramatically taken off the
field in a stretcher.
It is said that cricket originated
in Britain some where in the eighteenth century, when
the game was played with the heads of executed French
aristocrats imported especially from Paris to amuse
the British monarchy. However, this sport was too
costly for commoners, and the decapitated heads were
replaced by a round hard ball that, when thrown properly,
itself had the ability to decapitate the unprotected
batsman.
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