You need about 4 acres, but most of the good fields are taken up by soccer
By: Paul Koepp
SOUTH BRUNSWICK Baseball may be the national pastime, but one of its cousins is getting plenty of play in parks across South Brunswick and throughout the state.
The sound of bat on ball rang out across Veterans Park Sunday morning as Kings Cricket Club, a local team, played its last match of the season.
KCC has about 20 members, the majority are South Brunswick residents, and the open field in Veterans Park on Beekman Road has been their home "ground" for the last three years.
Team captain Asghar Kazim, of Kendall Park (originally from Karachi, Pakistan), said the club plays in the most organized cricket league in the state, the Cricket League of New Jersey, although there are at least two other statewide leagues.
Players from India, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia and the Caribbean all areas introduced to the game through the British Empire are bringing their passion for the game to New Jersey, Mr. Kazim said.
"There’s some serious cricket going on," he said. "Every team wants to join our league."
The CLNJ features a total of 44 teams, with 16 in an upper division and 28 in a lower division. After each season, the top four teams from the lower division are promoted and take the place of the bottom four teams from the upper division.
Mr. Kazim said that, as the league grows, its facilities will have to expand as well.
"We need more fields, but our resources are limited," he said. "You need about 4 acres, but most of the good fields are taken up by soccer."
Mr. Kazim and other members of the club, dressed in all-white uniforms, came out early Sunday to mark the perimeter of the playing field with orange cones 190 feet from the center. They also rolled out and nailed down a mat for bowling and batting, with wickets, cricket’s version of bases, placed 22 yards apart.
To successfully score a run, the batter and the runner, who start at opposite wickets, must trade places before the fielders retrieve a batted ball and throw it into one of the wickets. A hit caught on the fly is an out.
The sloping field in Veterans Park is typical of the league’s uneven playing surfaces, which often provide dangerous bounces, Mr. Kazim said.
"The big goal is to get better and more grounds," he said.
Cricket is ideally played on a neatly manicured surface with short grass like a golf fairway, and although the red ball with one seam around the middle is slightly smaller than a baseball, its leather surface can pack a wallop.
Batters wear long white shin guards and a black helmet as they crouch in front of the wickets and wait for a spinning, bouncing pitch from the bowler, who whirls the ball at up to 70 mph with a windmill motion after a long run-up. They try to either block it with the thick bat or drive it between or beyond the 11 opponents in the field.
The field’s longer grass also makes it difficult to bounce and roll a ball out of the outer boundary, a hit that is worth four runs. Hitting the ball out on the fly, the equivalent of baseball’s home run, earns six runs.
There are two other South Brunswick teams in the CLNJ, the Brunswick Cricket Club of New Jersey, which was involved in a match Sunday at Tall Timber Park on Culver Road, and Raiders Cricket Club. They are both in the lower division and will likely be joined there next season by KCC, whose Sunday match was rained out in the afternoon.
"Let’s say we look forward to next year," said Mr. Kazim.