There is a new Wellington-based cricket blog :
Livin’ on the Outside Edge: A social commentary on cricket, politics, and life in the Windy City…but mainly cricket
Written by some guy David Abricossow, who – Wellington being what it is – I probably know in some capacity.
It looks really good so far and I am looking forward to following it through the summer.
Welcome to the latest New Zealand cricket blogger: MP for Wellington Central, Grant Robinson.
With Pakistan’s thumping of Sri Lanka in the only 20-20, the Pakistani tour of Sri Lanka is now complete. So hopefully the Sri Lankan attentions will now turn to the New Zealanders. Check out these outlets.
There are three main English dailies in Sri Lanka. They are all wafer thin in print and pretty damn ugly online.
I seem to recall a preference for The Island myself when I was in Sri Lanka, but I don’t remember why.
The only decent cricket blog I know of out of Sri Lanka is Fly Slip, who have now noticed that New Zealand is touring and are already offering up a poll on the best excuses for NZ losing the test series.
I’ve come across a fairly weighty site about Sri Lankan cricket, Island Cricket. I don’t really know what it is; I suspect it might be one of the social networking sites, for SL cricket fans.
There are also a couple of forums for SL cricket fans, SLCricket and the Dilmah Cricket Network Forum – my own personal favourite brand for gumboot tea.
Having trouble getting to Cricinfo through your bookmarks? I did. It seems they’ve revamped themselves (and dropped some of their old homepage links). Or rather, ESPN have revamped them.
Cricinfo was most certainly due for an upgrade. The old site was getting rather musty and was really looking like it had grown far beyond what the design and architecture could handle. It could take take quite a bit of digging to find stuff. And there was a confusing disparity between the design of the main site and the ‘magazine’ section.
My first impressions are that they have done really well in condensing all the links into the main menu and drop-down submenus. The Scores/Results/Fixtures widget on the homepage will also be very useful. It’s going to take me a while to get used to the new layout, but I suspect that the site will be significantly easier to use.
Design-wise, the new site makes some use of some gradients, round-cornered boxes and reflected text. It looks swisher than the old site, but is dated before it even went live. The dominant feature is a big black box with the latest news headlines. It must be something to do with the fact that the rest of the site is decked out in utterly characterless grey and light blue, but I don’t think there has ever been an uglier black box on the internet.
So good re-engineering, but not so wonderful in the design. Still, the content is far more important, so I have to say that after exploring it for all of 10 minutes I’m impressed by the new site so far.
I discovered that if I subscribed to the feed for the Cricket Mystery site, I could check out the articles while avoiding the rather unpleasant design. All went well for a short while before suddenly the ‘new items’ in my feed reader was filled with old Cricket Mystery articles. That’s usually a sign that something is up, so I popped over for a visit and – lo and behold! – they have a new design.
They have blanded up by replacing their old lush green turf, if any of you remember the old design, with lime green fake grass over a WordPress blog.
Visit them at Cricket Mystery and read about Perky’s dilemma, whether to encourage his 5-year-old son to take up cricket over rugby.
(No sign of Mystery Morrison any more. I’m sure he was a fixture once upon a time.)
Sticking with my minor theme of blog comments, here are a couple of gems from Iain O’Brien’s Cricinfo blog:
Posted by: UberMetroMallu at February 24, 2009 1:42 PM
Ian, you don’t have a chance in hell against us Indians; I’ll tell you why. Man, you’re a Blogger. I mean, tomorrow, when you’re tearing in to bowl your first ball, you’ll be thinking that you look like a lithe, power-packed, all muscle and guts, picture-of-intimidation, Fast Bowler, who creates doubts in the minds of the Batsmen. You’ll probably think that noise you just heard is the Batsman’s bottoms squeaking out of fear. But then, reality will prove to be different, as it often does. Sehwag will take one look at you and recognize you as that pasty Blogger who pretend to be a Cricketer; he’ll maul you, grab your entrails and squeeze the smelly stuff out of them. It’s not like he’s going to think, “Oh! I better not step out against this guy, or he’s going to Blog about me, gulp!” You’re finished man; the Indians are going to hit you all around the park. It’s a shame your performance won’t be anything to write home about, but, you’ll still have plenty to write about. Dig irony, Ian?
