Welcome Aboard

Hi, welcome to my new cricket blog. I hope you’ll find something vaguely interesting in these pages. The following probably won’t be interesting to many, but I feel I must establish my credentials in order to justify having a blog in the first place.

I’ve been working as a journalist in Australia for the last eight years, and in that time I’ve written precisely zero articles about my sole obsession, cricket. I’m not a capital city journalist, so international cricket was never written, and rarely covered, by the newspapers I worked on. And local cricket was covered by the seasoned sports journalists who make up for a reasonable ability to write with an impressive cache of contacts built up over decades who can guarantee some quotes in every story.

I use the word ‘reasonable’ there not as a subtle dig at the ability of those journalists. It’s a style over content problem. The overly technical nature of newspaper copy writing grants very little leeway for writing with abandon. Newspaper copy, as I see it, is all about what the ‘reader must see first’ and the ‘economy of words’. So my passion of the great game of cricket would have been wasted on a page that also needed to include the weekend’s lawn bowls results (because “we get calls if they’re not all in there”).

That’s why this blog exists. I want to write about the game I’ve always loved in my own way. My intention is not to convert those that abhor cricket (in my experience, I’ve met many) or to stoke the fire that zealous cricket fans love to watch burning (in my experience, I’ve met many). They’re my words, and that’s all.

I once had a YouTube channel relating to cricket, and I blocked the potential for users to leave comments. “I don’t want to start a slanging match, or leave the door open for others to start one,” I said. It’s not as easy with a blog as it is with videos. The social media generation means viral video sensations are ignored as fast as they’re revered. Regardless of their informative and entertaining nature, blogs appear to have more staying power. I hope readers will enjoy my blog, agree or disagree with the points I’m making, and offer their own handsomely–crafted views as well.

There you have it, that’s my unwanted, yet obligatory, introductory blog. Talk again soon.