The use of statistical analysis has revolutionised sport in recent decades. Its success in baseball - as sabermetrics - was made famous by the book and movie (starring Brad Pitt) titled Moneyball.
EA Sports' Cricket 2007 was released a few weeks back, and considering that I reviewed the previous version, I feel compelled to add a quick note here. To sum things up right at the outset, it plain sucks. There are hardly any (but the most cosmetic of) improvements over Cricket 2005 (with respect to the gameplay as such) and the graphics are just as bad as ever.
While it has been said that the analogue controller (dubber the 'century stick' or something inane like that) will provide a marked improvement over the keyboard controls, I have it on good authority that it isn't anything to write home about either.
Cricinfo has launched a beta of a live 3D simulation of ball-by-ball game-play. The service named Cricinfo 3D, which requires Adobe Shockwave, has graphics on par with Cricket 2007 (sic), and allows the user to pan and zoom around and follow the play from preset positions. The usual statistics features that are provided with the standard cricinfo scorecard are also available.
It is very buggy at the moment, but.. interesting stuff.
-K
My delicious feed brought to attention (what I eventually found out was) a simple scriptaculous (yes, two of these buggers on the same line) gallery script named Dhonishow. I was (understandably) curious as to what this was, (and wtf was it doing on a .de domain) especially considering the fact that Dhoni has failed yet again (he got out earlier tonight slicing to third man :/).
Ah (the joys of parantheses :P).
Anyways, dhonishow.de informs me that a Dhoni is not just a word (and now a meme) that signifies an overly hirsute, milk guzzling, inconsistent cricketer. Instead, it refers to:
I just noticed that the squads for the upcoming superseries between an ICC selected World XI and world champions Australia, have been released. As usual, it baffles me how some of these selections could have been made. The result seems to be some kind of power play between selectors from each country. The selectors were Gavaskar (any team selected by him has to have Sachin in it :P), Hadlee, Jonty Rhodes, Clive Lloyd, Aravinda De Silva and Mike Atherton. A level-headed bunch, but some poor selections.
The following is the ICC selected World XI test squad for the World XI vs. Australia super series.
For the last week or so, my breaks have basically been spent playing (the newly released) EA Sports Cricket 2005. The game is a marked improvement over previous versions, and while I'd written it off early on, it's grown on me in the last couple of days - well, enough that I'm actually writing this ;)
