The Empire Strikes Back—With Ball-by-Ball Commentary By the Bureau Chief for Existential Sportsball, somewhere over the Indian Ocean Somewhere between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of TikTok, a quiet data-colony called ESPNcricinfo slipped its leash and began running the cricket world by remote control. Once a modest scorecard service born in…
The Super-Subcontinent Derby: How India vs Bangladesh Quietly Became the World’s Most Watched Proxy War by Our Man with a Visa Stamp and a Liver to Match When 1.7 billion people glance at their phones this evening, roughly the same number who claim they’ve “read the terms and conditions,” they will discover that a patch…
Sri Lanka versus Bangladesh—three syllables that, when uttered in cricketing circles, elicit the same mild enthusiasm you reserve for a lukewarm airline meal. And yet, the latest “SL vs BAN” series, which concluded under the sodium glare of Dhaka’s floodlights, has quietly become a geopolitical canary in the coal mine. While the rest of the…
Cricket’s Quiet Assassin: Why Axar Patel Is the World’s Most Politely Terrifying Man By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Geneva Geneva, 2024 – While the planet busies itself with proxy wars, algorithmic elections, and whatever fresh horror the feed serves up before breakfast, a soft-spoken Gujarati with the handshake of a librarian is quietly…
