Heads Up America, you can get cricket on TV. Well, sort of. Those nice people at Mediazone have got the rights to an international cricket tournament: the Hong Kong Sixes. Six-a-side cricket is a game so bizarre that I didn’t bother to describe it in my cricket articles. There are, of course, only six players per side, which means a lot of runs because of the huge gaps in the field. The games last just one 5-over innings per side. Every player but the wicket keeper bowls one over. And in this tournament there are some additional rules such as batsmen having to retire when they reach a score of 31 (they can come back later if everyone else is out). It is a totally frantic game – making arena football look positively pedestrian in comparison.

The coverage comes from an Indian TV channel, Desi. As is common with Mediazone, there is a whole lot of padding of shots of the ground and the like, and somehow they managed to lose the commentary soundtrack, though you can hear the stadium announcer and the crowd clearly, but the on-screen graphics are generally enough to follow the game. I was expecting highlights, but it looks like we are getting a select few full games.

Kevin and I have watched the first half of the Saturday package, which was an England-New Zealand game. It isn’t the best cricket in the world, especially some of the bowling, but there is some serious power hitting going on. I’ll try to avoid too much spoilers, but Spearman (NZ) and Cork (Eng) enjoyed themselves.

The best thing of all, however, is that the entire package (I think around 4 hours of material) costs only $5. Even if the games are a bit of a lark, it is worth buying them to show Mediazone that there are cricket fans in the US. It just might encourage them to get some coverage of next year’s Cricket World Cup.