``Click!'' the ball smacks into the three sticks behind the batter (the wicket) and sends the small pegs balanced on top tumbling. He's out of there.

``Well played! Lovely ball,'' the spectators call out amid a smattering of polite applause.

Very proper; very British until you look up to the stucco boxes of a San Francisco suburb abutting this field of dreams.

The venerable sport of cricket is getting a new workout in the San Francisco Bay area boosted by an influx of high-tech workers from cricket-loving countries eager to proselytize their sport.

``It's really picked up,'' says Santosh David Poonen, secretary of the Northern California Cricket Association, which includes about three dozen teams...

...popularity soared in the past two decades as the Silicon Valley boomed, bringing in workers from such cricket strongholds as India, Pakistan and Australia.

Now, the children of those workers are growing up, giving rise to a youth movement complete with ``cricket moms'' driving minivans of white-clad children to Saturday games.