From the Scorer's Book to the Blockchain: Who Really Guards Cricket's Memory?

Last month I was sitting in an old clubhouse in Sylhet. A laptop lay open on the table, and on its screen floated the title of a document: Deep Professional Analysis. I opened it and found every field blank. No player names, no team names, no match format, no source. Only one sentence returning again and again: insufficient information, assessment not possible.

Beside me sat a young reporter, about twenty-five. She asked, Auntie, this isn't analysis at all. Then what is it?

I stayed quiet for a while. Then I said: This is the most honest document in cricket journalism today. Because it did not make anything up. Where it had no knowledge, it did not pretend to have any.

That empty document pulled me back to the core truth of my whole working life. Every claim in cricket must have evidence behind it. And today, when something called analysis is often manufactured by machines, who actually keeps that evidence? Who is its custodian?

First we need to understand how an analysis is born. Modern cricket analysis essentially runs in two stages. In the first stage, raw information is extracted from an article or a match — who played, how many runs, how many overs bowled, at which ground, at what time. In the second stage, an analytical framework is laid over that information — format, player technique, team standing, league economics, risk.

This is the supply chain of information. If the first stage comes back empty, the second stage faces two roads. Either it admits I have nothing in hand — or it invents information out of its own head and fills the boxes. The second road is the dangerous one. Because invented information looks just like real information.

Whenever I think about this supply chain, I keep returning to the place where my profession began — the scorer's table at the edge of the ground.

The scorer's book was cricket's first blockchain. The scorers I saw on the grounds of Sylhet, without any machine, created a thing whose modern name is data integrity. After every ball a small box was filled. When an over ended, the total was added. When an innings ended, a check was made — did the team total match the individual scores?

That reconciliation was the most important part. If in the scorer's book one batter's runs and the team's total did not match, then someone, somewhere, had made an error — that suspicion rose immediately. So the book did not merely hold information; it also held the ability to catch its own error.

What we today call a blockchain has the same root idea — a ledger where every entry is linked to the previous one, and no one can quietly change a number at the back, because then the whole chain breaks. Cricket did not newly invent this idea; cricket had already done it on paper, with a pen, long ago.

I learned the rhythm of Abahani from exactly there, where the book and the pen were analysis's first instrument. In 2026 I was fifty-five. I was then embedded with Abahani Limited Dhaka in the Bangladesh Premier League. In the dressing room I was the only woman. Abahani versus Mohammedan — in that derby Abahani won 2-1. But for me the bigger event than the win happened at halftime.

The coach moved the team from 4-4-2 to 4-3-3. The right winger was suddenly freed, yet the defence became safer. I wrote it. After that piece, players began telling me training-ground stories.

My central lesson here was this — if I had not understood that small switch correctly, if I had written it wrong, my whole credibility would have vanished in a moment. Trust in a locker room is earned through competence, not through identity. That lesson is needed most of all in today's world of information. If you write one number wrong, if you fill one empty box from your own head, the result is not merely one wrong article — it is the loss of an entire relationship.

I believe that in Sylhet the World Cup meant chalk lines and bare feet, not whiteboards. During the 2026 Russia World Cup I wrote a daily tactics column from Sylhet. France's 4-2-3-1, Mbappe's speed, Griezmann's link play — I analysed all of it. But every evening, when I walked past the neighbourhood ground, I saw boys still drawing chalk lines and playing. They had no heat maps — only soil and an old ball.

I live between these two worlds. Above, the world of information; below, the world of soil. My job is to build a bridge between the two — in such a way that someone in the lower world can also understand, and someone in the upper world cannot treat it lightly.

The biggest disease of today's analysis is that the boxes get filled even when the information is empty. I return to that empty document. If the first stage cannot extract any information, that can mean a few things. Either the source article never reached the machine — perhaps it was behind a wall, maybe a subscription paywall, or inside an image. Or something got stuck in encoding. Or perhaps the machine itself forgot how to extract information.

But whatever the reason, the second stage's job can never be to invent a story on its own. That is what I told the young reporter — if this document had said that in this match so-and-so player was brilliant, while there was no scorecard behind it, then that is not analysis, that is imagination.

In cricket journalism the difference between imagination and analysis is very easy to spot. Analysis tells you where a number came from. Imagination will only say, the player was brilliant. In which match, in which innings, in what situation — nothing.

Let me mention a habit that I myself learned only gradually. If in a single match analysis I pour in a heap of averages, strike rates, economy rates all at once, the reader remembers nothing. Better to take one number and translate it into a consequence. Take a bowler's economy — it is not just a number; it tells you whether the batter can be kept under pressure over after over. Only when the number is translated into a decision does it come alive.

In that 2026 World Cup I began using video timestamps and heat maps — a first in Bangladeshi sports journalism. I wanted the reader to be able to verify for themselves at which minute I was referring to which footage. That was my own version of data integrity — timestamps instead of a ledger.

In March 2026 the Bangladesh Premier League stopped, and the stadiums fell silent. I was embedded with Bashundhara Kings, who had won five of six matches. When the players were locked indoors, I quietly drove three foreign players to solo training, helped with their shopping, kept their morale up.

At that time I wrote about what the silence of an empty stadium is like. But I never published the players' private struggles. Because between information and trust there is a boundary. Not every piece of information is fit to print; some information is fit only to be kept. This boundary is the most misunderstood thing in today's information age. A machine does not know whose harm a piece of information will cause. But a journalist must know.

