Cricket
I believe it was the renaissance painter Raphael who once opined, ‘Cricket? Nobody understands cricket. You gotta know what a crumpet is to understand cricket.’ Despite this, it has a massive worldwide following, and is a point of national pride – particularly when the fate of the Ashes is at stake. Those Ashes, incidentally, represent the posthumous reputation of English cricket itself, which seems like an enormous amount of pressure to defend. If you drop the urn, does the ghost of Ivo Bligh attack you?
So, cricket. It’s like a miniature version of baseball, and it’s just adorable. Mario is no stranger to the cutesy, and would look right at home in front of the wickets. It’s a sport that would be well-suited to all kinds of wacky power-ups, particularly in the bowling and fielding aspects. Daisy would be the first to shout ‘howzat’ into the stands, no doubt.
The only drawback is that cricket matches can take an ungodly amount of time. The aptly named ‘one day’ tilts routinely clock in at eight hours, and test matches? Multiple days. Not literally on end – you don’t have the batsman eyeing off balls at 3am (not on the pitch, anyway), but it’s hard to dedicate yourself to anything that lasts that long: sports, television shows, relationships, anything! Playoff basketball can become a bit of a grind when series go the full seven games, can you imagine just one match lasting the same length? Sheer horror.
