You can play many popular PC games designed to run on Windows using Linux software called cedga :
http://www.cedega.com/explore/
Cedega costs around £25 (25 EUR or $25) For a six month subscription and around £45 (45 EUR or $45) For a twelve month subscription at the time of posting.

You can try cedega before paying for a subscription by downloading the demo they have available on their website.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City from Rockstar games both work using cedega, as an example (According to the cedega games database.)

You can find out if a game you want to play has been tested and works with cedega by searching the cedega games database online :
http://www.cedega.com/gamesdb/
If you search for the game by title using the cedega games database, you should find it easier than searching by developer.

EA Cricket 2007 or Cricket 2007 is unlisted in the gamesdb, so you would need to try it for yourself by downloading the cedega demo to see if it works.

If you would prefer the open source route (read free) then get wine. I use it for Guildwars, steam, and counter strike source on a laptop. I'm planning to move to Ubuntu on my home gaming system and wine is the route I'm going to use. There are plenty of tutorials online that can walk you through the steps of setting up wine to auto update with the rest of your system when you use update manager.

All it takes is a little time, and a willingness to search for the information you need to complete the process.

See http://www.winehq.org/ for more information.

I advise using Wine. For some games, however, you will need a special workaround, or a copy of a Windows DLL from C:/Windows/System32.

To find out whether the games you want require this, go to appdb.winehq.org, then click "Browse Apps" or "Browse by Developer".

Just an FYI Cedega has now changed to Gametree Linux. The current list of supported games can be found at: http://gametreelinux.com/games-list

The other company I would checkout would be CodeWeavers. They have a product called CrossoverGames Impersonator which can be found here: http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxgames/