WEATHER PERMITTING, a full week's cricket is in store, withGlamorgan meeting Surrey on Saturday and Gloucester taking onLancashire on Sunday in the semi-finals of the Benson and Hedges Cup.There are plenty of County Championship matches, and Zimbabwe are inaction again, against Yorkshire this time.
On the web, while CricInfo and Lord's have set the pace, othersites are challenging for attention: Cricnet.com, for example,launched on 15 May. As the official site of the ProfessionalCricketers' Association, a lot is expected of it. So far it's lookingan extremely useful adjunct to the longer established cricket sites.
It is aiming to become a fully fledged portal with sectionsdevoted to all aspects of the game. The day's cricket, a hall offame, player interviews, and coaching pages are featured. Thefixtures and stats (domestic and international) are exhaustive andthe ball-by-ball coverage is well laid out and easy to use - a tableof latest scores in matches being played has links to full or desktopscoreboards.
Cricket history is to be covered with a series of features andreviews of each decade in the 20th century. For comment oncontemporary matters, a bulletin board page provides a series offorums for visitors to have their say. Starting next month, ClubCricnet will be going live, membership will give users the chance topersonalise the way they experience the site and make them eligiblefor competitions and other promotions.
Cricket.sports.com, which has succumbed to pop-up advert syndrome,is good for web users in a hurry. Although it has a news section, itdoesn't have the depth of information available on some of the othersites, but it does covers the county scene with a fixture list thatlinks to appropriate scorecards which are automatically updated.Separate sections are devoted to each of the Test nations, which isuseful for picking up news and results quickly.
Magic Cricket has an international flavour with a lot of breakingnews, using AFP primarily, which gives a different perspective tosites running Reuters and Press Association stories. An animated newswire on the front page flags the latest headlines and completescoreboards that are available for viewing. Team profiles for India,Pakistan, South African, West Indies and Zimbabwe are stored on thesite. They are extensive profiles compared to those run by manysites, containing links to relevant news stories, analyses ofstrengths and weaknesses, statistics and individual playerbiographies and stats.
A daily e-mail newsletter and a separate score flash service canbe signed up for on site. Those who don't have to worry about thephone bill can, according to the site, download a couple of Javaprograms to supple live score tickers and net TV commentary. Forthose rain-stopped-play moments, the site has cricket games fromcrosswords to online arcade games (Under windows, Internet Explorer 5wouldn't load them, Netscape 4.6 had no problems) and trivia plus auseful set of archives covering the World Cup and a number of otherseries.
andy.oldfield@virgin.net
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