eugene wrote:foreignfield wrote:Kriterion_BD wrote:FF is german german or a ZIM expat?
German, with no Zimbabwe connections at all. I seriously fell in love with the game around 98/99 ... and became hooked on Zim.
How does a German discover cricket? Oddly enough I have become hooked on handball which is pretty big in Germany.
How does a New Zealander discover handball? Great game, but while our domestic league is the strongest (and richest) around the globe, our national side are yet to recover from the shock of winning the World Cup some years ago.
But back to cricket: I think my interest started way back in the late eighties when, prior to cable tv reaching our neighbourhood, our next door neighbour put up a satellite dish for them and us, and we had, for a rather short time (the grown-ups decided they liked a different satellite better) access to Sky News. As a youngster trying to improve my English I got hooked to their sports bulletin which was full of the build up towards another England humiliation in the Carribean. In the end, England did better than expected (they only lost 2-1, it was the 1990 tour -- had to look that up!), I was curious but lacked access to any sort of media coverage. I remember to cherish every German newspaper article which referred to cricket (maybe 2 or 3 in ten years!).
Then, with the 1999 World Cup approaching, I discovered that CNN, which had lately been added to my cable TV service, had odd bits of info on cricket in their sports news and even teletext scorecards for Test matches. One of my first memories of such a scorecard is that of a Test match involving Zimbabwe where the names of Mbangwa and Olonga clearly stuck out from all those English names. I remember someone (I always seem to remember it as being Pommie, but it can't be, surely) being sent in as a nightwatchman -- a term with absolutely no meaning for me at the time but a certain poetry in it ...
Then came the World Cup, then came the Internet ... John Ward was still writing a lot about cricket in Zim at Cricinfo and was even nice enough to answer my e-mails to his Zimbabwe Cricket Newsletter. I remember Dr. Situ from those times
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But you could still say my interest in cricket was rather a literary one: learning a new language (from silly point to chinamen), reading match reports (the quality of cricket writing compared to the usual football dross was probably the reason my obsession grew and grew), delving into the history of the game, even learning about technical aspects without actually watching much cricket. And then came Youtube, and the streaming of live matches, and ZCF!
