Beyond the boundary

BLOG.COM

In the days when the Internet was young, I would read with great interest the articles on cricket written by Harsha Bhogle and Prem Panicker for ESPN-Star.com and Rediff.com, respectively.

The bulk of cricket writing in India (then as now) was dull, cliché-ridden and presented in a match-report format that allowed little room for stylish, original writing. Bhogle and Panicker (and a few others like Nirmal Shekhar, Sharda Ugra and the talented young lot at Wisden Asia/Cricinfo) were among the exceptions: they combined a solid understanding of the game and its dynamics with a distinctive writing style. Back then, though, there was still a divide between these established writers and the rest of us cricket-enthusiasts. Reading one of their pieces online felt no different from reading it in a newspaper or magazine - there was little opportunity to interact and exchange views with them. (For an interactive cricket "discussion" one had to go to one of the many carelessly maintained message boards on numerous sites - like the one on NDTV.com, which degenerated into a forum for the exchange of colourful abuse between Indians and Pakistanis, Sourav-lovers and Sourav-haters, and so on.)

One measure of how far the Net has come since those years is how much more accessible these high-quality writers are today to the average cricket fan. A couple of years ago Prem Panicker (now based in the US) began indepth online commentary on Rediff.com that was more personalised and detailed than the ball-by-ball live commentary on Cricinfo. Then a few months ago, he took the next logical step: he started a blog.

Sight Screen (http://prempanix.blogspot.com), originally named Fourth Umpire, was launched in May this year and predictably took almost no time to develop a huge readership. A Sitemeter count of 480,000 visitors in just seven months tells the story.

Sight Screen is now a group blog but it has maintained its quality. You won't find ball-by-ball (or even over-by-over) commentary here during live matches; instead, Panicker and his team break a match up into 10-over blocks and put up a single post commenting on various aspects of the action that occurred in this period.

Apart from this, there are daily updates on cricket news from around the world, along with opinion pieces (which, naturally, draw the most reader comments).

Cricinfo (http://www.cricinfo.com) has its own blogs too: The Surfer (http://blogs.cricinfo.com/surfer/) and Wicket to Wicket (http://blogs.cricinfo.com/wicket_to_wicket/), the latter featuring articles and analyses by senior journalists (including Bhogle).

A third blog will be up soon, for non-professional cricket writers. And of course, the Indian blogosphere is full of personal cricket blogs run by individuals too.

There's the old joke about how you can stop a man on the street, ask him the latest score and get an unsolicited match analysis in return. Cricket discussions are in the best traditions of democracy in this country (even when the opinions expressed are hidebound ones) and that tradition is being carried forward by the blogosphere.

As in the real world, all other conversations cease when a big match is on.

(Jai Arjun Singh, aka Jabberwock, blogs at http://jaiarjun. blogspot. com)