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A warm welcome to Wisden.com
Wisden CricInfo staff - August 2, 2001
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Eighteen months of doodles, memos, discussions, meetings and more meetings come to fruition as we launch the second and biggest phase of Wisden.com. It has required £4m, at least 50,000 e-mails, and about 100,000 photocopied sheets of paper. It has drawn on the skills of scorers in Bangalore, sports agents in Chelsea, technicians in Seattle, designers in Islington, engineers in Stockholm, database builders in Lahore, code-writers in Oxford, web hosts in San Jose, editors in London and Mumbai, and contributors in umpteen places and periods, from the wood-panelled writing-rooms of Victorian Britain to the current England dressing-room.
It has been a labour of love, and a few other emotions - as many dotcoms have discovered, you can't make a dream come true without your share of nightmares. But the end product makes it all worthwhile. Glitches? We've had a few, and you will no doubt spot a few more. Please let us know if you do.
The BBC called Wisden 'cricket's most famous name'. With this new site, we hope to live up to that name – and bring it to people who have never set eyes on a copy of the fat yellow book or our monthly magazine. We have already had registrations from 50 countries. Wherever you are, whatever your race, age, gender or knowledge of Test-match strike rates, we extend the warmest of welcomes. Thank you for coming, and we look forward to hearing what you think (write to: feedback@wisden.com).
What we are trying to do
Cricket and the internet could have been made for each other. This medium is perfectly suited to a game which takes all day, which spans several time zones but not many countries, which generates numbers and venerates words. In planning and developing the new Wisden.com, we have tried to combine the special properties of the web – immediacy, depth, fun, searchability and interactivity – with the timeless values of Wisden: trustworthiness, authority, independence, and sheer love of cricket.
How the site works
The new Wisden.com is in two sections. News, live coverage and basic information are free to all users, and are indicated by blue links. Everything else is marked by yellow links, and is only available to members. For details of our modest charges and how to subscribe click here
Phase one
The first phase of the new site brought you:
live coverage of all international cricket
expert commentary during major matches from outstanding ex-players, starting with Mark Taylor
a daily menu of columns and features
Wisden 20:20, a new kind of statistical analysis which uses ball-by-ball data to tell the story behind the scorecard
The Wisden 100, a new ratings system which evaluates the greatest Test batting and bowling performances of all time – and which, as we have already discovered, is a great way of starting a debate.
Live coverage
Test cricket, despite the efforts of the match-fixers, is going through a golden age. The present Australians are one of the best teams of all time, with a buccaneering spirit that is rewriting the conventions of the game as well as the record books. Several of the greatest players in history are in action at the moment – Tendulkar, Lara, Steve Waugh, Gilchrist, Warne, Muralitharan, Pollock, Akram, McGrath, Donald … Records are being broken as never before, whether it's Mark Waugh in his 113th Test or Hamilton Masakadza in his first. The new ICC Test Championship, which Wisden devised and championed, means that there will now be more Test matches, and more interest in them. You can follow all the big games as they happen, through the eyes of Wisden writers and expert analysts – including the England captain, Nasser Hussain.
The daily menu
The site offers news and comment seven days a week, along with All Today's Yesterdays, which captures what happened on this day in history, Ask Steven, which answers your queries, and Best of the Web – the page that trawls the other cricket websites, so you don't have to. Every day except Sunday, there is a daily column from one of our international team of regular writers. And for light relief, or when rain stops play, we have two games. Top Stumps allows you to test your knowledge of some of the great players, while Speed Gun enables you to take on other Wisden readers in a test of both knowledge and reflexes.
Who's who
The core of our editorial team in London has moved across from Wisden Cricket Monthly magazine, to make sure that the new site is very much a part of the Wisden family. I was editor of the magazine for four years up to September 2000, when I switched to Wisden Online. Steven Lynch, the magazine's long-serving managing editor and a cricket writer for the Sunday Telegraph, is our Database Director, in charge of records, statistics, and the colossal task of putting the Almanack online. He is also available to answer your questions in the popular and much-imitated Ask Steven column (write to wisden@wisden.com).
Our main reporters are Tanya Aldred, who writes for The Guardian and was until recently assistant editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly; and Lawrence Booth, who has been an editorial assistant on both the Monthly and the Wisden Almanack and was also assistant editor of Cricket Unlimited, our joint website with The Guardian. Wisden Online's managing editor is Martin Williamson, who has been a senior editor at SkySports.com and Sportal. The new site has been designed by Jeff Knowles and Neville Brody of Research Studios, whose credits include Britain's most successful newspaper site, Guardian Unlimited.
For the first time, Wisden has opened a bureau in India – in fact two, an editorial office in Mumbai and a statistical engine-room in Bangalore. Our India editor is Sambit Bal, who was previously editor of Total-Cricket.com. The assistant editors are Dileep Premachandran and Amit Varma , and the staff writers are Rahul Bhattacharya and S Rajesh
Wisden goes multimedia
In the beginning was the word, but soon after that, there were pictures too. Wisden Online will bring you the latest cricket photographs from Allsport and Reuters. To cover the game's rich history, we have formed an alliance with Hulton Getty, the leading international picture library. Our picture editor, Jan Traylen, spent much of the English winter buried in Hulton Getty's archive, sifting through dusty boxes of old prints, emerging periodically with classic shots that have seldom or never been seen before.
For the first time, Wisden has moved into moving pictures. Through our partnership with British Pathe, we can bring you historic footage of cricket from the first half of this century. More such arrangements will follow, for audio as well as video. If you have some classic cine footage in the attic, let us know.
Phase 2: the Almanack
For the second stage of the new site, we have opened up Wisden's back pages. Launched in 1864, Wisden Cricketers' Almanack had 13 years to play itself in before the world got round to staging the first Test match. Every international fixture since – about 3250 of them – has been covered by the Almanack. Those reports are often quoted as the definitive account of what happened, and how, and why. The earliest editions of the book change hands at auction for as much as £6000. We will bring you the highlights of all 138 Almanacks, including every one of those match reports, for a few pounds a month.
Coming soon: even more
The next section of the Almanack to go online will be the obituaries- quintessentially Wisden, sometimes quirky, but always authoritative. There will also be a selection of the best articles from Wisden Cricket Monthly. We hope you enjoy it the rich history of Wisden.
© Wisden CricInfo Ltd
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