From Bamboo Pole to Blockchain: Cricket's New Money and the Old Habit

Six-ten in the evening. A tea stall a little way inside from the Jindabazar crossing in Sylhet. A tin roof, bamboo posts, a kettle boiling on a clay stove. A bamboo pole is planted in front of the shop, and a cheap mobile phone is tied to its top with a rubber band. The screen is twelve inches, grainy, and inside it is a green field in Cardiff, eight thousand kilometres away. The ninth of June, 2026. New Zealand have made 265 for eight; Bangladesh need 266.

Forty men stand in front of the shop. Some sip tea, some have lit cigarettes, some lean on the posts because there is nowhere to sit. The phone is hoisted on the bamboo pole because the shop has no tripod, no camera, no studio — only a phone and a data pack. I stand behind it, commentating in Sylheti, and my voice comes out of the speaker and into the crowd's ears.

What happened on that screen that night went into the history of cricket. Shakib Al Hasan made 114, Mahmudullah Riyad made 102. Two Bangladeshis scoring centuries in the same ODI had never happened before. Bangladesh chased down 266 for the loss of five wickets, with forty balls to spare. New Zealand, one of the best sides in the world at that moment, lost at Cardiff.

But I have not sat down to talk about Cardiff. I have sat down to talk about the bamboo pole.

That night my phone sat on top of the bamboo, and the Facebook Live gathered three hundred and eighty thousand viewers. Three hundred and eighty thousand — not a small number, especially when you hold no broadcast rights, no studio, no salary. Past midnight three offers came to me. One from a television channel, one from a digital platform, one from a sponsor. I was forty then. I thought cricket's real power was finally showing itself.

Eight years have passed. Where that bamboo pole is now, I do not know. But in its place has come another thing, whose name sounds polite, whose surface glitters, and inside which sits a ledger — the blockchain.

Let me go back a little first, then forward.

Here a few cold facts should be set down, because the beauty of a story and the dry truth of a ledger are two different things. On the ninth of June, 2026, at Sophia Gardens in Cardiff, Bangladesh and New Zealand met in the group stage of the Champions Trophy. New Zealand made 265 for eight in their fifty overs. In reply Bangladesh reached 268 for five, sealing the win with forty balls remaining. Shakib Al Hasan made 114 off 115 balls; Mahmudullah Riyad made 102 off 107. Those two innings gave Bangladesh, for the first time in their ODI history, two centuries in a single match.

Many who read this today may never have watched that match on television. They watched it on a phone, on YouTube, or on someone's bamboo-pole phone like mine. That is the real point.

Cricket in Bangladesh was never only a game. It was a system of communication. Village grounds, city tea stalls, transistor radios, the pole at the corner of a neighbourhood — all of it together built an invisible network, where scores spread from mouth to mouth, ear to ear, patiently, patiently. That network needed no server. It needed one person who could speak, and a few who were willing to listen.

Fourteen years of my life were spent inside that network — local radio, local newspapers, then social media. When the radio crackled, you knew a stranger's voice was slowly becoming a friend. I saw how news of a century took seven hours to reach Bogura from Sylhet, and how those seven hours shrank to seven seconds.

Before the digital turn, scores travelled by hand, voice and patience. News entered one person's ear, and he ran to tell another. Along the way two runs might be added, or a wicket lost. It did not matter. People knew the news was coming, and inside that waiting was a kind of joy.

Then the money came.

First broadcast rights, then franchise leagues, then the price of players. The Bangladesh Premier League began, sponsors arrived, logos arrived on jerseys. Cricket became an industry — some call it business, some call it a product. The real point is that cricket is now a market, and in a market everything has a price.

The new thing entering that market is the blockchain. In plain terms, a blockchain is a digital ledger where transactions are kept by everyone together and no single person can erase them. In football this technology has been used to create 'fan tokens' — supporters buy tokens, and with those tokens they can vote on certain club decisions, give an opinion on a jersey design, sometimes take a small part in choosing players. Cricket has begun to adopt the same model. NFTs — non-fungible tokens — are being used to make digital trading cards, which some sell as 'digital memories'.

It sounds good, doesn't it? A direct relationship between fan and game, with no middleman. Money flows into the sport, and the fan receives a piece of paper — no, a piece of code — that says a part of this club is yours.

