So I am flying back to Dubai yesterday and this man next to me is a professor and he hates cricket. I ask him why he hates it, I mean you might not like the game but why do you have to actively hate it.

“Complete nonsense, two men standing in front of sticks and eleven others hanging around and millions watching, what a waste of manhours,” he says.

“Could be soccer,” I say, “the same number of people and two men guarding some netting.”

He doesn’t find it amusing but there are people out there who make an issue of disliking cricket. To be different, as a fashion, to impress the girls, perhaps a handful of them honestly being up to here with the hype.

It kind of gets you the attention if you are at a party and everyone is talking Dhoni or Sachin and you pipe in and say, what a crappy game, like it is the pits, a political ploy, the equivalent of the opium for the masses stuff.

People turn around and get excited and the hostile individual is now the cynosure of all eyes and he is enjoying himself thoroughly and we all fall for the trap.

They haven’t changed the world or made it a better place or invented some life inspiring commodity, all they do is hit a ball, he says, and now he is a philosopher and he is even getting support from some of the avant garde crowd who have to be different just to be different because now someone says, hmmmm, you do have a point.

Comedian Robin Williams called it baseball on valium, it is so slow. Actress Gina Lollobrigida reportedly sat through two hours and then asked when the game begins. Some poet once called it chess without the intelligence.

At the height of WW II Winston Churchill said, “A fanatic is someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject. A bore is someone whose chosen subject is cricket.”

In a competition held for anti-cricket sentiment the following made the finals:

What's the difference between watching test cricket and the TV screen test pattern?
A 1: After a while, the test pattern starts to look interesting.
A 2: The test pattern is more colourful.
A 3: There is more movement in the test pattern.

But the first prize for anti-cricket feelings goes to American bestselling author Bill Bryson who wrote these words:

“It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavours look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect… but it is an odd game. It is the only sport that incorporates meal breaks. It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players, more if they are moderately restless. It is the only competitive activity of any type, other than perhaps baking, in which you can dress in white from head to toe and be as clean at the end of the day as you were at the beginning.

“The mystery of cricket is not that Australians play it well, but that they play it at all. It has always seemed to me a game much too restrained for the rough-and-tumble Australian temperament. Australians much prefer games in which brawny men in scanty clothing bloody each other's noses. I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other. And the thing is, it would be a much better game for it."