My children, my wife and I have been fortunate to have lived in town of Oakland NJ, for past 18 years. The commitment to kids sports programs, especially girls softball, I think would be hard to surpass by any other town this size. ( 14,000 - 15,000).

I have seen many girls flourish in Softball program, playing on traveling teams, and at varsity level at our High School. Part of success girls have is due to efforts of a handful of men and women who are commissioners, coaches and administrators of these programs I would hate to think what my daughter’s life would be like if she was not playing softball. She loves that softball.

Cricket was invented in vast fields of England, supposedly by sheperds who herded their flock.Later on this game was shown benovalency by aristrocrats, and now has strature of being Englands national game. After a century now, cricket stands in international arena, with a place of its own.

THE GAME

Cricket involves two teams with 11 players on each side. The captain who wins toss decides whether his team bats or bowls first. If they bat first , their aim is to score a lot of runs and make sure other team does not reach that score.

FORMATS OF THE GAME

Cricket is played in many formats , but most popular are TEST CRICKET and ONE DAY cricket. In TEST cricket game goes on for 5 days, with each team batting twice - if time permits.

ONE DAY is most popular format, with each team getting 300 balls to score runs. ANd other team tries to outscore them within same number of balls.

KEY PLAYERS

Three functions of players are 1. BATSMEN, 2. BOWLING 3. FIELDING.

1. Batsmen - one who scores runs of balls bowled by bowler.

2. Bowler - One who bowls, and tries to get batsmen "out"(dimissed from ground).

3. Fielder - Players (10) who assist bowler in achieving his goal, and prevent batsmen from scoring runs.

BATSMEN

The game of cricket mainly revolves around batsmen. Crowds love batsmen, especially when they wallop ball all over ground. Batsmen are ones who whip up hysteria in crowd, eveybody loves them, they are Don Juans of game.

Many batsmen are good, but only a few are great. Their style, their flair, talent is unique. To each his own - if I can quote this famous phrase.

From numerous batsmen, from 11 ICC (International Cricket Committee, London, UK) recognize , only a few achieve imortality. So what is thing that seperates boys from men?

Many factors go in deciding, or rather making of a great batsmen. A natural talent is most definate, a good coach (Achrekar who coached Sachin Tendulkar), and obviously performing at right time.

In my first article, Lets take a glimpse in life and times of Sir Donald Bradman, pioneer of batting flair.

SIR DONALD BRADMAN: THE AUSSIE ICON

Donald(Don) Bradman was born in 1908 in a small town, Bowral, (population 2000 people) near Sydney, Australia. He started playing cricket seriously when he was in his teens, before that it was just another game. His favourite past time was hitting golf ball with a cricket stump on to a tank. And this very "past-time" of his went a long way in improving his reflexes and co-ordinating his eye and hand movement.

Slowly with right breaks he got involved with playing cricket in school and local clubs, Scoring centuries (100 runs or more) with unfalliable regularity.

In 1920 he went with his father to see a test match at SCG (sydney cricket ground). After watching Charlie Mc Cartney score 170 runs , he said to his dad "I shall never be happy until I play on this ground."