Portrait of the Artist: And all over the playgrounds

I was first introduced to James Joyce by a good friend. She had been absolutely enthralled by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, so whether out of peer pressure or out of prideful competitiveness, I decided I had to read the book for myself. I, too, was enthralled.

Let me ask you this:

As a writer, how would you describe a cricket game?

Cricket and literature have had a close relationship for years. Writers like A.A. Milne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and even Joyce's one-time secretary, Samuel Beckett, were all notorious players of the sport. Personally, however, I doubt that I could do justice to cricket. My own attempt to describe a cricket game with any amount of intelligence would be pretty laughable. I'm too much of a baseball fan. Contrarily, although Joyce was never known for physical prowess on the field, his description, in my opinion, is revolutionary. I think all writers can learn something from the passage below:

"And all over the playgrounds they were playing rounders and bowling twisters and lobs. And from here and from there came the sounds of the cricket bats through the soft grey air. They said: pick, pack, pock, puck: little drops of water in a fountain slowly falling in the brimming bowl."

What literary techniques does Joyce use to bring the game to life?