Cricket Quotes

“When's the game itself going to begin?”

“What is human life but a game of cricket?”

“Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.”

“If I knew I was going to die today, I think I should still want to hear the cricket scores.”

“Anyone who really plays well at cricket will never give attention to lawn tennis. The monotony of the game will choke him off.”

“Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it. When I did turn to politics I did not have too much to learn.”

“Paraphrasing [Carl von] Clausewitz, it seems that in Pakistan cricket is now becoming [Islamic] religious propaganda by other means.”

“Cricket civilises people and creates good gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe; I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen.”

“I was brought up to believe that cricket is the most important activity in men's lives, the most important thread in the fabric of the cosmos.”

“It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.”

“In spite of recent jazzed-up one-day matches, cricket to be fully appreciated demands leisure, some sunny warm days and an understanding of its finer points.”

“The true charm of cricket and hunting is that they are still more or less sociable and universal—there's a place for every man who will come and take his part.”

“Cricket is desecrated by futile levity, but elevated by a certain high-spirited detachment: between the extremes of indifference and over-anxiety there lies a proper mean.”

“Sledging is not required in cricket. It's not good for the game, cricket is a gentleman's game, not a contact sport. We don't see why there should be any abusive language at all.”

“Sledgers try and put you off but the way I look at it, people who sledge probably aren't at the top of their game so they have to try and use underhand methods to put you off your stride.”

“Cricket is not so much a game as an extension of being English: a gallimaufry of paradoxes, contradictions, frightening logic and sheer impossibilities, of gentle courtesy and rough violence.”

“Before we were old enough to practise at the nets with the Burslem men, we played most of our cricket on waste land that had been trampled flat by the clogs and boots of generations of miners.”

“If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?”

“I think once it broaches personal issues and once it sort of supersedes your moral boundaries of what language is tolerable, and also when it sort of gets a bit mundane and boring to the point of just going on all the time.”

“Cricket can stand up to sustained contemplation on other than statistical or merely sensational levels, and return to the careful and sympathetic watcher some reward more enduring than the fun of a good game would seem to promise or warrant.”