The Analog Cricketer is an ode to the Gentlemans Game.
I was born in 1984. Which, as cricketing accidents go, turned out to be rather useful.
I grew up believing Test cricket was the game.
Five days. Red ball. Whites. A deteriorating pitch. A batsman leaving outside off stump for an entire session and nobody feeling particularly cheated by the experience.
Then the one-day game took over my childhood.
Coloured clothing. Floodlights. Sharjah. World Cups. Tri-series that seemed to last half the summer. Sachin Tendulkar opening the batting. Wasim Akram with an old white ball. Australia turning ruthlessness into an operating system.
For my generation, the ODI wasn’t the awkward middle child of international cricket. It was enormous.
Then cricket changed again.
T20 arrived, and like plenty of cricket traditionalists, I wasn’t immediately convinced. Eventually I stopped arguing with reality. The format is different, sometimes ridiculous, frequently brilliant and now responsible for some of the most sophisticated tactical thinking in the sport.
I still love Test cricket most.
But loving what cricket was shouldn’t require pretending that everything new is worse.
Why The Analog Cricketer Exists
There is more cricket analysis available today than at any point in the game’s history.
There are also more numbers. That doesn’t necessarily mean there is more understanding.
The Analog Cricketer is my attempt to put the two together.
The Numbers Room is where the arguments get tested. Statistics matter, but only when we understand what they actually measure- era, conditions, opposition, role and sample size included.
The Analog Years is where we revisit the cricket that formed us without allowing nostalgia to rewrite the scorecard.
The Analog Dispatch is looser: observations, arguments, absurdities and whatever the current game has done to deserve attention.
The principle underneath all three is the same:
Numbers when they matter. Nostalgia when it deserves it. And opinions that have to survive the evidence.
About ME
I’m Shahzad.
I was born in India, where the game is a religion. I have lived and worked in 3 cities in India, 2 in UK, Singapore and finally settled in Melbourne, Australia.
A cricket tragic by temperament and part of the generation that has now watched the sport reinvent itself several times.
I am not a former international cricketer. That’s worth saying.
This publication isn’t built on pretending I know what facing 150 km/h feels like because I’ve watched enough slow-motion replays.
What I can do is research an argument, interrogate the numbers, examine the tactics, consider the psychology and history around them, and then tell you what I think.
Sometimes the numbers will confirm what we remember. Sometimes they’ll destroy it.
Both are interesting.
And cricket should still have room for the things a spreadsheet can’t quite capture: rhythm, pressure, aesthetics, personality, memory and the peculiar feeling of watching a Test match slowly change shape over five days.
Raised on Tests. Shaped by ODIs. Entertained by T20.
That’s not just the tagline. It’s the editorial position.
I don’t want to spend the next twenty years complaining that cricket was better when I was twelve.
Nor do I want to pretend that every innovation represents progress.
Some things have improved. Some have disappeared. Some deserve to come back.
That’s what The Analog Cricketer is here to explore.
Welcome in.