Cricket Fans Get Up Close and Sensational

Your personal downtime can be turned into the sporting event of the year if your TV is geared for it and you’ve brushed up on your cricketing terminology.

December and January are the perfect months for cricket fans to truly get into the game. Even if South Africa isn’t playing a match, most fans will tell you they have their favourite ‘other side’ – whether it’s the West Indies, England, Pakistan, New Zealand or Zimbabwe, there’s always a lot of cricket happening over the festive season and into January.

If you can’t be in Port Elizabeth for the Test against Zimbabwe on 26^th December 2017, or in Cape Town for the South Africa versus India Test Series that begins on 5^th January 2018, but still want to really get in on all the action, you’ll need to up your TV game.

That means getting hold of a Samsung curved QLED television with premium 4K UHD, which will draw you into the match in a way you’ve never experienced before. The 75-inch screen is infused with Quantum Dot technology, which improves luminous efficiency, so even if there’s a sunshine glare on the screen, you won’t miss a shot.

QLED televisions offer outstanding colour volume, pinpoint colour accuracy, improved brightness and the deepest blacks on an active display, giving viewers unmatched picture quality.

Be warned, however, if you are discerning enough to get a Samsung QLED TV, you’ll need to brush up on your cricketing terminology because you’ll have absolutely no excuses for not seeing every single piece of the action in precise detail.

Cricketing jargon is sometimes viewed as a foreign language to people who aren’t fans. To give you a head start and help you up your fan game, here are a few of the expressions you’re likely to hear from commentators, loud and clear and in astounding colour:

Beamer: A delivery that reaches the batsman at around head height without bouncing. Due to the risk of injury to the batsman, a beamer is an illegal delivery, punishable by a no ball being called.

Caught behind: A catch by the wicket-keeper.

Daisy cutter: When a ball rolls along the pitch or bounces more than 2 times

Dibbly dobbly: A delivery that is easy to hit.

Duck: A batsman’s score of nought (zero) dismissed, as in “he was out for a duck.” It was originally called a “duck’s egg” because of the “0” shape in the scorebook.

Featherbed: A soft, slow pitch of predictable bounce.

Full toss: A delivery that reaches the batsman on the full, i.e. without bouncing.

Googly: A deceptive spinning delivery by a wrist spin bowler which spins the opposite direction to the stock delivery.

Hot Spot: A technology used in television coverage to evaluate snicks and bat-pad catches. The batsman is filmed with an infrared camera, and friction caused by the strike of the ball shows up as a white “hot spot” on the picture.

Jack: Number eleven batsman.

Leg bye: Extras taken after a delivery hits any part of the body of the batsman other than the bat or the gloved hand that holds the bat.

Mullygrubber: A ball that doesn’t bounce after pitching.

Non-striker: The batsman standing at the bowling end.

Popper: A ball that rises sharply from the pitch when bowled.

Rib tickler: A ball bowled short of a length that bounces up higher than expected and strikes the batsman in the midriff (usually the side) and hits several ribs.

Silly: A modifier to the names of some fielding positions to denote that they are unusually close to the batsman, most often silly mid-off, silly mid-on, silly midwicket and silly point.
Through the gate: “Bowled through the gate”: dismissed with a ball that passes between the bat and the pads before hitting the wicket.

Uppish: A shot that gains a risky amount of height, opening up the possibility of the batsman being caught.

Wicket maiden: A maiden over in which the bowler also dismisses a batsman. A double wicket maiden if two wickets are taken, and so on.