Howz what?

By Graciela Damiano of the BBC Brazilian Service

When watching a game of cricket and I'm told a shot is good, I have to believe what I'm told. I can never be sure if it is or it isn't.

Cricket has always puzzled me. I was introduced to this very English tradition by a boyfriend a few months after arriving in Britain. I was excited at getting to know him. He was excited about me getting to know his cricket.

He was keen to tell me about it. The sound and fury, the drama, the violence on the pitch. But to me it was all summed up in the threatening face he made playing as a bowler. He wanted to intimidate the batsman.

The batsman returned the courtesy.

"I do believe he's out!"

"That was pure strategy" they said. The seconds it took for them to compose those ugly faces felt like hours. Anyway, long enough for the top Brazilian footballer Ronaldo, to score three goals single footed.

Knowing when to cheer

My boyfriend told me not to cheer. He was sure I would end up cheering the wrong side. So, I watched it silently like a Mona Lisa. With a mysterious smile that could I hoped, belong equally well to a stoic loser or a serene winner.

In any case, it would have been really difficult to know when to cheer. I was told you had eleven men pitted against two of the rival team. It seemed rather unfair.

The action was concentrated on those three men in the middle of the pitch. I found the others rather patient; most of them hardly touched the ball.

More like ballet

But I ended up caught in a strange fascination with the bowler. All that choreography involved in throwing the ball. All the grace in the jump of the man clad in white. I could imagine that any moment the queen of English ballet Dame Margot Fonteyn, coming out of the bushes on the tips of her toes and joining the bowler for a pirouette.

Ah, the Nureyev bowler. I entertain myself creating a whole ballet in my mind. It helped to keep me awake until the interval. Yes, there had to be an interval.

It was indeed tea-time. When I heard about a tea interval, I was sure it was code for "We've had enough of this game, boys. Let's go to the pub for a few pints." I was mistaken and I found myself sitting pretty among wives and players nibbling little triangular cucumber sandwiches and drinking real tea rather than the real beer I'd hoped for.

After the break, there they went dutifully back for an endless second half of a match that in some cases, can last up to four days.

Even a Nureyev bowler would not have been enough to keep Mona Lisa amused. Long before, she would have run away with Ronaldo.