Guest blogger and good friend of the Middle Stump, James Castle has a look at how cricket coverage used to be in the old days of when the internet first started and the rise of online media covering the game. I would say things have taken a turn for the better, but here James looks through retro rose tinted specs at what it was like trying to find out how quickly Glenn McGrath would go through the English batting order.
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No need for the radio Glenn, get on the World Wide Web! |
To a man of my somewhat advanced age a
computer was something that you wired up to a TV and a cassette recorder in
order to wait ten minutes to play a game involving pressing a few keys on a
keyboard to enable a small pixelated figure evade some monsters, but that all
changed when I got a job in a university library in late 1995 and I was
introduced to a white plastic behemoth known as a personal computer (which I
had to share with four other people) and something referred to as electronic
mail. I was most excited to find out
that not only did I have my own e-mail address, it wasn’t just an internal one
but one that would allow me to communicate with anyone in the world who had
one. My excitement was deflated mere seconds
later when I realized that I didn’t have any friends or acquaintances in the
world that had an email address, so I had no-one I could contact anyway.
About a month into my employment I was also
introduced to something else that in those days was referred to as the World
Wide Web, the internet then referring to every other form of electronic
information sharing done outside of Internet Explorer and Netscape.
This was a bit like being given the keys to a
new house and then discovering that your garden is the same size as Siberia,
and just as bloody difficult to find things in.
In those halcyon days there was probably only, ooh, tens of millions of
websites up and running but even then there were fan sites for obscure football
clubs, sites where you could find people who really did think that Shakespeare
was Norman Collier and sites that promised to show you things that could
potentially get you sacked from your job, and which we were told politely not
to try and gain access to, although, one of our jobs was to patrol the
library computers for students using the web for immoral purposes. I can tell
you we certainly saw a few things that were previously believed to be
anatomically impossible!
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Now with their multi screen app Cricinfo has certainly moved forward |
One of the downsides of the job was that we
had to work evenings and weekends in order to man the help desks. This was particularly irksome whenever there
was a big sporting event on that we wanted to watch. There was almost nothing in the way of live
streaming in those days so I still had to program our video to record crucial
Euro 96 football games (although, pre-smart phones, it was a lot fucking easier
to avoid finding out the results) but when it came to the Ashes in 1997 this
posed a real problem as my video did not have long play and I had not enough
free time to watch an entire day of cricket when I got home anyway.
It was then that I found, courtesy of our
ancient help desk PC that was so battered and care-worn that it presumably was
custom-built for the Soviet space race, that I discovered a gem of a site
called Cricinfo which I found by using a wonderfully named (now sadly closed)
search engine called Hotbot. Now this
was a real find.
I don’t personally know
the history of the site but it was then in its pre-ESPN days and looked as
chunkily home-made as a grandmother’s tomato chutney but what it did provide
you with was (almost) live ball-by-ball commentary that we had failed to get
via TMS, our basement location meaning that a long wave signal was only
possible if you hung a radio out of the window.
You had to remember to manually load the page though and some of the ball
by ball descriptions were, well, pretty non descript but this, in my opinion,
was what the internet was bloody built for.
That, and pictures of Anna Kournikova.
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What the net was made for! |
I was surprised to find that England only
lost the series 3-2 as in my memory it was by a wider margin but that could
have been tainted by me being given a verbal dressing-down by my boss for
swearing at the PC monitor in front of the students during our shambolic first
innings of 77 at Lord’s, McGrath ripping through the innings like a Phal
through a digestive tract, after ten pints of scrumpy.
I also remember spending a quiet Saturday
afternoon trying to explain the LBW rule to a bunch of foreign students and
failing – akin to the sketch on ‘The Fast Show’ where the guy at the dinner
party tries to explain the offside rule.
The Cricinfo site was a bloody revelation to
say the least. It brought to mind an
eager work placement student cradling an enormous laptop on his knees as he
tapped away from an obscure vantage point tucked away at the top of a
stand. As well as the ability to get a
visual version of the kind of audio description normally found on TMS (though
without the Battenberg) it also incorporated a pure gem which was audio files
of each player saying his own name.
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Meeearrrk Wooouagh....baaaaad heeeeaairrrcut! |
For
the 1997 Ashes squad this included Ian Healy sounding like he was Woody Woodpecker speaking through a mouthful of helium after chugging down half a
pound of speed, and Steve Waugh talking so quietly that even with the sound up
full blast it sounded like a muffled orgasm heard three hotel rooms away.
His brother Mark, though, proved a firm
favourite with his elongated “Meeearrrkk Woooooouauuuuuugh!” not only being a
purely wonderful example of the Aussie accent in full rip but also, if you managed
to pause the file just before he finished saying his first name, sounded
exactly like the kind of throaty groan made by Kenneth Connor whenever he got
an eyeful of Barbra Windsor’s front googlies.
It also had possibly one of the finest misspellings I have ever come
across when, describing a boundary hit by Graham Thorpe, I was informed that it
had raced away to the boundary, “fielders chasing in van”.
Today Cricinfo, like most other specialist
sports sites, is a superb resource with more statistics stuffed in than
grandchildren in an Austrian cellar and one where you would be happy to spend a
good few hours rooting around (not the cellar, obviously) but sometimes I still
harken back to those older times where it really did provide cricket fans with
a really unique way to be engaged with the action.
I do concord - I line with the coaches at my somebody cricket club, and also the laborious chunk is often a dispute for the kids. we incline to use soft agglomeration games to need them wont to effort and getting
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the rise of online cricket info, great post
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Cricinfo
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