Exaggerating the positives
New Zealand Cricket has a very nice website, with loads of stats, great photos, live scoreboards, heaps of info and of course current news about the Black Caps.
One thing that has always amused me is how they push out press releases as news items with headlines and everything. These get to me through my RSS feed with the very nonspecific byline “from News”, so at first glance they look like they’re a newspaper article or a TV news segment.
“Full and exciting calendar for cricket lovers” was a recent “news” headline from NZC headquarters. And it certainly was news to me, coming as it did after I had waited out a month and a half of no international cricket and was struggling to raise any interest in the Bangladesh series.
I was further surprised to read in the article that:
The vagaries of international cricket scheduling will be highlighted over the coming two weeks as New Zealand, Australia, Bangladesh, Australia and the West Indies compete in all three formats of the game in six different locations at the business end of the cricket season.
In order to manufacture interest in what is left of the season, we’re being enticed with being able to watch a team, the West Indies, who we aren’t even playing against. This is New Zealand cricket news right? And what is the trick of listing one of our opponents, Australia, twice?
