Category Archives: items of interest

Amy S Did Not Actually Pass Away

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So I found it strange finding a photo of the cricket blogger Amy S on a different site with a different name, but the mystery is now solved. That was not Amy S, and the actual Amy never died. She faked her death on the blog. After seeing my post, Achettup forwarded an email from her sent earlier this year that explains what happened. I cannot post the email here as she hadn’t given permission to post (only to share) and apparently she is a minor, but her explanation (paraphrased) is as follows:

Amy contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome when she was 15 and was confined to a hospital for several months (more than a year). She started posting while she was in hospital, and being a minor, decided to use “Amy S” as her name and give people the impression that she was 20+. But the disease being what is, she had bouts of depression and during one of those, she decided to kill the blog.

The email is much longer and has many details that demonstrate that it is from the actual person. But I have no way of verifying whether the story itself is genuine, considering that the original “death post” was a very elaborately constructed lie, complete with a borrowed photo. And so the email needs to jump over a much higher hurdle of disbelief.

Ultimately, the who, what and why doesn’t really matter much. All you need to know is that the Amy S was a fiction, both alive and dead.

All Ten Test Cricket Nations Playing Bilateral Series

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Achettup on Twitter noticed this:

Here is what is going on:

  • England in India
  • Australia in South Africa
  • West Indies in Bangladesh
  • New Zealand in Zimbabwe
  • Pakistan v Sri Lanka in the United Arab Emirates

It is pretty amazing. For one thing, no cricket fan needs to complain about lack of matches because there is a rest day. For another, does October have the best weather for cricket matches both in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres? Strangely, the Northern Hemisphere teams are playing against each other, while the Southern teams have not crossed the Equator. Finally, this could only happen because Zimbabwe just rejoined the family of Test-playing nations.

Robots at Cricinfo

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Looks like there is a new technology in town:

The Big Ten Network, a joint venture of the Big Ten Conference and Fox Networks, began using the technology in the spring of 2010 for short recaps of baseball and softball games. They were posted on the network’s Web site within a minute or two of the end of each game; box scores and play-by-play data were used to generate the brief articles. (Previously, the network relied on online summaries provided by university sports offices.) As the spring sports season progressed, the computer-generated articles improved, helped by suggestions from editors on the network’s staff, says Michael Calderon, vice president for digital and interactive media at the Big Ten Network.

In the past, I suspected Cricinfo of using the same kind of technology, but my suspicion was more down to earth, meaning the commentary was the kind of mundane stuff like “FOUR. Cover drive”. However, Will Luke, a commentator at Cricinfo, said that they didn’t use anything like that and actually had to type everything.

At that time, I praised him & Cricinfo for such attention to quality, but I think now if they still actually do that, the folks at Cricinfo are truly nuts. You could have a simple addition to the scoring system to generate the necessary boilerplate. And then the commentators could add more interesting stuff like emails from fans.

Having said that, I think the quality of commentary at Cricinfo has been very depressing of late. I am not sure if the ESPN acquisition has contributed to it, but something’s not quite right. If England is playing, I tune into the Guardian over-by-over commentary which is far more worth reading. I suppose having some robots at Cricinfo may even make a positive difference.

How Many Tests Have You Played?

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I can understand when writers praise Test cricket in the highest terms. It, after all, remains the purest form of cricket. A closely fought Test match with two balanced teams with ups and downs with a classic denouement is the aspiration of every cricket spectator. But this does not mean that every other form of cricket is terrible, as some cricket fans are fond of writing.

If you look at how cricket is actually played in most parts of the world, it is totally unlike Test cricket. Nobody plays a match 5 days in a row with 90 overs per day. Many people don’t even play with a hard cricket ball, pads, stumps, a proper cricket pitch or a large enough ground. The essential elements of most cricket played in the world are:

  • A little room to throw a ball from the bowler to the batsman. Which means, you can also play cricket indoors in your bedroom (as long as your parents don’t know)!
  • A “ball”. Size and material does not matter. Heck, you could even play cricket with a table tennis ball.
  • A “bat”. You don’t need a manufactured bat. A broomstick will do just fine. Or even just use your arm and palms!
  • Stumps. Wait – you don’t need that. 3-4 shoe boxes stacked on top of each other is okay. Or sometimes you can do without that too.

What if you don’t even have that? Or it is raining outside? Well, don’t just sit there. Play dice cricket. Or some book cricket!

However there is something to be said about playing cricket according to the rules of the game. But even when you look there, the time dimension of proper cricket is still not always that of Test cricket. There is a stunning lot of limited overs cricket being played even as it lacks some of the “innovations” brought by the IPL.

Fundamentally, playing and viewing cricket is about fun. Different forms of cricket offer different flavors of enjoyment. If you don’t like a particular form of cricket, that is fine. Nobody is forcing you. Just enjoy the cricket you like and let the others enjoy what they like.

More on Hungarian Cricket

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Sledger at the Hungarian cricket blog Krikett emailed me a couple of links, one about a recent ICC delegation’s visit to Hungary to audit their cricket pitches. Also from the article:

The Hungary cricket league has been in existence since 2007, with seven teams and about 150 adult players. There’s also a national squad, where two of the players are women.

