Widescreen Cricket

The one thing I used to hate about watching cricket when i was younger was that our television was too small to show any of the action. Every time the batter hit the ball, the ball would fire across the pitch. The television screen only had a 4:3 picture so you couldn’t see where the ball went or anything.

By the time you’d found out, the round was over. Widescreen televisions used to be so damn expensive and there was no chance of owning one of these in the 80s. Nowadays thankfully, with DVD being so successful, most people own one now and you get a much better picture ratio of 16:9. Cricket is still a hard game to watch as it is still impossible to see what’s going on but at least now you can see a little more of the action as it happens.

My First Cricket Game

I always hated cricket when I was younger. I was growing up in 90s Britain when all the football revolution was coming back into play. Cricket to me seemed to be one of those games that your dad and grandad used to play when they were younger. I did enjoy watching various baseball matches on the internet and on foreign satellite channels, though that sport seemed to have a lot more spirit to it.

Now that I’m in my 40s I’ve actually been coaxed into watching the ashes by my 10 year old son. He thinks cricket is ten times more interesting than football and, now that I’ve started watching it myself, I have to agree. The intense feeling when your team is about to score a try beats waiting on a penalty any day, and there’s less violence!!

Cricket Glamour

One thing I’ve never quite understood about the British sports lover is their fascination with no-frills sports. What I mean by that is that when a sporting event is held in the UK there never seems to be much of a fuss about it. If you look at American Baseball or Football games, they have fireworks and carnivals, shows etc etc. The Americans did try and create a little of that excitement over here by designing the NFL Europe league which was a short-lived American Football league.

There was the Scottish Claymores and the London Monarchs in the league. The games used to start with an hour long party outside the stadiums with music, games, bouncy castles etc. During the games, whenever a touchdown was scored, fireworks went off and replays were shown on a gigantic screen. It was extremely exciting at the time (though when the league folded, it was estimated the country had lost over £30million). It seems obvious that the British sports lover doesn’t care about glitz or glamour, they just want a simple no-nonsense event where they can watch their teams play to win.

This is probably the way it should be of course. Cricket is no different. I find nothing glamorous about the game myself. The uniforms are white and dull, the pitch is dull, and the fans don’t seem that involved in the game.

With that said, Cricket probably takes more money for the country than any other sport (with the exception of football) so who am I to judge the fact that the game doesn’t look like it commands a lot of money!

Cricket As A Whole

Cricket is really a sport which involves plenty of joy, pleasure and energy.  It is really an essential sport in the uk.  It’s a game of passion that serves the sentiments and passions of cricket fans.  It is a game that is loved by many thousands of individuals. Cricket has won the minds of millions by becoming the most-visited website during the 44-day ICC Cricket World Cup 2011.

Cricket is one thing which has appeal of its own and the whole planet is an integral part of that attraction.  It’s one particular sport that’s followed around the world and it is viewed by each and every class of people. It was the preferred game of gentlemen in North of the Woods, although many people opted to watch tennis rather than cricket at first. Cricket is a game of uncertainty and you can regularly expect to be surprised by which team wins in various different matches. The sport has been documented as being played in the South of England during the 16th century.

Cricket is a predominately a male sport but is not exclusive to males only. It’s the favourite sport in india and it’s very rare to find an Indian who isn’t a massive cricket fan.

Cricket is handing out chocolate to get people to vote for her for class president.

Cricket Corruption

Recently I was watching the whole fiasco involving the accusations of match fixing between Pakistan and England. The amount of disbelief shown from everyone astonished me for so many reasons. I have no idea why people can not seem to fathom the fact that wherever there is big money involved, there will be corruption. Because there’s big money in sport, there is guaranteed to be a high level of corruption.

Boxing and Snooker are obviously areas with the worst rates of fraud, probably due to the fact that it’s easier to set up a match involving just 2 people. John Higgins was recently caught on camera offering to lose frames in a match for a 300,000 euro payment. He claimed innocence, stating that he played along as he believed the reporter to be involved with the russian mafia.

In cricket it’s not as easy to fix matches as it takes a lot more teamwork and fraud is easily spotted if large groups are involved (you can see if someone is deliberately creating a fault, or deliberately not playing to their full potential). For what it’s worth, I don’t believe there was any corruption involved in the particular game which caused all the controversy, but I wouldn’t be as quick to write off the idea that match fixing does not necessarily happen.

In football, it would not be tolerated in the slightest but this is perhaps because of the high prices footballers are paid (equivalent to that of some A-list celebrities). Therefore no good player wants to lose his long-term income for a short-term one-off payment (plus there is a chance of losing the ability to play professional football at all if found guilty of match fixing!). Maybe cricket players would be more willing to get involved with match fixing due to the fact that cricket players certainly don’t earn anywhere near what footballers do but I’m not sure.

All i’m saying is that where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Cricket Violence

One thing that’s quite relaxing to know is that there are sports in Britain which don’t have thousands of fans that go to games solely for the purpose of beating each other up. Recently, football has become an absolute joke in the UK. You have the worst fights and disagreements in football, compared to any other sport.

Though it is wrong to generalise, it seems to be fans of teams like Celtic and Rangers who cause the most trouble. A lot of those who support rangers and Celtic have done so out of religious hatred (catholicism vs protestant).

The violence has always been terrible in club football, but recently there have been incidents where fans have actually sent nail bombs to Neil Lennon (celtic boss).

There seems to be very little violence in cricket but it is also fairly obvious that many people who enjoy cricket come from a different family background or upbringing. Cricket seems to be more of a working class/upper class sport whereas football is borderline working class. Hundreds of fans think it’s a great idea to get drunk before going to see a football game, which is where a lot of the trouble stems from.

Some might say the reason there is no violence or little violence in cricket matches is because there’s less of a following than that of football. I don’t see how  this is true though as cricket is almost as popular as football in the united kingdom with hundreds of thousands of fans worldwide.

Watch Cricket Online

Dear Live Cricket Fan,

It’s amazing how difficult it is to watch live cricket streaming games in the UK and abroad on terrestrial television (and getting hard to watch it on cable or satellite too). Football seems to be the sport that television companies invest in, even though live cricket has a massive fanbase also.

This is why many people prefer to watch cricket online. It’s FREE, simple to setup, and you don’t need to upgrade your television or get an ugly satellite dish on the side of your house.

WHERE ARE THESE STREAMS?

The streams are scattered all over the internet and trying to find them yourself is a nightmare. By downloading our guide, you’ll know where they are and also the various software programs you can download that will tune you into the streams automatically.