LITTLE ROCK — Outside of high school football and possibly central Arkansas' active kickball leagues, Arkansas doesn't enjoy a bounty of adrenalized athletic rivalries.
Unless, that is, you factor in the little-seen but zealous antagonism between the Central Arkansas Cricket Association and the Little Rock Cricket Club.
"They're our archrivals," Cricket Association member Nishad Karekar says of the Cricket Club. "There's not a single game we have had with them when we haven't had a heated argument."
Yes, cricket is played in Arkansas: The season for the Central Arkansas Cricket Association, the more active of the teams, begins in April and runs through August, with Tuesday practices and Saturday matches on the soccer fields of Burns Park in North Little Rock.
The Jonesboro Cricket Club is the third Arkansas team in the Arkansas-Tennessee Cricket league, which also includes six teams in Tennessee.
And, yes, the centuries-old sport, fixed in the Anglophiliac imagination as a prewar exemplar of whiteuniformed gentility, can inspire a sticky wicket's worth of shouting matches.
"It's a reflection of the fierceness of the players on the field," Karekar says of the animus that develops between the Cricket Club, a cadre of motel owners, and the Cricket Association, comprising in large part doctors from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and software engineers from Acxiom.
"It's also sometimes the heat," Karekar allows. Although, for practical reasons, Arkansas cricket teams forgo the many-day matches associated with the sport and play more abbreviated (but still three-to-four hour) forms, "you're standing in the sun, with a lot of stress on the players," Karekar says. "Even the slightest misunderstanding sparks a big argument. But never to a point it has caused physical or mental harm." But if two cricket teams feud in the middle of a field and there are no spectators on the perimeter of the game's trademark green oval to take it in, do they still make a sound?
Central Arkansas' cricket matches take place not exactly in secret, but with so little fanfare - let alone fans - that a match can fail to rouse the interest even of Milo, a basset hound puppy and unofficial Central Arkansas Cricket Association mascot, who snoozed under the bleachers on the first day of playoffs in early August.
Cricket remains most popular in the former British Commonwealth countries; most cricket players in central Arkansas are of Indian descent, and of the Cricket Association's 16 members (11 players from each team are required on the field at a time), only one - a South African now living in Arkansas - joined the association after spotting the group through the sea of minivans and soccer cleats that collects around the group's corner of Burns Park.
While a minor sport in Arkansas, nationwide it has undergone the same Internet-borne dilution as every other athletic enterprise.
Vicarious players can draft fantasy cricket teams just like their baseball contemporaries, and a teen-idol magazine-like feature of the Web site of the International Cricket Council asks and answers the question, "What do top cricketers like to watch at the movies?" (Meanwhile,gocaca.org, while infrequently updated, is still the best way to keep up with the central Arkansas group.)
"We don't broadcast it," says Karekar. "The goal is not to get spectators. The goal is to enjoy the game."
'ALL THE BEST'
But if you had been a spectator on a recent Saturday morning, here's what you would have taken in: The Cricket Association, hosting a Memphis team, plays what Karekar calls a "happy medium" between the most abbreviated form of cricket, a game so short that it barely registers before play is over, and the longer of the one day versions, which can go on so long that it makes interstate travel for matches difficult. (The Cricket Association once participated in a tri-state system enveloping Arkansas, Oklahoma and Missouri, but "it was too much traveling and too much cricket," says Karekar. Now the association has aligned with the Arkansas-Tennessee system.)
Play began around 10:30 a.m. - a chorus of "All the best!" sounding from one to the other as the men filed onto the field - and was expected to last until around 3:30 p.m., with a 40-minute break for lunch.
The nucleus of cricket action takes place in center field on a narrow strip, called a pitch, bookended by the three-pronged wickets, which resemble a section of a banister.
A bowler - the cricket equivalent of baseball's pitcher - makes an exertive overhand serve of cricket's hard leather ball, pitching to a batter. While his throw is meant as a volley the batter must return, he is also attempting to hit the wicket, which the batter is defending by striking away the ball with a paddle-like instrument.The batter's primary objective is to prevent the ball from hitting the wicket, and then to move the ball far enough away to secure himself time to run from one end of the pitch to the other.
Unlike in baseball, the batter can hit the ball in any direction, and runs take place across the 22 yards that separate the wickets along the pitch. Outfielders return the ball to the pitch, attempting to interrupt the runs.
A scorekeeper, situated far from the action underneath a tent, sat and keyed scores into a Palm Pilot with a stylus. There was no scoreboard. To keep track of a team's standing, "we just have to do a lot of yelling," says Karekar.
When the league formed back in 2005, Karekar and his compatriots were unsure they'd generate enough interest to merit investing in real equipment. They used a tennis ball covered in electrical tape to replicate the dynamics of a cricket ball.
"I'm telling you, the level of cricket in this league has really stepped up," says Kalpesh Das, who made the drive from Jonesboro to umpire the first game of playoff season. (Ultimately, the Cricket Association team was defeated by the visiting team from Memphis.) "Each year you can see the difference."
Karekar agrees. In the early days of the league, "a team would score about 150 runs," he recalls. "That's a pretty decent score. Nowadays the scores go as high as 250, 300. Same amount of cricket, same time span. The much higher number of runs is an indication that players are playing better."
NOSTALGIC PULL
Still, members of the Central Arkansas Cricket Association are so focused on improving their play that so far they've not had the resources to train newcomers.
Most players share a story similar to Karekar, now 37, who took up the sport at the age of 10 in his native Bombay. He went about four years without cricket after moving to the United States, instead playing a lot of tennis, badminton and racquetball. But he always missed the game that had seen him through his school years.
"We grew up playing cricket, all of us. We were very happy with it," he says. "We know it, and it doesn't require a lot of equipment - just three sticks, a bat, a ball."
The league he says, "is still in the nascent stages. Right now, at least, it's very competitive and very serious. Hopefully at some point we will have the bandwidth to teach the game to somebody who was interested."
Until then, Karekar says the appeal for him remains the league's close-knit status, free, even of spectators.
"It's a hobby. We do it for the camaraderie, the getting together."
ActiveStyle, Pages 25, 30 on 08/31/2009