Cricket World Cup heads into cyberspace
HANSIE CRONJE'S abandoned earpiece will bear rich testimony to the accusation that cricket tends to take a step backwards when confronted by modern technology. By and large, it is administered by die-hards who constantly battle to protect traditions established in the 19th century. Cricket's followers are different. Forget newspapers, radio and television. During this World Cup the place to be is cyberspace, the medium which is expected to dominate our lives increasingly in the 21st century. Computer-literate fans from Antarctica to Scandinavia, and even the United States, are daily calling up websites for news of the 12 participating teams. It is anticipated that by the time the tournament reaches its climax with the final at Lord's on June 20, the audience on the Internet will exceed 10m every day. "Cricket is custom-made for the Internet," says Simon King, the chief executive of Cricinfo, which was started in 1993 and claims to be the biggest single sporting website in the world. "The pace of the game is perfect because it allows for full analysis of a match during real playing time. Also, there is a lot of interest in cricket in parts of the world where the game does not get full exposure. In America, not only are there many expatriates from countries where cricket is played, but it also has the deepest penetration of the Internet among the population." The Stateside interest is further borne out by early figures for the World Cup released to The Sunday Times by the England and Wales Cricket Board's (ECB) own Internet operation. Of the 1.8m calls it received during the opening match between England and Sri Lanka at Lord's, 25% originated in the US and many more came from a clutch of European countries such as Sweden, where the game has barely a toehold. Apart from containing news and statistical information, the web services available vary enormously. Cricinfo has ball-by-ball scores and written reports along with a tracker index, which went online on Friday and allows its subscribers to follow the form of individual players. BSKyB's web service lets fans download a daily package of video highlights from each game being covered by the satellite TV station, while the ECB site includes live audio coverage provided by BBC radio's Test Match special team. The ECB also claims to be breaking new ground with reports provided by English cricket's first full-time woman writer, Kate Laven, a Sussex fan and one-time advertising executive turned journalist. After covering the Ashes tour from Australia last winter, Laven has begun to collect a worldwide following. "I might not get the recognition in English press boxes because I do not have a paper to write for," she said. "But on any match day we receive up to 250 e-mails about our service. The other day I did an interview with Gavin Larsen and within 30 minutes I had a reply from a fan in New Zealand. "In some ways we have overtaken the newspapers. They quote readership figures but they are not accurate because they do not express the number of people who are reading about cricket, whereas we know that everybody who comes on to the site only does it for the cricket; we have a captive audience. "It is the most dynamic medium because it combines the reports and pictures of newspapers, the commentary of radio and the action of television." Julian Goode, of the ECB, is at pains to point out that his figures, and the estimates of between 3m and 10m daily calls to Cricinfo, are not based on site "hits", the jargon most often used to describe Internet popularity. He talks of page impressions - calls to individual pages which in themselves may contain up to 10 individual sites that will all claim to be hit each time. So in hit terms, the cricket Internet audience already runs into tens of millions. Goode adds, though, that one unusual trend has started to emerge: office workers are far more likely to call up the web in their firm's time than from home. The number of page impressions for England's game with Sri Lanka dropped significantly when play was extended by rain until 8pm. Overall, the popularity of cricket on the Internet will be music to the ears of the World Cup organisers. They have been stung by criticism of their limp opening ceremony, hit by the poor weather, which in mid-May had hardly required the expertise of Michael Fish to forecast, and the lack of excitement provided by early games in the tournament. A growth in general public interest has been noted since the midweek giantkilling acts of New Zealand and Zimbabwe, in beating Australia and India respectively, but the tournament is not expected to heat up fully until it reaches the Super Six stage at the end of this month. Then the BBC and BSkyB, the World Cup's joint broadcasters, predict a significant rise in their viewing figures, which are running at around 2m per game, only slightly up on an average summer Test series. Meanwhile, county cricket continues to struggle for public attention. It almost passed unnoticed that the start of a new round of championship matches coincided with England's appearance at Lord's. Hampshire and Surrey, among the early-season leaders, reported disappointing crowds for their games, while Glamorgan's local derby crowd of 1,700 with Gloucestershire dropped on the third day when fans crossed the Severn Bridge as Bristol staged its own World Cup fixture. Only Yorkshire, with a gate of 4,604 over the first three days against Middlesex, reported an increase in attendance - which could be seen as casting aspersions on the depth of computer penetration in the north of England. 
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