Mystify, mystify me

Not that I've tried, but I don't think I could ever figure out what the hell is going on in cricket. I'm not even sure most of this description of a match between England and Australia is written in English:

For the last ten days Ashley Giles has talked the talk. At Edgbaston today he walked the walk, picking up three vital wickets as a relentless arm-wrestle of a Test edged towards England. At close of the second day of the second Test, England were 25-1 in their second innings after Australia, replying to England's first innings 407, were all out for 308.

What? Wickets and arm-wrestling? England scored 407? 407 what? And I thought scoring in the NBA had gotten out of hand.

First to go was Matthew Hayden, who fell into a carefully laid trap to bag the first golden duck of his Test career in the second over of the day. Hayden loosely drove the otherwise ineffective Matthew Hoggard to one of three men set specifically for the shot, Andrew Strauss at short extra-cover.

But Ricky Ponting, determined to right the perceived wrong of bowling first on a featherbed yesterday, swaggered to the wicket and launched a blistering counter-attack.

Ok, so apparently the cricket match turned into a hunt and someone shot a duck. Then this character, Ricky Ponting, was bowling on a featherbed. He must have used the duck feathers.

After tea, Simon Jones who claimed the prized wicket of opener Justin Langer, who had defied England for four and a half hours in making 72 from 154 balls with seven fours. Meanwhile, as the Australian tail crumbled Adam Gilchrist was left unbeaten on 49 in his 100th Test innings.

Ok. Ok. I know American sports can be difficult to follow for the uninitiated. I know this because I once tried to explain baseball to a Spaniard. It's near impossible, because all of the baseball knowledge an American grows up with and takes for granted, all of those little intricacies that we know offhand, are new, strange and incomprehensible to someone to whom the game is completely foreign. But in all of my stunted attempts to explain the infield fly rule or hit-and-runs, I never, EVER, began a sentence with "After tea. . ."

His 52-ball fifty came up with three successive boundaries - two of them sumptuously straight-driven - off Simon Jones, and he had batted just about as well as it is possible to bat when he checked a sweep at Giles and was taken by Vaughan at short fine-leg for 61.

What the...now they're just putting words together, right? It's complete gibberish! I've seen MadLibs that were more comprehensible.