 The best cricket site in the world
The cricket website Cricinfo never ceases to amaze me, with its fantastic coverage and the love of cricket that shows through its every feature. It is now owned by Wisden, I believe, and that would explain the completeness of the site, anyone would assume, for what do you expect such a great institution to come up with, except a perfect, wide-ranging compendium of cricket information, articles and profiles?
Such an assumption would be slightly off the mark, as Cricinfo was launched in 1993 by a few cricket-crazy, Tamil-speaking NRIs using the services of volunteers entirely. Students and faculty of numerous educational institutions contributed cricket content, which the core team put together in the form of a database. By 1996, it had grown big enough for Badri Seshadri and Simon King to set up Cricinfo Ltd., UK. (By the way Badri is an alumnus of IIT Madras and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University).
When a series of fundings fuelled the explosive growth of the company with offices in many countries, Simon King became its global CEO and Badri Seshadri the global COO. This was in 2000, when Sify held a 25 per cent stake in the company, and Badri was looking after the Indian operations. When Cricinfo established their Chennai office, you could meet Badri Seshadri and his livewire partners Murari and Satyanarayanan there, and learn at first hand what passion for the game was all about. They had built around them an eager bunch of cricket fanatics who made their office a pulsating place full of life and energy.
They came up with several interesting programmes for television audiences and downloads from the Internet. I had the pleasure of anchoring one such programme, whose topic was spin bowling and the panelists were E A S Prasanna and S Venkataraghavan. Though both off spinners brought rich experience and original insights to the panel discussion, they could not hope to match the missionary zeal of the Cricinfo team.
It is the passion of these young enthusiasts that drove the steep and rapid growth of the website before it was hit by global trends and eventually taken over by Wisden. Cricinfo went through straitened financial circumstances in 2000-2001 when the Internet bubble burst, but by the end of 2002, had made enough smart moves to reach operating break-even. The merger with Wisden took place in February 2003, and the content writing team of Cricinfo soon moved to Mumbai, the Indian headquarters of Wisden Asia.
Today, Badri Seshadri has quit Cricinfo to start a publishing outfit that is redefining the rules of the game in the Indian market for language books, starting with Tamil. Murari left earlier and only Sathya of the trio remains in Cricinfo still. But in a short span of less than ten years, these young innovators have made history. What they have created is quite simply the best cricket portal in the world.
V Ramnarayan
vramnarayan@gmail.com
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