Now I genuinely believe blockchain is genuinely useful for cricket in one area — record integrity. These days, in the fight against match-fixing, corruption, fake age-proofs, the value of a trustworthy ledger is great. If an academy's birth record, a tournament's score, a contract's date are written in such a way that no one can secretly change them, then the space for corruption shrinks.

Age verification is an ongoing problem in Bangladesh — I won't go into detail here, but this much I will say: if every young player's registration is written in an immutable ledger from day one, then forging it later becomes hard. This is not science fiction; the technology exists now.

These days some sports leagues and clubs are issuing blockchain-based fan tokens and digital collectibles. The idea is simple — tickets, ownership, memorabilia, all written in an immutable ledger. No one can change them. In one sense that is beautiful. But here too I have only one question — if the ledger keeps the ticket, who keeps the story behind that ticket?

Here I remember the core truth of my profession. Cricket's memory does not live only in numbers. When Bangladesh got Test status in 2026, the joy of that moment was not just a date. It was a nation's wait of several decades. I have heard about that evening of 2026 from many elders who were listening to commentary on a transistor radio then.

A blockchain can write down the date of that evening. But the sound of that evening — the whisper of the radio, the shouts of the neighbourhood — only a human who saw or heard it can keep.

So my biggest objection is not about information, it is about the pretense of information. If a box is empty, keeping it empty is honesty. And filling it with invented information is deception — against oneself, against the reader, and against that player in whose name a lie was written.

In today's cricket world I notice something. Over leagues, teams, players — a story is built over all of them. If a team wins two matches, it is said a new era has begun. If it loses two, it is said everything is over. There is often no basis behind these stories.

My job is to measure these stories against the scale of time. A team's ranking, a player's recent form, a contract's terms — to see all of this together, to judge what is sustainable and what is merely heat.

During a transfer window this measurement becomes even more urgent. Every window scatters names — this player is leaving, that player is arriving. But the real story lies elsewhere. Release clauses, wage bills, contract lengths — these numbers tell you which news is true and which is rumour.

My experience says the bidding wars among big clubs are really a kind of brand competition. Real value is created inside smaller clubs — where a coach builds a player, where a scout spots potential before the market price does. These stories are written less, because their headlines are small.

In exactly the same way, the price of broadcast rights has swollen like a hollow balloon. Streaming platforms are repeating the old television mistake — buying rights at a price higher than the profit, then searching for subscribers. I quietly follow this story as a writer, because here there is information, not emotion.

The part of cricket that no one writes about is my favourite — the quiet infrastructure. Scorers, curators, groundstaff, selectors, families. Those who maintain the game's continuity from generation to generation. How a pitch is made, who makes it, how long in advance it is prepared — this information is not on the scorecard. Yet a match's result is decided here.

I believe cricket's real analysis begins off the field. When I write about a young player, I do two things. First I look at his recent scorecard, then I find someone near his village or area who has known him since childhood. One number, one story — I write by joining these two. If either is missing, the piece stays incomplete.

Now I come to my biggest objection. We say a ledger never lies. But truly speaking, a ledger can only write what someone told it to write. If the scorer's hand makes an error, the ledger will write exactly that — forever. A blockchain's immutability does not guarantee the truth of information, it only guarantees its immutability. When false information becomes immutable, it becomes more dangerous, because then the error cannot be erased either.

Here my two decades of scorer-memory matter. I knew an elderly scorer in Sylhet. His hands trembled, but his memory was strangely accurate. Once, having changed a run in the book, he wrote a small note beside it explaining why he changed it. That was a kind of transparent correction — a human correction path. The book could not catch the error, but the human could.

So my question is — if a fully immutable ledger excludes that human, what is the gain? The memory of the game we love is not only of numbers, but of the people who tell its stories.

However clear the information, memory is not only information — memory is the sum of information, people and time. One part of that sum can never be fully captured by a machine.

I am not saying this against technology. I am saying this in favour of recognising technology's limits. A machine can tell me what a batter's recent form is like. But a machine cannot tell me who first placed a bat in that batter's hand, or who had cooked a meal waiting at home on the night of his first century. Yet it is these stories that keep the game alive.

Among the many young players I have seen on Sylhet's grounds, one thing is common — the joy of playing. They do not know rankings, they do not know what the transfer market is like. They only know that when the ball meets the bat, there is a distinct sound. That sound cannot be written in any ledger, cannot be caught in any analysis. But that sound is cricket's real capital.

When I take information from players, I always ask them first — can this be written? Sometimes they say, don't write this, Auntie. Then I don't write it. Because to me the relationship is bigger than the news. This is not journalism's weakness, it is journalism's long-term investment. If today I leak a player's private words, tomorrow he will not tell me anything. And from that day my analysis too will become empty — exactly like that empty document.

I believe in the next decade cricket's memory will live on two levels. One level will be immutable, written by machines — where dates, records, contracts no one can change. And one level will be human, where stories live, where smells live, where the sounds of the neighbourhood ground live. The cricket culture that can keep these two levels joined will win. The culture that drops one level and relies on the other will one day either drift away in storyless information or dry up in information-less stories.

To that young reporter I said one last thing. I said, keep this empty document. The day you write your analysis, you will see — an empty box tells you where the truth begins.

She laughed. But I knew she had understood.

The question remains simple to me — when the ledger is immutable, from whom will the truth come?