Cricket is Fun to watch, but Incomprehensible

I went to my first cricket match yesterday; Yorkshire vs Devonshire. The home team (Yorkshire) won, we had some good food, a few beers, and a right jolly good time!

Yorkshire vs Devonshire

Here are a few of the things I learned at the cricket match:

• The wickets are the two "bases" and if the batter knocks the little balanced thingy off the wickets, he's out. (Technical terms are already long forgotten, so just roll with me…)
• If the other team throws the ball and knocks the thingy of the wickets, the batter is out.
• The batters work in pairs, running back and forth between the wickets with their bats, gaining points, also called wickets.
• There are no foul balls.
• If you hit a ball into the stands, you get 6 points, if you hit the wall of the stands, you get four points. There are a lot of other ways to get points, and they all seem arbitrary.   
• Each batter gets 6 pitches, and they're called bowls, not pitches.
• There isn't a heck of a lot of hustle from anyone on the field but the pitcher and the runners. Really. The rest of the guys just stand around. The. Whole. Game.
• The pitcher cannot bend his elbow when he bowls the ball to the pitcher. Bowling looks really, really odd and uncomfortable. 
• We saw a T20 game, in which each team only has one "inning." Real cricket matches last for up to five days and the players break for lunch and afternoon tea. Seriously. 
• The game ended after 2-1/2 hours with a score of 134 to 130.
• Like musical chairs, spectators are allowed to move to/from the seating area only when the music blasts from the stadium speakers (think Everybody Dance Now, and Gangnam Style) so as not to disrupt the viewers/gameplay. 
• There is such a thing as a "Beer Snake," and although verboten, we saw one with our own eyes last night. (Made from empty plastic pint cups) Because games can last all day, for up to five days, many, many empty pint cups are collected. Our game only lasted 2-1/2 hours, yet the beer snake was saw was probably around eight feet tall… not nearly as impressive as the one below (or others you can see online that stretch all the way around the stadium). Yeah, beer snakes are a thing. 

  

  Beer Snake - NOT MY PHOTO (Via Wikipedia)