Another article at the Financial Times:

Glover (a Lancastrian) and fellow KPMG partner Mark Bownas (a Yorkshireman) have stumped up the cash to buy, prepare and equip Hungary’s first dedicated cricket ground – the Szodliget Oval.
Created from what was previously a swamp 20 minutes’ drive north of Budapest, the ground will host Hungary’s first men’s international tournament later this month when teams from such renowned cricketing nations as Bulgaria, Romania and Lithuania will battle and bowl for the 2011 Euro Twenty20 cup.

Interesting times. Hope to see a Twenty20 World Cup someday with some of these teams.

Lagaan versus Trentbridge

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This is brilliant:

The Lagaan team’s captain could actually Bat and bowl and captain very well. The players were not complacent because they were not a part of the #1 ranked team then. In fact the team had a lot of innovative practice sessions and had gotten used to the conditions very well. The team also boasted of a mystery spinner who actually bamboozled the opposition. The two aforementioned teams had one thing in common though. Both had English coaches. Fletcher coaches the current Indian team and Elizabeth coached the Lagaan team.

I have sometimes thought that the English captain (played by Paul Blackthorne) in the movie seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to Jimmy Anderson. With that utterly useless factishoid rolling in your brain, you can go and read Namya’s article in full.

Fix Ticket Scandals Through Commissions and Auctions

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Once again, Ducking Beamers steps outside the cricket ground (but this time not too far) to bring us the shenanigans of the Indian cricket authorities with respect to ticket sales. This is classic India. The involvement of the politicians. Police supporting the corrupt. Nothing doing without knowing a “VIP”.

But there is an easy solution! The basic problem here has to do with ticket prices remaining constant while their demand has gone through the roof. An associated problem is that the people in charge of ticket sales (apparently) do not seem to have any stake in selling more tickets. Fix these two issues and you get rid of the problem.

So here is what I suggest. Whoever is in charge of ticket sales gets a high commission for any tickets sold. The commission percentage increases significantly if no tickets remain unsold and it also goes high if the price of a ticket goes beyond a particular value. A sample with numbers totally pulled out from a hat:

  • 15% of the sales price for every ticket sold for a price till $200. You get 25% if the price is between $201 and $500. You get 40% if the price is above $501.
  • If more than 75% of the tickets are sold, you get an additional 5% which goes up to 10% if all the tickets are sold.

Marry that with technology to create an auctioning system for each vendor to sell the tickets. This eliminates your ticket booth except as a means of collecting tickets already paid for over the Internet, unless there are unsold tickets. Now, I suppose there will still be corruption for the rights to sell the tickets because of the possibility of huge profits. But there will be no corruption for the rights to buy tickets.

Of course, tickets could become vastly more expensive in a cricket crazy country like India. But money is more democratic than connections. Since the “free” tickets are probably being sold on the black market, this may not even increase the actual costs of tickets, just make them more transparent.

There is the risk of some 3rd party agent who tries to corner all the tickets with the intention of resale. I think this risk is mitigated by an auction system that allows people to bid and counter-bid until only a few hours before the match. Because at that point, the ability of another agent to resell enough tickets to make a sufficient profit is diminished.

The BCCI Does Not Deserve Your Trust

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No, not these guys. They are fun! I am referring to these fellows .

It is funny that when it comes to team selection, everyone has no qualms about criticizing the Board. No one worries whether they are more competent than the officials in charge of cricket governance to understand which player is capable of playing for India in what format of the game. Also, when the IPL was launched, many people talked about the greed involved and how cricket “as we know it” was destroyed forever.

Everyone has an opinion and good for them.

But when the BCCI “does not accept the reliability of the ball-tracking technology” even though other nations do, it suddenly becomes a test of patriotism. India versus the World! Suddenly, we have super geniuses sitting on our cricket board who are completely competent about technology and the philosophical debates that bloggers are fond of having about umpiring versus technology? And the ICC is a corrupt organization that is just signing off some gadget that they never even looked at?

I read bloggers argue seriously about the merits of UDRS as if that is what is driving this debate. In every aspect of public life in India, decisions are driven by political connections and money. Yet, we are supposed to believe that BCCI is adopting this tactic because of the purity of their hearts and that they want to protect the traditions of cricket. God, I mean, how gullible can people be?

It is impossible to know what the BCCI’s agenda in rejecting DRS is. It could probably be influenced by India’s poor success with DRS. It could have something to do with the device vendors needing some kind of license and refusing to pay the necessary kickbacks. Or it could be plain old conservatism and fear of the unknown. Who knows? But whatever it is and regardless of where you stand on the DRS debate, I don’t think a proper scientific understanding or philosophical stand is involved in the decision.

A Hungarian Cricket Blogger

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Via Cricinfo, I landed at a cricket blogger writing in Hungarian. Not sure what his name is since he calls himself Sledger (!) Using the automated translation in Google Chrome, I found that he was writing about the England-Sri Lanka test, Chris Gayle, Ricky Ponting and for good measure, throws in an article about cricket at the Olympics.

It is interesting in some ways how cricket is supposed to be the 2nd most popular sport by followers in the world, yet people outside the English Commonwealth nations have no clue what it is. In America, cricket refers to an insect and I have always needed to refer to cricket as “a sport similar to baseball” when talking to my American friends.

Anyway, I am happy that cricket seems to be expanding into new territories now, even if much of it is being driven by immigrants from South Asia. And hoping for more bloggers like our new friend from Hungary.