being german.

(Getty Images)

Cricket isn't that big in Germany. I'm sure there are people who have all kinds of fancy numbers at the ready and could tell you exactly how not "that big" cricket really is, but even without those numbers I can safely say that it thankfully still ranks above dry swimming and sitting shot put, but far behind our Volkssport football, cycling, swimming or the ever so popular winter sports. Most active cricketers in this country are either British soldiers stationed here or originally hail from the subcontinent, with cricket automatically being part of their lives despite the omnipresence of football and co.

So with me being neither a British soldier nor of subcontinental origin, how did I end up watching cricket? First of all, I've been a huge rugby (union and league) and Aussie Rules football fan, and cricket is (as far as the Southern Hemisphere is concerned) what's being played when the rugby and footy seasons are over, and I guess I was curious and wanted to check it out for myself. And secondly, and probably more importantly, I refused to accept that I couldn't read, understand and interpret the cricket scores in the Guardian (my English-language newspaper of choice), so I pretty much forced myself to watch some cricket and learn the rules on the way.


But this also means that I don't have any special stories to tell about how my grandfather took me to the cricket for the first time or how we all used to come together to sit around the radio, listening to England having Ashes series defeat after Ashes series defeat handed to them, or how it felt when I picked up a bat for the first time or bowled my maiden over of really ugly offspin in the park. There's no allegiance, no nostalgia, no tradition, no "back in the day" component to my following of the game. I stumbled upon it for rather stupid reasons, via other sports and because I wanted to learn more about it, and in the end I came to love it so much more than I could ever have imagined.


Coming from a non-cricketing country means that I can watch the game without any patriotic feelings neither clouding nor brightening up my view, and support a team, for example, because I admire a certain player, not because loyalty tells me to. At the same time this also opens the door for a catalogue of annoying questions à la "Why do you like the Black Caps?", "Why do you not like Swanny?", "If you support England in the Ashes, how come you like Ponting so much?" - because we all know, nobody who isn't actually Kiwi would voluntarily support the Black Caps in all their average glory, let alone publicly admit to it; Swann is the greatest and funniest bloke on earth and also the genius behind a bowling style we now call offspin; and supporting England has to include hating on a legend of our game.


Of course, not everyone in the Test cricket playing nations is a die-hard cricket fan, but overall the access to trivial things such as live broadcasts, newspapers, books, merchandise and live events is so much easier and so much more comfortable - if you're into cricket you will find like-minded people as well as the tools to feed and live out your passion for leather and willow.


It might be a bit of a luxury to be able to just watch cricket for the game's sake, but at the same time I can't help but be envious of those who live in the "right" countries, who can watch cricket on regular TVs (Pay TV nonetheless) and don't have to sit crammed in front of a computer day after day, hoping that Giles Clarke hasn't followed through with his Crusade Against Streaming™ just yet. Those who can watch it live at the most beautiful grounds without having to sell their mothers for it and sacrificing several goats at the altar of the rain gods, who don't have to pay a small fortune for magazine subscriptions that arrive two weeks late anyway, and who in school, at university or at work, among their friends and families, have people whom they can talk shop with.


Following cricket (as well as rugby union and league and Australian Rules football) and keeping up with news, developments and current live games everywhere can turn a time-consuming hobby into an unpaid full-time job. When you find yourself driving up to your allegedly international airport (I've been told planes do fly to destinations outside of Germany from here, but who knows) to get at least the Guardian or the Times in order to have some kind of a fix for your obsession in print, it may well be time to step away from Twitter and StatsGuru and everything in between and get a life.


Despite the time, emotions and even genuine tears I put into following cricket from abroad, I still feel like an outcast among our (online) cricket community at times. When I look around, there are people chatting away about going to Lord's, having been to Newlands or looking forward to going to the G next Southern summer, telling each other anecdotes about that time they fell down the stairs at Trent Bridge, that time they ran into Player X or that time Player Z was rude to their granny - and while being a fan shouldn't be a competition, people quite easily turn it into one, and can get quite condescending towards someone who can't chip in with similar stories.


They can even make you feel like you're not a "real fan" because of geographical challenges. Which raises the question - what is a "real fan" anyway? Is it about dedication or proximity, devotion or live attendance? Me and my shoddy streams and my dependance on mediocre, and at times shockingly ill-informed, coverage on Cricinfo and BBC Radio, we can't quite compete with the majority of cricket fans if hailing from the same country as a more or less successful Test side is the major criterion, no matter how well versed in the sport I believe myself to be.


Of course I'd love to attend as many games as possible (or just one game, for starters), of course I'd love to be able to meet up with cricket aficionados everywhere and feel part of the family and of course I'd love to not be stared at like a creature from outer space just for liking cricket and arranging my social life around it - but at the same time I am proud of my efforts, proud of my knowledge, proud of being so enamoured with this great game. And when nobody's looking, I ask myself whether those of us who live abroad, who accidentally came across cricket and who don't have access to anything might not actually be the biggest fans out there after all.


My supporting of cricket went from an experiment to a hobby to an almost tragic passion, albeit with a few obstacles. But it's worth it, every second of it, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

(originally penned for @aotearoaxi's blog, originally published here.)

self-absorbed. adjective. absorbed in your own interests.

Little addition to my piece on Kevin Pietersen's retirement from one-day cricket.

"I'd had enough of the schedule. I can't carry on doing everything. I play every single form of cricket that there is. I play the IPL and I've the Champions League in October. Apart from MS Dhoni, I've played the most days of international cricket over the past seven years. There comes a time when some form of the game has to be taken out of my schedule. One-day cricket was it.

It is a shame, but that is schedules we have. If the schedules weren't like that, or I played for another country where you had months and months occasionally to rest and recuperate, or if I had the opportunities to be rested things might be different. But you don't get those opportunities when you play for England. So I had to make a decision. You know what that decision is." (Source)

(Kevin Pietersen. Keeping It Real Since 1980.)

I'd like to work in a job where I get paid millions to travel all over the world and hit a ball around, where my biggest problem is that I don't get months off work. Apart from that, it isn't the ECB's problem that KP™ is playing in the IPL and Champions League (and it should never be). As far as I know, England had the months of November, December, February and almost the entire month of March off. So technically he's done a bit in January and at the end of March and then went to India to participate in the IPL where he's being paid ~$125,000 per week.

Yeah, I feel so sorry for you, you greedy sack of shit.

selfish. adjective. thinking only of oneself.

Those who follow me on Twitter will know that I harbour nothing but negative feelings towards Kevin Pietersen, and that I'm certainly happy to have him spoil only Test cricket for me in the future instead of all three formats. The entertainment value he allegedly adds to the game never managed to overshadow my intense dislike of him and his stinker attitude. Despite all that, if the timing of KP's sudden retirement of international one-day cricket - or as I like to call it "KP doing whatever it takes to be the #1 trending topic worldwide" - hadn't been so peculiar, I'd may well be saying that we should let the man earn his cash if he's gagging for it this badly. But since he mistimed his actions so spectacularly, I can't find it in me to be this generous.

Let's think the best of him, against every fibre of my being, and assume he did ask the ECB to be rested from the ODI series against Australia (if the players even wash up on the UK shores), and they turned him down. Seems highly unlikely, since the Blazers usually do anything for KP, but let's roll with it. The Blazers then told him to either play through the summer or retire - couldn't he have gutsed it out (if playing one-dayers really is such a hardship), participated in the T20 World Cup and then retired directly into the CLT20 and the Big Bash?

Instead, it seems as if he wanted to screw the ECB for how they handled the Moores affair and his Twitter outbursts, as if he wanted to settle who's whose daddy in this never-ending soap opera once and for all. Regardless of whether the ECB's ruling of players having to be available for all limited over formats or none makes sense or not, he knew about said ruling all along - and he retired from one-day cricket anyway. Probably with the petty intention of testing whether the ECB were willing to make the umpteenth concession to the Great KP and His Even Greater Ego, because moving Craig Kieswetter down the order to give His Highness more time at the crease (and to Kieswetter's clear disadvantage) simply wasn't enough. And even though it meant depriving England of their prime limited-overs batsman, this time around someone decided to stand his ground (for now) and let him go.

Yes, English cricket has profited from his contributions over the years, but those benefits definitely went and still go both ways. Was playing a dozen one-day matches this summer for the country that welcomed him and the organization that's been been bending over backwards for him and allowed him to turn his indisputable talent and c*nty persona into millions (!) of pounds really too much to ask? I don't think so. Yet, he decided to go down this road, and he and his camp will simply need to deal with the consequences for the brand KP™, step away from Twitter and stop blaming others for a choice he made of his own free will.

For some inexplicable reason, I've never quite rated him as a team player, and by acting like this, he's only proved to me that he's exactly the selfish knob I always believed him to be. With the vast majority of players, especially players who are already on the wrong side of 30, I wouldn't begrudge them wanting to earn big(ger) money for a second. But when it comes to KP, all his slightly desperate and slightly worthless declarations of loyalty and love and whatever else to the cause of English cricket not to mention the damn tattoo spring to mind, which makes his clearly non-essential (i.e. not forced by injury) retirement so impossible to deal with.

Way too many people, fans and journalists alike, complain about the ECB treating 20- and 50-over cricket as basically the same - and completely miss the point. The ECB are trying to protect the one-day game by making sure that their most talented players don't opt out of playing it, which as long as it's still around and World Cups are being held, is what every board should be doing and what supporters should be encouraging. Sure, Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott don't play Twenty20 cricket, but they've never retired from the shortest form and are technically still available - they're just not being selected due to their more conservative approach to batting not being required in Twenty20. And if people don't want to get that, they should buy a Melbourne Renegades Membership - KP will turn out for them next winter.

Whether there's too much cricket being played or not, whether there's too much one-day cricket being played or not, that's a discussion for another day. People can believe that KP did what he had to do for a higher cause, that he sacrificed himself for the greater good of English cricket, and that it had nothing to do with money whatsoever, but I'm never going to buy into it; and thankfully, I'm not alone in that. Kevin Pietersen only ever thinks of what's best for Kevin Pietersen, and his decision to retire now and throw England's limited overs teams and their inexperienced captains to the wolves in the lead-up to the T20 World Cup and a possible title defence is yet another act of a self-serving prima donna, who is now free to go and earn his cash wherever he wants to buy himself all the lip balm and loafers in the world.


(And I sincerely hope the door hit him on his way out.)