Indoor cricket is a variant of and shares many basic concepts with cricket

Cricket

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...

. The game is most often played between two teams each consisting of eight players, in matches featuring two innings of sixteen 7-ball overs each. Rather than simply being played indoors, the match is played on specifically designed courts covered in an artificial surface and enclosed by tight string netting.

Several versions of the game have been in existence since the late 1960s, whilst the game in its present form began to take shape in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Conventional cricket has been played indoors at the Docklands Stadium in Melbourne

Melbourne

Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...

, Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

, but there are no other enclosed stadiums with a playing surface the size of a full-sized cricket field in any major cricket playing country.