Cricket and the Internet

This year, the web site Cricinfo, the essential online repository of everything cricket, turns 20 years old.

In 1993, the Internet was mostly academia plus a few companies. The web had barely begun and, Mosaic and Netscape were early version browsers. Those of us in the non-cricket playing countries like the US had to rely on other people sending match scores in email, or listen to the BBC on short-wave radio (yes, I still have my Sony short-wave radio in a box somewhere).

Back in the mid/late 80s, when I was an undergrad at USC with no one else around to talk cricket with, I used to go to the Periodicals section of the library just to get the London times, all of about 5-6 months old, just to read about the Test matches that had been done and dusted long ago.

Later, there were the Usenet newsgroups rec.sports.cricket and soc.culture.india where we could find more recent scores.

When Cricinfo site started doing ball-by-ball real-time commentaries, that was phenomenal. Even though I hadn't watched a cricket match in years, I used to follow the commentaries online as much as possible. Sri Lanka being barely out of the status of minnows, I didn't think my team was going to do anything much in the 1996 World Cup. Read this article about how Cricinfo volunteers scrambled around to set up the early equivalents of twitter, live blogging and online-chat in this new thing called on-line ball-by-ball commentaries. You can gloss over the cricket part but I'm sure the early Internet pioneering work, written up as a first person account, will be quite interesting.

Of course, when Sri Lankan team go into the World Cup final, we (the grad/undergrad Sri Lankan student community spread across US and Canada) tried to figure out (a) any place where there was a satellite feed of the final, (b) barring that, how to get the most up-to-date scores to those who were stuck with web browsers at dial-up speeds. We asked the Cricinfo folks if we could snarf the scorecards from their site and repost them on our various web pages. They were quite happy to share, specially since they didn't know if their servers (in various universities in the US and UK) could handle the expected load.

If I remember correctly, Sri Lanka still didn't have an Internet connection back then. What we (again, the academic community in the West) had done was to link SL universities with e-mail. We had machine at Stanford (walawe.stanford.edu) that would accept all e-mail for .lk domain. One of the grad students there would make an international phone call to University of Sri Lanka, Moratuwa campus every night and download the outgoing e-mail, and pick up any waiting e-mail from that side. Yeah, e-mail really was store and forward ... and it took about two days to get any response back from someone.

So, we used walawe.stanford.edu as the hub that snarfed the cricinfo site for new scores and then we'd send them out to our own pages.  I still have those scripts:

-rw-r--r-- 1 pkd pkd  747 Mar 16  1996 header
-rw-r--r-- 1 pkd pkd  521 Mar 16  1996 header.noscores
-rw-r--r-- 1 pkd pkd  615 Mar 16  1996 header.last
-rw-r--r-- 1 pkd pkd  309 Mar 16  1996 tail
-rw-r--r-- 1 pkd pkd  680 Mar 16  1996 README
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pkd pkd 2604 Mar 16  1996 getscores*
-rw-r--r-- 1 pkd pkd    0 Mar 16  1996 getscores.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 pkd pkd  152 Mar 16  1996 scores.new

% cat tail

The information here is brought to you courtesy of
the good folks at &ltA HREF="http://www.cse.oga.edu/cricinfo/" &gt CricInfo &lt/A&gt
This service brought to you by the good folks from  SLNet and LAcNet


% head getscores
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -s
#
# script to download the most current scores from the server on walawe

require 'sys/socket.ph';

$port = 9889 unless $port;
$host = "walawe.stanford.edu" unless $host;
$delay = 60 unless $delay;


I had setup this script on my pkd@isr account and parippu@wam account.

And, the best part ... against all odds, Sri Lanka won the World Cup in 1996.   

(That's more than I can say about our current team that has been second best in the last two World Cups and the last two T20 World Cups. {sigh})