Cricket Game

Behind orange net fencing that cordons off much of Norman Manley International Airport, the skeletal frame of a new terminal looms as a nagging reminder that this host nation of the Cricket World Cup has only a month to go before 15,000 fans descend on this city.

England and Pakistan were linked again in the headlines Monday, but for reasons far removed from any bomb plot. This time, the controversy, described as an "unprecedented cricket crisis," involved sport. It focused on the cricket farce Sunday in South London, when Pakistan refused to exit its dressing room for resumption of a match with England after the tea interval, reminding some that cricket incorporates a tea interval, not to mention a lunch break.

There is no dead of night in this once-idyllic capital, as hundreds of Chinese workers jackhammer and steamroll round-the-clock in a race to rebuild a stadium destroyed 19 months ago by Hurricane Ivan. Grenada is scrambling to make up for months of lost time to get Queen's Park stadium ready for International Cricket Council inspections that start this month for the 2007 World Cup that is to be held jointly by nine Caribbean countries.

Baseball immortal Ted Williams said nothing was more difficult in sports than hitting a round ball with a round bat. Abid Hussain begs to differ. Try using a flat board to hit a ball about the size of a baseball -- without ever missing. In baseball, it is three strikes and you're out, until your next at-bat. In cricket, one strike and the batter is usually out of the batting order for the rest of the match.

Tickets were being resold for $500 or more. Millions of pounds were bet on the outcome. People jammed pubs and skipped work to watch the action or listened to the play on their computers. Tony Blair interrupted a speech on education to read out the score at tea time. But for once, it wasn't soccer that was bewitching all of Britain. It was that most sedate and graceful game of summer, played on uncounted village greens: cricket.

Tea bags in Tinseltown When a Brit goes outwardly "native," his inner Union Jack seems to blaze all the more vividly. Aldous Huxley epitomized the legions of seekers who flocked to Los Angeles before World War II, yet he remained thoroughly British down to his argyle socks. No American has created more iconic images of Los Angeles than David Hockney, but his thorough Britishness is legend.

The cricket match between India and Pakistan was being broadcast live via satellite and expected to run early into the morning, so Aakin Patel showed up at the Lakewood theater in his hospital scrubs. His job at a Santa Ana medical center started at 5 a.m., and he planned to go straight from the theater to work. Sleep? Not during cricket matches, especially one between two political rivals. "It's my passion," said Patel, a native of India. "For cricket, I can stay up."

Walt Disney Co. and News Corp. are challenging in court the conditional award of Indian cricket TV rights to media firm Zee Telefilms Ltd., their ESPN Star Sports joint venture said Tuesday. On Sunday, the Indian cricket board awarded Zee, India's biggest listed media company, rights to telecast all of the Indian team's home matches for the next four years. Zee had been in a fierce bidding war with ESPN. ESPN said a hearing would be held Thursday.

India's first cricket tour of Pakistan in 14 years got off to a rousing, peaceful start amid hopes that the series would further improve ties between the nuclear-armed rivals and neighbors, who have fought three wars since 1947. Fans packing Karachi's National Stadium gave the Indian visitors a standing ovation after they eked out a victory by five runs in the first match. Thousands of police patrolled outside. Hundreds of millions of people in both countries watched on television.

Ringed by armed security forces, India's cricketers arrived in Lahore for their first full tour of Pakistan in 14 years, determined to win but also hoping the visit would help bring peace between South Asia's nuclear-armed rivals. Since the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, Pakistan and India have been enemies, unable to reconcile their competing claims to the Himalayan region of Kashmir.