Cricket is the world's second most popular spectator sport behind association football or soccer.

However, it's played almost nowhere outside of former British colonies.

It's a game that can be confusing to those who are uninitiated and if it's played in its traditional manner can take an extremely long time to complete.

Learn more about Cricket, how the game developed and how it's played today on this episode by saying I am confident that I know more about

cricket than 99% of the population of the United States.

And I want to follow that up by saying that is an absolutely meaningless

statement because nobody in the United States

really knows anything about cricket. In the course of my travels I've come to view

the world as being divided into three parts. First there are the countries that play

baseball which I will call the baseball sphere.

This includes United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican

Republic, Puerto Rico, Aruba, Currasau, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Then there are the countries that I'll call the Cricket Sphere.

These are the UK, broken up into its four constituent countries, Ireland, all the former British colonies in the Caribbean lumped together as the

West Indies, including Guyana, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Australia, South Africa,

and New Zealand.

The third group is everyone who plays neither baseball nor cricket.

The amazing thing is that there is basically zero overlap between the cricket sphere and the

baseball sphere. My first real exposure to Cricket was in 2008. I spent a month in

Melbourne and I was watching TV one day when there was a Cricket match on. I figured I'd watch

it to try to learn something. They eventually cut away for the news,

played a full episode of The Simpsons, and then went back to the match which was still in progress.

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