Ludo Cricket

Last week I posted a blog on Book cricket inspired by this blog which is probably the first ever written evidence that book cricket was infact a reality during the end of 20 th century before the advent of Video Games.I was cleaning my room when I got the Ludo-Cricket boards which I prepared nearly ten years back, that pushed Book-Cricket to new levels.The following blog is all about the golden era of Book-Cricket that thrived in the Pinastro illam.

Even after Video Games arrived but was still inaccessible to the middle class society the Book-Cricket was alive and attained new heights until the death blow was given by drastical fall in the prices of electronic goods.

I used to play a very different form of book cricket indigenously developed by Pinasto and his Sister.It had all the elements of Modern day T20 Cricket. Quick Scores , Quick Wickets and Massive Entertainement.The game was basically a cross breed of two timeless masterpieces of Time-Pass games ; LUDO and BOOK-CRICKET.

I named it LUDO Cricket.Me and My sister used to play this Weird Form of Cricket for hours and sometimes days.The plus point was it recreated the same thrill generated out of all the action on the field like , the Commentator’s excited commentary over the huge six that goes out of the park,The crucial Third Umpire decisions,The batsman hit on the Grill, Batsman being Run out by just a few inches from the crease, the sledging wars between the players,Catch being dropped by the fielder in the Slip,No Ball, Wide,Stunning Catch by the Wicket Keeper and almost everything that used to happen during the 1990’s to 2000 in the world of cricket.

A Different Ball-Game

The Ball used in this game was a Cube shaped , Red in color.This Cube shaped ball also known THE DICE which used to haunt many students in the Maths Mani’s , Probability class.

Rules of the game Ludo-Cricket

The Game is played on a board painted with images of action that happens on the ground.There are two batsmen standing on the board at a single time.

The coaches ( real players ) throw the Red Cubical shaped ball(dice).The dice shows a number.The batsmen on the Ludo cricket board move that many squares and ends up in a square.Whatever action is drawn on that particular square is the fate of the batsmen.Whenever a batsman scores a single , the next ball is faced by the other batsman.

Sometimes,when the batsman entered the square that had a small STAR at the corner.If the batsman landed on a starred corner , he is moved to a More Electrifying board that had nothing but Wickets and Boundaries and Sixers.More on the Electrifying board is explained below.

Advantages over other forms of Book-Cricket

All the action that happens in the real cricket can be felt on paper.Who bowled the maiden over, who thrashed the stumps of the batsman,How many dot balls the batsman wasted in the game,how many drop catches by the team,how many run outs by the team and almost everything except the FREE HIT and the CHEER GIRLS.

Disadvantages over the other forms of Book-Cricket

Very difficult to appreciate this game if you are allergic to Mathematics.I loved calculating the run-rates, strike-rate,runs-per-over etc. ofcourse everything was manual calculations.But this disadvantage can be an advantage too, if you seriously wanted to improve your math , as this game is a fun way to learn.

Since, this game was played by only two people in the world , me and my sister, I was the person who always did the calculation part (remember manual calculation)

Efforts taken to Maximise the Entertainment generated from LUDO-Cricket

Apart from the High scoring games there is a special type of Entertainment generated by the low scoring games.For Low scoring games a special board was painted which had most of the squares as DOT BALLS.

Also sometimes the games tend to charged up either due to the Crowd Noise or the Sledging Wars between the Bowler and the Batsman.For this kind of Game a separate board was painted with every square having either Boundary,Six or a Wicket, in which every square is richly illustrated which is called the Electifying Cricket Board.

Indeed Twenty Twenty was invented long back in the form of Book Cricket which was lost in the missing pages of Folklore ,due to the advent of Video Games.

Re: Book Cricket, age unknown, R.I.P

This blog wants to just add on to this amazing blog by Ashok.As he says the IPL reminds the generation that was in shcool before the period when ‘what’ became ‘wat’ and ‘colour’ became ‘color’ , about the Book Cricket.

I think Ashok is not the first person to see the similarities….Probably he is the first to write a blog on it. I remember Sherry (Navjot) telling to Sonali of NDTV about the similarities of Book Cricket with the twenty Twenty format of the game during the T20 world cup.

The similarities, I see is that the way the runs are scored are never cared for….the shot selection is never a thing to be technically discussed by the Cricket Experts sitting in the TV room.
And the most important similarity of them all ; In both forms of cricket i.e. the OMI ( One Minute International) and the Twenty Twenty ….the number of runs scored by the batsman is always greater than the number of balls faced , even if it is the most boring batsmen like Dravid,Laxman. Really nice to see Dravid scoring 38 off 31 balls.

Well, I will come to the point.I just want to show some other forms of book cricket that were prevalent in my school days …atleast in my school.

TYPE 1

The First one was almost the same as the one mentioned by Ashok, but in that form …when the last digit of the page number is ‘0’ , the batsman was considered Out.Nobody cared , how he got out …run out , bowled, lbw …nothing.

But some of the cricket enthusiasts also listened to the expert talks by Sunil Gavaskar ,Ravi Shastri, Tony Greig and Geoffrey Boycott after the match,wanted to raise the level of Book cricket equal to the standards of the real ones,so that the book cricket can also be analysed by the (hidden) cricket expert in them.Hence, they designed a new way of playing Book Cricket.

The last digit of the page number was taken as the number of steps to go forward in the runs and wicket maze as shown below.Whenever we got ‘0’ as the last digit,we considered it as a ‘DOT BALL’. Hence, the DOT BALL in book cricket was introduced.

It’s quite evident from the picture that the various way the batsmen got out was also introduced to Book Cricket.Experts now had loads of things to talk about the batsmen’s poor run of form.

TYPE 2

The other form of Book cricket was perhaps born out of influence from the metro channel’s superhit game show “Metro Dhamaka”.The picture below shows why

This game demanded a Safety Pin to be used as Willow.Boys didn’t have the Safety Pin.

So , the boys got some reason to talk to the girls in the first bench and ask them a safety pin for playing this form of book cricket.

Somehow , this form of book cricket never took off as it was mostly being distracted my the curious girls (owner of the Safety Pin) who come to the last bench and see what these guys are playing with the Safety Pin.Hence, the games mostly resulted in NO RESULT due to Kadalai ( putting groundnuts) sessions that lasted as long as the CCA periods ( Co-Currivular Activity periods on Thursdays).

Anyway, none of these forms of book-cricket nor the most basic form of book-Cricket now exists.Thanks to Video Games and various other factors…