Why Cricket is Better than Football

I am writing an article for a sports magazine called Sports Daily and they have asked me to write about why cricket is better than football for their which sport is better section.

Whenever it comes to sports it doesn’t matter where you live in this world, this question is always asked. Which is better cricket or football?

So in this article I have given all the cricket fans all of the the most important reasons why cricket is better than football.

1. The shortest versions of cricket are longer than any football match which means it provides more entertainment for a longer period of time. The action replays in cricket are so nerve racking because the outcome can change the whole game around. This also makes the game more entertaining.
2. Football is played for 90 mins and all that will happen that either it will be a goal or not but in cricket every ball is different even the outcome is different like maybe a run out, a catch out, a six, a four, a stump, a wicket or just a dot you never know. This gives the supporters more reasons to cheer.
3. Football is not very commercially valuable because it only provides one-time which is the half time for advertisement where as in cricket you can have an advertisement between balls and overs, and to be precise in T20 you have 40 time slots. T20 is one of the shortest versions of cricket. This makes cricket more commercially valuable.
4. If you’re watching football on your TV, tablet, mobile, laptop or a PC you’re mainly shown one camera angle unless if it a goal or a penalty. Whereas as if you’re watching cricket on a device the whole stadium is covered in cameras so you get to watch the game from many angles. Furthermore, in football the only advanced technology that is used is goal line technology which is very rarely used, where as in cricket you have a hot spot, speed gun, snicko-meter, hawk eye, stump camera, super slow motion, heart beat monitor and dart fish. This all makes cricket more technologically advanced and makes the game fairer.
5. The commentary in football is so predictable. They nearly just say this for most of the game “Marcelo to Kroos, Kroos to Bale, Bale to Ronaldo, and it’s a goal. The commentators don’t analyses the techniques or power they put in the pass or the shot, instead they just comment on the literal thing going on during the match. But in cricket the commentators have to analyses each delivery which makes the job tougher and more professional.
6. Alongside the kits the players wear in football they use shin pads which are pretty cheap. Whereas in cricket the players have to wear a lot of safety equipment like ball box, pads, helmet, thigh guard and chest guard, which makes cricket richer and making the players better fed.
7. Cricketers are higher paid than footballers. IPL is on rank no.2 whereas EPL is on rank no.4. Virat Kholi is the sixth most marketable athlete. He is higher than Messi and Ronaldo. This again shows that cricketers are richer than footballers. In the end they all do it for the money.
8. If we start talking about the popularity of cricket and football. Cricket is way more popular. Here are some figures the total populations of 32 nations taking part in football are 1541 million. The population of 3 crazy cricket fan countries India, Bangladesh and Pakistan is 1572 million. This number will be higher if you count the countries I left out. This clear shows cricket is more popular among people.
9. Football doesn’t even mean the same sport in some countries like America. In America football means rugby. They call soccer football, whereas cricket means the same thing in every country.
10. In cricket your physique doesn’t affect your performance but in football players get genetically modified to perform better like Messi who got genetically modified to grow taller when he joined barca. If Messi didn’t do it he wouldn’t be as great of a player, he is now. In cricket short players like Sachin Tendulkar left the game as legends without being genetically modified. This shows that cricket not about your physique but instead about your dedication to the game.
11. Cricketers aren’t actors like footballers. Footballers fake injuries or start to lay on the ground and jump around like fish out of water. They do it to get the referees attention in order to get a free kick or get the opponents a red or a yellow card. Some fake minor leg injuries to make it look like a serious injuries and succeed in getting a free kick and then a minute later the same player starts sprinting up and down the pitch. In some cases, they even fight or even bite each other. But cricketers do none of that. They act like gentlemen and play the game fairly. Thus making cricket more civilized than football.
12. Football causes people to hate other people that support a certain team. Sometimes fights and deaths have occurred due to football. One incident happened in 1985 it was the Heysel Stadium disaster which happened in Belgium. Fans of Liverpool and Juventus started a riot before the game even started which caused 39 deaths, 600 injuries and a long term penalty for the English Premier League. In cricket no such accidents have been recorded. This again shows cricket is more civilized than football.
13. If we look at the number of players that died during or got injured and got taken to the hospital in a cricket or football match. More than 120 players died if you count the table that Wikipedia made. Where as in cricket 11 players died if you count the table that Wikipedia made.
14. The first official football match that was played was on 1849 and the first official cricket matches started in the late 16th century according to Wikipedia. So as we can see that even though cricket has been around for longer football, cricket has consumed way less life’s of its players than football.