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29th
October 2000
Winners
of World Cup "Most Valuable Player" Awards Classified
Information - Still!!
Longest vote count in history, or is it really a secret?
The official
host of the recently completed Indoor Cricket World Cup, Action
Cricket, have a website. On that website are results of the World
Cup (not surprisingly - after all, the World Cup finished a week
ago). Well, let me qualify that statement - on that website are
some of the results of the World Cup.
Go to the
page "devoted" (we use that word with extreme caution)
to the "Player(s) of The Series" and you will find ......
a note telling you that "You are going to have to wait till
the end of the Tournament for this information. It is classified".
Quite frankly we wonder what tournament they are refering to?
World Cup 2002 in New Zealand? In the meantime, is it too much
to ask that an explanation for the delay is posted on the site?
Now, the fact
that provision of live-streaming video didn't eventuate is just
one of those things. It is a highly technical issue, and there
are many things that can go wrong. As we have said before, no-one
should ever be criticised for experiencing insurmountable technical
difficulties, and in the case of the live-streaming video, we
didn't. But come on, how technically difficult is it to publish
on a website the names of the "Player(s) of The Series"?
Does it really take a week (so far)?
If we had
known this situation was going to arise, we would have made just
one more call to our contacts in South Africa and ensured they
got the names for us the night they were announced. We would have
then published them that same night. Silly us, we assumed (without
giving it enough thought obviously) the Action site would at least
be able to do the same, so we didn't do it.
I don't know
. . . . you keep giving people the benefit of the doubt, and they
keep giving you reasons not to. But we'll continue to do so, even
in the face of an increasing number of very compelling pointers
to the folly of such concessions. So . . . . let's just hope that
whatever the technical glitch, a solution is found very, very
soon.
Despite our
constantly pointing out the distinction between an organisation
and that organisation's website, the very strong association between
the two is made in the minds of almost every person who sees the
website in question (an argument for organisations having total
control over their website's content and management). They are
one and the same thing in the eyes of most. Our contact with people
from Action itself underlines the fact that they do care about
the game, were extremely serious about running the World Cup professionally
(a fact borne out by the players themselves - most who have contacted
ICW report it was the best World Cup so far), and do care about
the game beyond their own borders . . . but if our mail is any
guide, the perception that no-one really cares is, unfortunately,
beginning to gain a pretty substantial foothold. There is an obvious
solution, but that is of course for Action to determine. Perceptions
can be changed, even highly negative ones. There is also a point
beyond which those perceptions solidify into "reality"
- when solutions will be viewed as "too little, too late".
For the status of future World Cups and, ultimately, the international,
national and local status of the game, we hope that point has
not yet been passed.
But it's getting
closer every day . . .
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