…
Posted by: Iain O’Brien at February 24, 2009 11:15 PM
Thanks for all the comments, especially the one where my Sehwag will ‘grab and squeeze my entrails’; mate, you need some help!!
Looking forward to an great series…
Iain
While writing a little piece for the Herald, Mark Richardson found a phrase he really liked: “playing your boss at golf”. His point in this article was that while we can prepare wickets here in New Zealand that would gift us easy victories, if we want to be invited to play with India again, we have to prepare pitches that will give us close fought victories so that the Indians think they had a chance against us – just like if you were playing your boss at golf. (Though really, he just had a phrase he wanted to use and needed some context for it.)
He liked his little phrase so much that he used it again in an article for Cricinfo. But this time he overcooked his metaphor. In case we weren’t going to get it, he spells out that “New Zealanders and New Zealand cricket understand who pays the wages nowadays”. What seemed a bit cheeky in the Herald, became petulant and accusatory on Cricinfo.
And it ignited a firestorm in the comments, with rising anger towards Richardson, then tempered with some crowing about the strength of India’s new-ball attack and new-found likeness for pacey conditions, followed by some defences of Mark before degenerating into sniping amongst the commentors, with the thread culminating in what appears to be an Indian delighting in the Indian loss in the first 20-20 as it proves Richardson wrong.
Cheap Opening Shot Mr Richardson!
Oh this is a new low. The pre-emptive-whine strike – “We lost because India will not come back if we beat them”.
Wow! Shocking article. If I understand it correctly, Mr. Richardson is saying the following: NZ can beat any side in the world if it so chooses but since it is a poor cricketing nation, it has to kowtow to the countries that have money.
It is good to read your comments Mark, but pray tell me what is your achievement in cricket field. Have you done anything in any of the sub continent countries. How many centuries have you scored?
I can tell you what is brown, dry and steaming: Mark’s article.
I personally as an ardent Indian fan am PRAYING that NZC dish out greener tracks than in 2003. Regardless of the batting strength India are bringing with them, the bowling attack in India is unimaginably better than the last one which arrived in NZ.
Hilarious. Loving this. the so called slightest slight regarding indian cricket and all the trolls come out. Lets ignore the fact that most of what Richardson said was true.
The Indian reaction to this article is just bizarre – I am Australian, and I think Mark Richardson is spot-on. He points out that India are much stronger than NZ in most conditions (obvious), and that NZ’s best chance would lie in greentops a la 2002-03 (also true). Yes, India have Zaheer and Ishant this time, but can they use the conditions as well as the NZ guys who have grown up in them? Maybe, maybe not – but we won’t find out this time! NZ will prepare wickets India considers “fair”, no matter what disadvantage to NZ, because NZ Cricket knows it can’t afford another 6-7 year gap before India returns again. (They know that India would have returned much sooner than this had they experienced good batting wickets last time, rather than embarrassment!) Nowhere does he suggest match-fixing or anything like it. His only criticism of India is that its famed top six was outshone by their NZ counterparts on green pitches last time, which is a fair and accurate assessment.
Your so called boss actually lost in first T20 and proved the backbne of your theory completely wrong. Uhh.. I will pray for you Mark, so Boss can win the second T20 and you can save your face..hehehehehe
I’ve been searching for a West Indian voice on the current series, but there seems to be a dearth of West Indies’ blogs.
The only one I have found is West Indies Cricket Blog, which has a promising title, but unfortunately hasn’t been updated since November, and then just to talk about boots.
If there are any West Indians reading, please tell me where I can read a real West Indian perspective.
Iain O’Brien’s blog has been a crash hit, generating praise and controversy all to quickly in its brief life. It is not surprising perhaps that it has been syndicated by Cricinfo.
Just a day after urging us all to join O’Brien’s Facebook fanclub, JRod is disappointed that he has been absorbed by the evil Cricinfo empire.
One good thing about the Cricinfo version is that it includes photos, including this one of Iain in his evil empire uniform:
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