Gimme a break

Cricket haters (here's looking at you, America) often complain that a huge amount of time in the game is spent standing around doing nothing. But those of us who get cricket know that standing around doing nothing can be mentally exhausting, and killing on the feet. The only times you can chill (other than during lunch, tea, drinks and when your team is batting) are between or after games.

Cue Graeme Pollock and Eddie Barlow basking in the radiance of a job well done - a 341-run stand, which led to a series-levelling ten-wicket win in Adelaide, 1964. Pollock was 19 at the time, playing his first Test series, and it was his second hundred in two matches. "The amazing thing about that partnership was the time it took," Pollock remembered. "We went at easily over a run per minute and took just 270 minutes for it. We made 180 runs in the last session on Saturday, the second day of the Test, and it just turned things around not only for South Africa but for my career."

From topless Test cricketers to spectators in 1932 swathed in blankets with stoves to warm them and armed with reading material for those slow periods. Or could they be luxury-loving scorers?

Sometimes you need to calm those nerves before the start of a match, like these club cricketers do before a final in Toronto in 2014.

And sometimes it can be tiring to simply watch the match with the intense focus it deserves.