If there's one thing cricket fans - and those of all sports really - across the world have in common, it's the inevitable wait to see your favourite team play. And the wait usually involves long queues - for tickets, for entry to stadiums, even for refreshments once you've made it past the first set of lines. The queues have given rise to their own enterprising side hustles - you can buy everything from newspapers and replica T-shirts to vuvuzelas to annoy your neighbours with while you wait. And it's hardly a modern phenomenon - in the picture above, a vendor sells cricket balls before a Test at Lord's in 1921.
While the wait is often long and arduous, it teaches fans patience - and poker, rummy and bridge possibly. In the photo below, a motley group passes the time with a card game while waiting to enter The Oval for a game in 1953.
Queuing also provides a great opportunity to get in some R&R and catch up on your reading.
If you're lucky enough to be an MCC member, you'll be offered refreshments while in queue, because food things come to those who wait.
The plebeians, though, are left to organise their own sustenance. In the photo below, school children settle in for a long night with blankets and ice-cream as they wait to get in for a match the next morning at The Oval.
When it comes to cricket, gender is no bar. Except, of course, if you're a man trying to squeeze into the women's line.
No bar, in fact, is the mission of the preachers below, who are using Don Bradman as the ideal role model and the queue as the perfect captive audience for their message of abstinence.
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All pretence at a line goes for a toss when it's time for the toss. Below, a crowd of spectators in Bengaluru rush the Chinnaswamy gates before a World Cup match.
But in India the long arm of the law comes with a lathi attachment - a bamboo stick that's de rigueur for crowd control - and the police are liberal with its application if you don't fall in line. The result? Dress code: shoes optional.
The lines aren't for fans alone. In the picture below, aspiring bowlers wait their turn at bowling trials organised by the BCCI in Meerut.
Long before IPL fan parks and mall screenings were buzzwords, enterprising cinema owners were bringing the big-match experience to local theatres. In the picture below, a line of people wait to enter a movie theatre in Peshawar screening the 2003 World Cup.
But sometimes you've got to skip the line, kick back and grab a drink.
