To celebrate the addition of “cricket” to my categories, I have decided to give you some cricket “game story play-by-play” from this morning’s editions of The National.

Remember, hundreds of millions of people understand this. Completely. And for those of you who don’t get it … go ahead and read. If just for the comedy of confusion.

It’s as if someone took an American baseball story and swapped in nouns and verbs randomly plucked out of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oh, and the tea. Wait for it. The tea.

Here we go. This is the lead. (Or the “intro,” to get in full-on Brit mode.)

Pakistan stumbled to a hapless 15 for three after Matt Prior’s unbeaten 102 left them needing to rewrite Test history by making 435 to win at Trent Bridge.

Well, first thing I think of is … “hook ’em with the lead. Draw ’em right in!” Admit it, you can’t quit now. Not when Trent Bridge is already in play.

Let’s go on. “Carry on,” as our British friends would put it.

Prior took guard at 72 for five, as Umar Gul (3-41) added wickets to the 65 not out he made from No 9 this morning to help the tourists avoid the follow-on in this first Test.

Are you following that? Can you feel the … tension, is it? Triumph? Horror? Comedy? And how did tourists get caught up in this? A wrong left turn at Albuquerque?

Bring on more, you say!

England were 98 for six before tea. But Prior shared stands of 49 with Graeme Swann, 56 with Stuart Broad and then an unbroken 49 with last man Steven Finn in reaching his third Test hundred from his 136th ball, having hit seven fours and two sixes.

I had to add that graf just for the “tea” part, which never fails to slay me. I’ve read 50 cricket stories in the past month, and “tea” still cracks me up. Every time. I go through this mental process. “OK, they stopped playing … and everyone went into the clubhouse … and drank tea (two lumps, please) and ate finger sandwiches … and no one thought that was queer? No one thought, “Maybe we should just keep playing till we’re, like, done with today”? Imagine the Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears breaking a couple of hours for tea. Yeah.

And Graeme. In British sports journalism, by law all stories must include at least one Graeme/Graham … or one Ian/Eoin/Ewan. Have to have one or the other. OK, we’ll let you go if you have an Alistair.

Let’s dive down a bit deeper in the story.

England then lost captain Andrew Strauss to a bizarre caught-behind from the fourth ball of Mohammad Aamer’s opening over. The left-armer got away movement and bounce from a dangerous area, and Strauss edged to second slip. Umar Akmal was unable to take the chance at the first attempt, but somehow parried the ball back over first slip for his brother Kamran to dive to his left and intercept with the gloves — leaving a disbelieving Strauss to troop off for a third-ball duck.

I mean, how bizarre is that? A caught-behind … somehow parried over the first slip for his brother to dive and intercept? You never see that. Never. “Bizarre” is what it is.

And we won’t even get into that “troop off for a third-ball duck” thing at the end.

Let’s find one last graf to wrap this up.

He decided on a belt-and-braces job, starting with cautious defence and branching out to some of his favourite cuts and off-side drives only as conditions began to ease under sunnier skies.

Always fun to inject some incomprenisible British Isles jargon in your copy (belt-and-braces job”?)  before getting back to the nitty-gritty of favorite cuts and off-side drives. And thank goodness we got the weather in there.

Here is the scary part: I edit a lot of this stuff.

And the scarier: I actually understand a fair bit of it now. (Though I have serious conceptual issues with the idea of a single game lasting three days.)

What we try to do at the paper is … leave the cricket to the people who really know it. And those guys try to leave the baseball/football (especially) to one of the Yanks.

So it all works out.

And that’s why “cricket’ is now a category on this blog. I live and breath it. Sorta.

Wait till it’s time for the Ashes. You won’t be able to get me to shut up.