I want to stop here. Because exactly at this point I have a question, and that question comes from my bamboo-pole night.

The technology that claims to make the fan a 'stakeholder' is in fact making the fan a 'customer' — and the difference between the two was best understood by the crowd beneath my bamboo pole.

Not one of those forty men bought a token. Not one voted. Not one had his name in any ledger. And yet every one of them felt that the match was theirs. Why? Because no one had to buy that feeling with money.

Stakeholding cannot be bought; it is built. A token can be bought. A vote can be bought. An NFT can be bought. But the feeling that lived in those forty chests, when the fours came off Shakib's bat, cannot be bought.

Now let me go a little inside the field, because cricket's biggest lie is that emotion and strategy are two separate things. In fact one lives inside the other.

New Zealand's 265 was an intelligent score — neither too many nor too few. On the Cardiff wicket the ball was holding a little; the spinners were getting help. Early on Bangladesh's batting moved slowly, wickets falling at regular intervals. When Shakib and Mahmudullah came to the crease, the required rate was above eight. In twenty overs they needed nearly one hundred and sixty.

This is the hardest place in cricket — where playing safe loses you the match, and taking risks loses you wickets. Most sides break here. Bangladesh did not.

Shakib's innings was a design of patience. Early on he gave himself time, left the good balls, put the bad ones away towards the boundary. Gradually he dragged the innings towards the end while keeping the rate intact. Mahmudullah in that time was a silent engine — less light, more work. Where Shakib was the visible storm, Mahmudullah was the foundation on which the storm stood.

I remember one thing, though I do not have its ball-by-ball account. In the middle of that innings there was a stretch when both men understood that without risk there was no way out. In the overs that followed came sustained attack. Sixes, fours, quick singles — a tide that, as it swept past, changed the face of the match.

Moments like this I call the 'nine-second accounting'. Because the story of a match turns on small decisions — not the boundary itself, but the ball before it, when the batsman decided he had not come to survive today, he had come to take his revenge.

Cardiff, the ninth of June, nine seconds — and then the story kept breathing. That breathing is what matters most to me. Because tokens expire, code grows old, wallets shut. But the breathing stays — in memory, in story, in the imagination of the next generation.

Now I come to my real complaint. The world of blockchain and fan tokens promotes one thing very loudly — transparency, data, accounting. Every transaction visible, every token's price known, every vote recorded. It sounds excellent. But for years I have been watching another data-culture in sport, one that is exactly as glittering and exactly as hollow.

That is 'statistics-based effort'. In football, a player's distance covered and number of high-intensity sprints are now shown in big numbers, as if this were the player's value. But the truth is that if a team runs about aimlessly, that running also looks good. Pointless running produces pretty numbers too. And those numbers have almost no relation to winning.

The same trap lies in the blockchain world. A fan token's volume, its number of holders, the speed of transactions — all look marvellous. But these numbers do not prove that a fan's relationship with the game has deepened. Often they prove the opposite.

I have another long-held observation, relevant here. Over the past decade, 'gegenpressing' — the aggressive pressure that wins the ball back from the opponent — became a sacred word in football. First Barcelona, then Liverpool, then everyone. But today we see that even mid-table sides neutralise the system with sheer athleticism. What was once a game of intelligence is becoming a game of the body. It is turning into a contest of speed and stamina.

My fear is that the blockchain-based fan economy will do exactly the same. At first it was a story of fan empowerment. Later it will become the game of the rich fan — more tokens, more votes. And the ordinary fan, who stands beneath the bamboo pole to watch, will be left behind again.

Bogura, Sylhet, Rangpur, Khulna — the distance between the cricket grounds of these towns and the Sher-e-Bangla Stadium in Mirpur is not merely geographical. It is economic, cultural and political. When a boy from Bogura enters the national side, he does not merely occupy a place — he carries the hope of an entire region. And that hope is the real capital, which no token can capture.

At the tea stall, a bamboo pole held up the hearts of three hundred and eighty thousand viewers. Those people were not in the stadium, had bought no tickets, had seen no sponsor's logo. And yet they were there. Their names are in no blockchain ledger, they have no share in any vote, but their share of the match was the largest of all.

