On Saturday, April 2, India and Pakistan begin a series of 6 one-day cricket matches. One-day matches are much more lively than the notoriously slow "test" cricket matches. A one-day match takes only about 8 hours including the lunch break (one team bats before lunch, the other after); a test match typically run five days (each team bats twice through its lineup). By limiting each batting team to a fixed number of deliveries to swing at (normally 300), one-day cricket radically reduces the incentive to bat defensively. In test cricket, where deliveries are unlimited and where -- unlike baseball -- the batsman needn't run once he strikes the ball if he doesn't think it safe to do so, I once saw England's captain Nasser Hussain bat so defensively that he made only one run off his first thirty deliveries.

It is difficult for Americans to fathom how popular is India-Pakistan cricket. But Ramchandra Guha's superb book A Corner of a Foreign Field (previously mentioned here) gives a useful statistic (p. xiii):

When [Indian star Sachin] Tendulkar is batting against the Pakistani swing-bowler Wasim Akram, the television audience exceeds the entire population of Europe.

It's so popular among NRIs (non-resident Indians) that an Indian restaurant here in St. Louis (where I picked up takeout tonight) is showing all six matches live on a big-screen projection tv at $7 per head per match -- even though the matches start at 10:25pm local time!