Cricket is the world’s second most popular sport, with 2.5 billion fans. There’s some good news for cricket fans in the U.S. Major League Cricket has launched. The newly-formed Washington Freedom joins teams from San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and Texas in the inaugural season, which is underway now.

Cricket can be intimidating for people who are unfamiliar with the sport. You may have heard the phrase, “that’s a sticky wicket.” The metaphor is used to describe difficult situations. That expression comes from cricket, where it’s used to describe a particularly resilient wicket — a set of three stumps, connected by two smaller sticks, called bails, at either end of a cricket pitch. More about wickets later.

One of the top cricketers in the world, 29-year-old South African Anrich Nortje, is bowling for the Washington Freedom. A cricket bowler is similar to a pitcher in baseball.  Nortje is a star, recently named South Africa’s cricketer of the year.

Nortje is known for his speed. He regularly bowls over 150 kilometers per hour, or about 93 mph, and sometimes even faster. He is training in Houston, and says he never thought he’d be playing cricket in the U.S.

“Never, never ever, never. So it’s really exciting to be here. It’s such a great place. I always see it in movies and on T.V. but I never really thought I’d actually come here to play,” Nortje says.

Bowling is different from pitching in baseball. Bowlers get a running start before they wind up to release the ball. Nortje has never tried to pitch a baseball but, he says, pitchers appear to have a bit more control over their form.

“From the outside [pitching] looks a little more controllable. Where, with running, you might jump into a hole, you might jump into softer areas to try and take off. Where with throwing from a standstill, like [in pitching], that base is always the same,” says Nortje.

Once you get the basics, Nortje says, cricket can be really exciting.

For more on the basics, we turn to WAMU’s resident cricket expert, Kojo Nnamdi. He’s a lifelong fan of the sport, having cheered for the West Indies team, known as the Windies, most of his life. Growing up in Guyana, Nnamdi says watching the Windies cricket team was a long and often-frustrating experience.

“You have favorite players, and when you root for them and they don’t do well, you can’t sleep at night, you’re upset all day long. And you get so emotionally invested in this game. That was particularly hurtful because, in those days, all cricket matches lasted for five days,” says Nnamdi.

MLC matches will not last five days. Teams are playing a “twenty20” format, where games last about two and half hours. (Five-day cricket matches are called “tests,” not because they’re a test of attention spans, though. Tests are still played today, mainly between member countries of the International Cricket Council).

All the action in cricket takes place on the pitch, the center of the oval-shaped field. There are eleven players on defense, including a bowler, who hurls the ball at the batsman and tries to hit the wickets and break loose the bails connecting them (remember the sticky wicket?). If the bowler succeeds, the batsman is out.

Another way a bowler can get a batsman out is something called “leg before wicket.”

“In cricket, the ball bounces before it reaches the batsman,” says Nnamdi, explaining how the batsman’s position in front of the wicket affects the bowler’s ability to hit the stumps. “When the batsman steps in front of the wicket to hit the ball, if he misses and is hit in the leg with the ball, that batsman is out.”

The batsman has two jobs: hit the ball and score runs. “In order to score a run in cricket, it’s the equivalent of getting to one base,” says Nnamdi.

When a batsman hits the ball, they don’t around bases. They run back and forth between two wickets at opposite ends of the pitch,  about 66 feet apart. Each time the batsman makes it from one wicket to the other, that’s a run. By the way, there are two batsmen on the pitch, each sprinting back and forth between wickets scoring runs.

During this time, the defensive players work to get the ball back to the pitch and hit the wicket, thus sending the batsman packing. If a fly ball is caught before it hits the ground, the batsman is out.

There are a couple other ways to score runs in cricket. Imagine a home run in baseball being worth more than just one point.

“If a batter can hit a ball through the field and get to the boundary, that’s four runs. If the batter can lift the ball in the same way that a home run is hit, and it goes over the boundary, that’s six runs,” says Nnamdi

And, just like in baseball, the team with the most runs at the end of the game wins.

All MLC matches will be played in Texas and North Carolina for the time being. The owners of the Washington Freedom and officials at George Mason University are exploring the feasibility of building a cricket and baseball complex in Fairfax County. But the earliest fans would be able to watch a professional cricket match in the D.C. area is 2025.

Now, that’s a sticky wicket.