This season has seen a major step forward in accessibility to national team games, due to the partnership between Cricket Canada, Rogers TV and Sportsnet, assisted by sponsorship. This has resulted in parts of the National Cricket League, the Auty Cup T20 matches and four matches against the UAE being covered on Rogers Television in the Toronto area and streamed live on the Sportsnet web site.
\nUp to now, glimpses of the Canadian team on television have been few and far between- some of their World Cup games have made it to television, a few matches have streamed on the net, but generally if you want to watch the national team you need to travel to Toronto and make the trek to King City (or if you are fortunate the much more accessible Toronto Cricket Skating and Curling Club). The team rarely plays anywhere else but Toronto, due to the paucity of natural turf wickets across the country (although plans to play the Auty Cup in Edmonton were shelved in order to allow the TV coverage).
\nIt is not difficult to live stream a sporting event. All that\u2019s needed is a video camera, a laptop connected to the internet, and access to a streaming service such as UStream. Live coverage of minority sporting events in Canada has become common- Skate Canada provides live streams from many of its competitions, including provincial qualifiers, many universities have coverage of their sporting events, and I recently watched local coverage of an under-13 inter-provincial soccer tournament. Thus technologically, it\u2019s about time that we saw some Canadian cricket on the net.
\nMost of the events referenced above used single camera coverage, with some voice commentary. It\u2019s not hard to provide reasonable coverage of soccer, hockey or skating using this method, with good camera positions easily accessible in the stands. Cricket is more demanding. Highlights from county cricket are readily available from most county web sites but these use a single fixed camera (also used for computer analysis). The view is far from satisfactory, with coverage from one end only, and no panning to follow the ball; hence much of the action occurs out of view. When I started watching cricket on television, the BBC only had cameras at a single end, so when the bowler was bowling towards the camera, it was hard to determine whether the ball was spinning, and how close leg-before decisions were.
\nI took the opportunity to watch both the Auty Cup T20 games from start to finish, with the live stream played at full screen on a large TV. The stream and picture quality were excellent; the picture quality was close to cable high definition, and the stream ran almost without hiccups throughout the event.
\nWe\u2019ve got used to the type of detailed coverage provided by major broadcasters of international cricket \u2013 to cover a Test or IPL match, over 80 staff are on site, with between 30 and 40 cameras being used. It is unrealistic to expect anything close to this for domestic coverage. That said, I was impressed by the effort put in. The pitch view cameras were positioned well, high enough to give the right view of the pitch, and there was one at each end. There were at least a couple more cameras providing side on views, and they were able to effectively demonstrate some run out and stumping decisions might not have been correct.
\nFrom what I understand, the broadcast staff are volunteers, part of Rogers Community channel coverage. As such the odd glitch with camerawork or direction is understandable and forgivable \u2013 in fact it was comparatively rare. The most common error was not returning to the standard down-pitch view for every ball, but even then if a wicket fell or a boundary was struck they were ready with replays from a variety of views.
\nThe commentary was similarly variable; the presence of Nigel Reed, who provides commentary on soccer for Sportsnet and CBC, added to the professionalism, and there was generally lots of enthusiasm. The team was able to provide good background on the Canadian team but didn\u2019t really seem to have done their homework on the American squad. It was very much commentary for the cricket fan- there was little attempt to explain the game to the casual Canadian watcher, which perhaps was the right approach given the likely audience.
\nIt will be interesting to find out what the on-line audience actually is for these matches. The games are being shown in Ontario on the Rogers community channel but not elsewhere. The coverage was promoted by Cricket Canada using on-line methods (Facebook, Twitter, web ads), but it is unlikely that casual viewers would come across the online stream. The advantage of coverage on the main cable channels is that people may come to the game through channel surfing. You can find occasional coverage of sports that have far less participation than cricket in Canada on Sportsnet and TSN- Australian rules football is getting regular air time right now \u2013 and some viewers will find the game interesting and entertaining and become fans. The increased cricket coverage on mainstream cable certainly has an impact on perception of the game in Canada \u2013 many have caught a glimpse of the IPL. To really build interest in the game in Canada what is needed is coverage of the national team on mainstream cable, combined with efforts to explain the game to the uninitiated, and followed up at a community level with learn to play cricket programmes delivered by clubs.
\nThat type of coverage is difficult to achieve, so we certainly should commend Cricket Canada for that which was provided. It allows access to the games to a world-wide audience as well as Canadian followers of the game, and from my point of view it was a treat to see some of the younger players in action for the first time. It provided an accurate but perhaps not flattering picture of cricket in Canada. Twitter comments referenced the lack of spectators, the odd sight of matches taking place on adjacent pitches, and the lack of facilities with balls frequently lost under cars. Peter Della Penna who covers US cricket noted that there were more players taking part in matches on other pitches at Maple Leaf than there were watching the game.
\nThere\u2019s more coverage coming up of the 50 over and 20 over matches against the UAE, and I\u2019d encourage fans of Canadian cricket to take in the games. The live stream will be available on Sportsnet for the 50 over matches on Tuesday and Thursday, and the 20 over games on the weekend. This young Canadian team is well worth watching, with some talented and entertaining players, and it will be interesting to see them playing against a more challenging opponent than the USA.
\nDave Liverman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This season has seen a major step forward in accessibility to national team games, due to the partnership between Cricket Canada, Rogers TV and Sportsnet, assisted by sponsorship. This has resulted in parts of the National Cricket League, the Auty Cup T20 matches and four matches against the UAE being covered on Rogers Television in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4994"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4994"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4995,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4994\/revisions\/4995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadacricket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}