I have often wondered where cricket's true economy lies. The answer is not simple. But one thing I know — the greatest asset of that economy is trust. The fan trusts that this game is his. That trust cannot be bought with money, nor recorded on a blockchain. It is only built — year after year, defeat after defeat, and now and then after a win.

Every match builds a small town where strangers become neighbours for ninety minutes. In cricket those ninety minutes are sometimes seven hours, sometimes five days. The time changes, but the thing is the same — people gather, the line between known and unknown blurs, and an ordinary thing becomes everyone's.

I listen for the silence after the crowd, where the real story learns to speak. When the match ends the shouting stops, the clapping stops, the stream shuts down. But then there is a stretch when people quietly walk home, and inside their heads the match plays again. That silence says the match really became something. No token can do that.

Now I come to the objectionable thing that nobody wants to say.

Everyone says blockchain is cricket's future, fan tokens are fan empowerment, NFTs are digital memory. I say there is a blind spot in this story. That blind spot is this — the fan was never an 'owner'; he was always a 'witness'. And being a witness is his real strength.

An owner buys a relationship with money. A witness earns it — with time, with pain, with sleepless nights. Not one of those forty men beneath the bamboo pole was an owner. But every one of them was a witness — to that night, that innings, that tide.

When blockchain wants to make the fan an 'owner', it is in fact bringing him down from witness to buyer. And in that descent lies the greatest loss. Because a buyer buys a ticket, an owner buys a share, but a witness buys nothing — he is simply present. And being present was cricket's greatest gift.

I do not want to be stubborn here. If it turns out that the fan-token model really does put power in the ordinary fan's hands — if it is proved that a boy at a Sylhet tea stall buys a token, influences a team decision, and that influence translates into better play on the field — then I will gladly change my mind. I want proof, not promotion.

But from what I see so far, blockchain is entering cricket in the same old mould — where money rises and the fan stands below. The only difference is that this time the fan will have a token in his hand, and an illusion in his head that he is changing something.

Saying this does not mean all use of blockchain is bad. In some tasks of cricket administration the technology can genuinely help. It can reduce fake tickets in ticketing, increase transparency in transactions, keep accounts of player contracts, and even flag suspicious patterns of match-fixing. In these areas blockchain is a dry, useful tool.

The trouble begins when this technology is dressed up in the language of love. When it is said that buying a token makes you part of the club's family. That is when the ledger of accounts and the ledger of the heart get mixed up. And that mixing is where my objection lies.

I notice another thing, especially among young fans. Fan tokens and NFTs are often seen as an investment, not as love. The boy buys a token thinking the price will rise, that if the team wins his token will be worth more. Here a fine line between cricket and gambling is created, which no one wants to admit.

Love and investment are two different things. Love cannot be measured; investment can. When you begin to measure love, love itself changes. Blockchain hands you that measuring device, in very pretty packaging.

Back again. On that night of 2026, when the last run came at Cardiff, I was shouting behind the phone and forty men in front were jumping. The bamboo pole shook. No one bought a token, no one cast a vote, no one scanned a code. And yet that night was theirs — wholly, unconditionally.

Today I wonder, if there had been a blockchain that night, what would have happened? Perhaps every viewer would have had a digital ticket, an NFT, a token. Perhaps instead of three offers I would have had thirty. Perhaps each of that crowd would have had a wallet, with a small number glowing inside it.

But the real asset of that night was something else — a stranger's voice and the clapping of forty strangers, written in no ledger. I want to get that back — not against technology, but through it.

Because I am no enemy of technology. I am only an enemy of the illusion that sells technology as a substitute for love. Blockchain is a ledger. A ledger is a good thing; a ledger keeps accounts. But a ledger can never take the place of a bamboo pole, because a ledger holds no heart.

Even today people gather at that shop in Sylhet. Today there is a tripod, a good phone, perhaps a small television too. But the real thing has not changed — people still gather to watch something together, to feel something together. This gathering is cricket's first technology, which existed before any blockchain and will exist after any blockchain.

Cricket's future will be written on the blockchain, that is certain. Every run, every wicket, every ticket may one day be bound in code. But cricket's soul will be written on those nights where a bamboo pole, a cheap phone, and a crowd of strangers — together make an impossible thing possible.

The question, then, is not about technology. The question is — when everything in cricket enters the ledger of buying and selling, who will write about the man standing outside that ledger? I write about the man outside the ledger, and I will keep writing.