Tape Delay Cricket
by Devanshu Mehta
Samir Chopra elaborates on the story he told in the Boredwaani podcast a couple of weeks ago. Some times, even one day cricket demands patience from its viewers:
When the 1996 World Cup rolled around, I was living with my girlfriend in Manhattan, and working in the Bronx. The day-night games began early in the morning and ended in the afternoon. I would only be able to watch an over or two live before I had to leave for work to begin the long subway ride on the D train, uptown to the Bronx. The extended-play mode of the videocassette, and an extremely patient girlfriend came to the rescue. I would leave after having set up the VCR with a tape in EP mode; my girlfriend, who worked at Rockefeller Center, would walk back at lunchtime to our apartment, change the tape, and then return to work; the two tapes added up to more than eight hours, more than enough for a one-day international.
Though, someone should have taken mercy and warned him about the Calcutta semi-finals.
Deep Backward Point 
[…] Great stuff, and it has rightly received praise from many other bloggers. I particularly like the piece because it neatly falls into a genre of blogging I’ll call meta-cricket – these are posts that deal more with the experience of watching cricket, rather than the game itself. The difference lies between reading another match preview or game analysis (or even selection policy), and reading about commenatators, annoying cricket ads, and new technologies (or old — see Deep Backward Point’s post on Tape Delay Cricket). […]