[GirlySports]

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/...-cricket-maybe

Two Americans get a DVD of the India-Pakistan semifinal played two months ago and give hilarious commentary of what they're seeing at they learn the game

We are told that in ODI (One-Day International) tournaments, the team that bats first wins 72 percent of the time. This whole thing is basically NFL overtime. So when India wins the toss and elects to hit first, it strikes us as odd that the announcers would bother to discuss whether that decision is wise, but they do. They then do an interview with the Pakistani captain who does an admirable job of pretending that if he'd won the toss he would probably have just chosen to bat second anyway, but you can clearly tell he just died a little inside. Then they head over to the Indian captain who is handsome and oozes team leader. He is Steve Garvey-esque, and his interview is straight from the Nuke Laloosh school of sports clichés. Nate finds this vaguely disappointing, as he always wants foreign things to be more foreign than they usually are.

Each side gets two video reviews, and the Indians decide to use one — again, Sehwag is one of their best guys, so it's worth it to try to prove the ump wrong. Instantly, an incredibly authoritative-looking computer animation from a machine called Hawk-Eye (the same Hawk-Eye used in major tennis tournaments, interestingly) — shows definitively that (a) Gul did not foot fault, and (b) the ball's trajectory would definitely have struck the wicket had Sehwag's padded shin not gotten in the way. The computer replay animation looks fantastic. The whole thing takes 20 seconds, and leaves no room for doubt. The crowd watches it on a diamond vision screen and for 40 seconds, the whole contest is turned into a video game, yet it is surprisingly awesome. The fact that baseball has not embraced replay for all matters concerning the game now seems like the craziest aspect of any sport in the universe.