MUMBAI, INDIA -- It’s a mid-March afternoon, and on sun-drenched playing fields and vacant lots all over the city, the crack of the bat can be heard along with the exuberant cries and good-natured taunts of the players. These are the unmistakable sounds of grown men playing a game in fierce but friendly competition with one another.

Although this may sound like a description of just about any city in mid-March Florida, from Ft. Lauderdale to Port St. Lucie, it is not. This is not Major League Baseball’s spring training. The place is Mumbai, India, and the game is not baseball, but cricket, India’s unofficial national pastime.

At Cross Maidan cricket grounds in Mumbai, within view, if not a cricket ball’s toss, of Wankhede Stadium, India’s beloved sport is being played at the amateur level by hundreds of men and boys of all ages. At the stadium, England is visiting India today. It is Day Two of the third five-day test match between the two nations. The first match resulted in a draw. The second was a resounding, 9-wicket victory for India. The current match, being played several hundred meters away, is to be the decider of the series.

Although the rules are very different, the essential concept of cricket is similar to that of baseball. Teams bat in successive innings and attempt to score runs, while the opposing team fields and attempts to get the batting team out. After each team has batted an equal number of innings, the team with the most runs wins. One major difference, however, is that a batsman continues to bat and score runs until he is out. This usually results in hundreds of runs being scored in a cricket match, unlike in a baseball game.

The previous day England scored a seemingly insurmountable 400 runs in their first innings against the Indian national team. Mumbai’s own Sachin Tendulkar, one of the best batsmen in the world according to many, was booed on his home turf for producing just one run after 21 balls and 34 minutes of batting. Eight days prior, during the second test-match, Anil Kumble the famed Indian “spinner” took his 500th career wicket in Mohali, becoming only the fifth player in history to accomplish the feat.

Ultimately, after the five-day test match is complete, England will have virtually thrashed India by a margin of 212 runs. However, on this particular day, hopes are still high. It is a perfect day for cricket in Mumbai.

Javinder Singh, a Sikh, dressed in a traditional, white cricket uniform and a black turban steps away from his own match to offer some instruction to a 12-year-old Muslim “spinner,” a bowler who puts spin on the ball while delivering it to the batsman. He has had his eye on the lad “for quite some time,” he says. The boy is playing cricket with a tennis ball and too few players to fill the pitch at the far end of the Cross Maidan grounds, opposite from where Singh’s amateur Mumbai Cricket Association league match is taking place.

“I told him he has to keep his arm perfectly straight if he ever wants to bowl for India,” Singh, a 34-year-old computer technician from Mumbai and “serious amateur” cricketer says.

Singh takes the ball from the would-be future bowler, and shows him how to do it correctly, taking a running start and delivering the ball to the young, baffled batsman who does nothing but watch in mild amusement.

“Now do it again, and keep it straight,” he says to the bowler, “that’s the most important part. It doesn’t matter how much spin you put on it if you don’t keep your arm straight.”

“I don’t care if he’s Sikh or Muslim or Hindu,” Singh later says, “on the pitch, there is no talk of religion.”

“Cricket is the one religion that unites the country,” says veteran Indian sports journalist, Gulu Ezekiel, echoing an oft-repeated sentiment that one is likely to hear when asking just about any Indian about the relationship between cricket and religion. “Cricket simply is a religion in India.”

And although it may seem a hyperbolic statement, in a country with India’s history of inter-religious struggles and tensions, to say that religion pervades practically all aspects of life and society, including sport, is an indisputable fact.

Ezekiel, who says he has a specific interest in the intersection of cricket and religion, says that cricket is the one area of Indian society that is “religious blind.”

“The captain of the Indian National team is the second most important job in India after the Prime Minister,” he says, before pointing out that current Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is Sikh and noting that past Indian captains have included four Muslims, one Sikh, two Christians and two Zoroastrians. The current captain, Rahul Dravid, is a Hindu.

Charles Maideen, 39, a junior college lecturer and Muslim originally from Chennai, began playing cricket at the age of eight, hoping, as many young Muslims do, he says, to one day “make it big as a professional cricketer.” Maideen concurs with Ezekiel’s take on cricket as a religion but has his own perspective to offer.

“For people who don’t really follow any particular religion in India, cricket becomes that religion for them,” he says, adding, “Tendulkar is like a god to people. The whole country kind of worships him.”

However, when asked about his own experiences on the cricket pitch, Maideen, who says he played with Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians for his district and school teams throughout his teens and early adult years, says religion was never an issue.

“We never really mixed religion with cricket,” he says “nobody really cared about that when we were playing.”

Ezekiel, 46, who covers and writes about cricket for numerous online and print publications including www.khel.com, Sportstar Weekly, BBC Online and also for an Australian radio station, is a “non-practicing Jew,” he says. Religious or not, he keeps a virtual shrine in his modest Delhi home to his cricketing heroes, past and present.

Ezekiel has an extensive collection of sports books, which he organizes on his bookshelves by sport, the largest section being books on cricket, cricket memorabilia and artwork. He laughingly refers to his collection as his “museum.”

Lining the crest of the walls of Ezekiel’s museum or shrine are hand-painted portraits of many of his favorite players. Ezekiel, who is a member of the Autograph Collectors Club of India and is in touch with “artists around the world,” commissions portraits rendered from photographs and has the players, who hail from nearly all cricket-playing countries, many of whom he knows through his work, sign them. They are then framed and become a part of his collection. His prized possession is the signed bail, a small wooden piece that connects the stumps, that he personally received from Kumble from a 1999 match against Pakistan in which the star bowler took all 10 wickets, a feat that has only been accomplished twice, according to Ezekiel, in cricket history.

“Give me anything from that match,” Ezekiel recalls telling Kumble of the historic match when the bowler showed up for a television interview later the same day. “Give me your socks,” Ezekiel pleaded.

Another veteran sports journalist who covers cricket extensively, Clayton Murzelo, since 2001 the Mumbai-based Sports Editor of India’s largest circulated tabloid, Mid Day, and self-professed “cricket-mad fan,” says of religious harmony among the members of the current Indian national team, “it's a great and happy unit. The only time teamwork is questioned is when the team is not faring well. It is like any other team sport.”

Murzelo goes on to report of the team that “of the current squad of 15, there are three Muslims, one Sikh and the rest are Hindus.”

According to Clayton, a Christian, however, to say that equating cricket with religion is going a bit too far.

“I was a cricket mad fan, but I did not treat it as a religion,” he says, “It's just a good line, that's all. This is my view, and it could well be contested. But I’ve been a mad fan, so I know. Going to church did not equate to cricket.”

It’s a hot, sunny afternoon in Mumbai, and the English national team is in town. The result of the match will prove to be a great disappointment to Indians everywhere, but particularly to the “cricket mad” residents of Mumbai, in which “the most passionate interest in cricket in India” exists, according to Ezekiel. On this day, Indians of all faiths are not in church, and they’re not at the mosque, or the temple, or the synagogue. They’re at Cross Maidan or just about any vacant lot or open field in the city, playing cricket. If they’re lucky enough to have procured themselves a ticket to the big event, they may be worshiping at Wankhede Stadium.