• Cricket is the national summer sport in Australia.cricket image by PeteG from Fotolia.com
  
  Cricket is the national summer sport in Australia, and is played and watched by millions of Australians. The sport is organized and played at local, state and national levels, and in the city of Dandenong, located in the state of Victoria, organized cricket is governed by the Dandenong District Cricket Association, or DDCA. Because cricket is played with wooden bats and a hard ball, it can be a physically dangerous sport, and the DDCA has rules governing the game played by juniors, meaning players of 17 and under, designed to protect them from harm.
  
  

Team Managers and Senior Persons

• All cricket clubs governed by the DDCA, which organize junior teams in any of the junior age grades, must appoint a manager for each junior team. A club may field junior teams in four age groups: under 11, under 13, under 15 and under 17. Each junior team manager must be a senior person, meaning someone over the age of 17, and the name, address and telephone number of each manager has to be submitted to the DDCA Junior Secretary by October 31 every season.
  
  Whenever junior matches are played, there must be at least two senior persons in attendance representing each team, and these senior persons are responsible for keeping score and acting as umpires.
  
  Junior team managers have an extra responsibility for ensuring that the pitch and the grounds are correctly prepared for play, and must also ensure that stumps are set up on the pitch no later than 15 minutes before play is scheduled to start.
  
  

Strikers End Umpire

• During play, the umpire at the striker's end of the pitch is responsible for deciding on the validity for appeals from the bowling side, claiming that the batsman should be declared "out," as a result of a bowled ball hitting the wicket, the batsman being stumped and a batsman being run out. A batsman is stumped when he has stepped off the mark known as the crease, and the wicket keeper catches the bowled ball and hits the bails off the top of the stumps with it, before the batsman can step back to the crease. A batsman is run out, if the fielding side hits the stumps with the ball before the batsman running between the wickets reaches the crease. The umpire at the striker's end is also responsible for signaling a "no ball," which occurs when a bowling infringement occurs, such as the ball being thrown rather than bowled, or when a wicket-keeper is not fully behind the batsman's stumps before the batsman hits the ball, or passes behind the stumps.
  
  

Borrowed Players

• If a team turns up for a match and does not have a full complement of 11 players available, the team may borrow any excess players that the opposing team may have brought to the match, if the opposing team manager approves. If the opposing team does not have enough excess players, then players may be borrowed from another team, affiliated to the DDCA, but both managers must agree to this. A team cannot field more than four borrowed players.