The United States of America I suspect will have ground to almost a halt for these couple of hours as the 41st Superbowl takes place. In terms of actual money spent on advertising and number of television sets tuned in, then this rates only behind the Football World Cup Final for a worldwide audience.
To be totally fair, you have to hand it to America when it comes to putting on a massive show. The Superbowl does attract major superstars to appear at half-time and the hype that surrounds it must be ludicrous.
Yet for all of this, the main criticism of the game in Australia is the two points that the game although only an hour long, takes four hours to complete and that there are too many rules. This I hope helps to disperse that.
When it comes to games that take a long time, we in the colonies have a game that days not 4 hours by 6 hours multiplied by 5 days. A cricket Test Match if played to completion can take up to 37.5 hours in total if the over rate is slow. That's a shade over NINE TIMES as long.
The other main problem that people in Australia seem to have with the NFL is the myriad of rules. If you look at the official rulebook, then you only find a mere 34 laws that actually govern the game of American Football. Again cricket exceeds this with 46 Laws.
In fact the Laws of cricket are so seemingly arbitrary that it actually requires a meeting of a Privy Council of the UK House of Lords to get them changed. From a constitutional standpoint, it's the reason why appeals are still allowed through the state parliament of Western Australia. I very much doubt that you'd get a select committee of the US Congress just to sit on the adjudication of rules for American Football.
Of course there is one major difference which cricket does have in its favour. If you happened to see someone at a cricket match taking a cup tea, you might think that they were jolly good folk but at an NFL game, they'd just look a bit naff.
Addenda: Indianapolis beat Chicago 29-17 to win Super Bowl XLI in rain that made parts of England look positively like the Sahara - it was filthy.
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