I think i am slightly late to the current world cup cricket party but i have been watching the streaming in the internet once in a while, reading reports, watching scores in HTC (they have a ESPNCricInfo app) and watching video blogs ( like Harsha's daily). When i start to write this, this reminds me of the good old days when i started playing cricket.
For people who know me personally you know how much i like cricket in the earlier days.. I used to play lots of street cricket in my very early age in 80's. We started going to school and college grounds to watch and play cricket using cork and cricket balls without mat. We all move as a gang in the morning and come home in the evening times to get some good scolding and at times beating from parents. Our faces would look red after playing almost whole day and mind you, it's not cold out there, it's damn hot but hey when you are young no one would give it a thought whether it is hot or cold.. All these things happen in the week ends.
During the week days, we play at our school using whatever we could ( rubber balls, tennis balls, plastic balls and sometimes even those corn stems, dried ones are good for hitting). All the team selection and the toss would happen during the course of the class and the matches begin during the lunch time. Haha, it was way cool.
Apart from this we love to play book cricket along with our own commentary. Those days we also listen to radio commentary a lot when players like Srikanth, Shastri, Kapil and Gavaskar plays the game. My class mate, Faizal Mohammed was among the greats in book cricket, he loves Kapil dev a lot and he himself is a fast bowler too. We take our science book which is the biggest of the lot and play cricket during free times. It's so very interesting, we have some dedicated note pads only for the team score cards.
Then came the B.Sc college days and later during my B.Tech university days, my playing has come down a lot but started watching, reading and commenting about cricket a lot. I love reading articles by R.Mohan from Hindu paper (now i think he's not there), Prem Panicker, Avinash subramanian from Rediff, and last but not least Harsha Bhogle and they are the ones who inspired me a lot in terms of writing and talking about cricket. Those days we do lots of debate about who is the best batsman and all that stuff :) People who know me personally would know that I always love Sachin Tendulkar both as a cricketer and as a person (some one who doesn't let success to his heads) and I personally always consider him as the best batsman in the world.
I also had written some odd cricket articles in the past, I will have to dig it out from my notebook. Will be doing that some day.. So these days i rarely play cricket and even watch but mostly read articles and watch videos clippings etc.
Anyways, for this world cup Cricinfo has introduced the concept of Harsha's daily a summary of the day's game which i like a lot. He'll bring most part of the match through his ever smiling way and I feel like i have watched the entire game.
Follow this for the rest. Thank you Cricinfo for this.