For years now, I’ve been experiencing the onset of a slow love affair with cricket. Maybe it’s because I love puzzles (especially the cryptic kind), and here in North America, cricket is usually shrouded in mystery. It’s viewed as baseball’s exotic, off-kilter cousin whose rules are just a bit too cryptic to figure out, thank you very much, especially if there’s a baseball game on.

As it turns out, just as with cryptic crosswords, puzzling through the rules of cricket offers great satisfaction. Now that I have a clue what’s happening on the pitch, I can hardly tear myself away. And the language! Can any other sport compete with googlies, doosras, yorkers, maiden overs and ducks?

There’s a kind of poetry to cricket. In honour of the 2011 Cricket World Cup in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, I produced this mini-doc on how I came to love the sport.

First aired Feb 17, 2011 in syndication on CBC Radio 1. Thanks to Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons for the photo of the cricket ball.