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Google doodle celebrates cricket tournament with crickets

Doodle doubles as game that helps you catch cricket fever.

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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chricket-doodle

Click to play cricket with crickets.

Google

As the summer days warm up, it's time to grab the ol' bat and ball and head for the cricket field.

Yup, that distant cousin of baseball is in full swing too, as evidenced by the matches currently being played as part of the 2017 ICC Champions Trophy, an international tournament second in importance only to the Cricket World Cup.

To celebrate the tournament, Google has produced a doodle that doubles as a cricket game, with a twist. Instead of people playing on the field, the batsman is a cricket and the fielders are snails -- which may be a reflection of the game's speed of play.

It's also a reference to the network speeds on which Google's game can be played.

"We know that cricket is loved worldwide, so we wanted to make sure our Doodle works for everyone, including those on slower mobile networks," Google said in an introduction to the doodle. "We kept the file size fly-sized, and the result is our smallest interactive Doodle ever -- even snail networks can load it in seconds."

The human-size tournament, which pits eight teams against each other in a limited game format, is now underway in England and Wales.

If you aren't familiar with cricket, now's a good time to take a swing at it, with Google's help.

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