We wrote about India losing over at Cricinfo

1. Were you also responsible for the jocular caption on the photo?

   1. No, we never do the captions and rarely do the headline.

2. Poor response from the comments. Must try harder.

   1. Give it time. Although we must admit to feeling pretty disappointed so far.

3. I like that. Very good. One of your best.

   Not that I’m saying that the others aren’t good as well, only that this one was. I realise that every compliment has a corresponding insult by definition, and that you are the sort who will find it, but in this case there is no need.

   Or is there?

   No.

   1. I agree with Bert. Much funnier than usual. I believe that is what he was trying to say.

4. Psychology, KC, psychology. People who express outrage in the comments section of an internet blog are a breed that usually do not bother to read an entire article (interestingly enough, this is a trait they share with scientists, who have a propensity to read just the abstract and the conclusion sections of a paper – but I digress). So to maximize outrage, it stands to reason that you have to begin and end with vitriol. Sample this piece that you wrote – the first paragraph sympathizes with India and the last paragraph lauds Dhoni*. If instead, you had started with branding the Indian team spineless and ended with calling Sachin Tendulkar a cunt, there would’ve been more than one comment theorizing that your real father may well be that drug-dealer in Western Australia.

   I hope that helps.

   *I should also point out that most people are blind to any under-current of sarcasm that might pervade an article – so this also doesn’t help your cause.

   1. For our next experiment, we’ll write an ironic piece about how England will win the World Cup.

5. It’s a good article. Unfortunately, the people most likely to bash the article will probably only read the subheadings, which are relatively innocuous (although that seems to be the point). On Cricinfo, you will generally see articles being bashed for their title rather than their content, so that when headlines greatly exaggerate a player’s statement, the comments will generally be on the title statement rather than that in the article.

   The title will do well in gaining the attention of people ready to pour out vitriol, although not enraging them as yet, but then they will probably see the subheadings and go, “I agree with this,” and then go away to find an article in which Darren Sammy’s name is mentioned somewhere. Of course, this reaction of agreement is on some level the point of the article, and it would seem more reasonable to consider the article a success if many Cricinfo commenters have this reaction, and therefore do not post a response, than if they do in fact post angered responses.

   Such a response would, in fact, mean that the article was a work of art on two levels, both on that of being initially amusing, and in that it was able to deceive people into agreeing with it while this very agreement in fact undermined itself. This shall lead to the history books declaring not only that KC was an infamous writer about the ancient sport of cricket (which was lead to extinction by a more popular sport named ‘Twenty-20’, of course), but a ‘subtle, subversive’, infamous writer about cricket, and it is always good to be called subversive by historians (it makes one very popular with future teenagers).

   Given this, perhaps it would make more sense to hope for fewer angry comments, and consider such a scenario to be a success. The upside to this approach is that, by tailoring your expectations to the current results, you mitigate the risk of failure.

   1. Your comment is four times the length of KC’s original posting. Even accepting that the posting referred to an article slightly longer than your comment, that’s still pretty lengthy.

      Lots of long words too. I hope you didn’t eat alphabetti spaghetti for breakfast this morning -you know full well you should be breakfasting on throdkin like the rest of us these days.

      http://www.kingcricket.co.uk/okay-there-are-going-to-be-some-changes-around-here/2011/09/16/

   2. This website is now on the first page of Google hits for “throdkin”.

   3. I think that says more about throdkin than it does about King Cricket.

      When KC’s site software ceases to identify throdkin as a misspelt word, we’ll know our campaign is nearly complete.

   4. We don’t have ‘site software’. How sophisticated do you think we are? That’s your browser. Educate it.

6. Ah, they seem to have exchanged being irate of being bafflingly enigmatic.

   “Interesting + awesome + 100 x shames for Team India.”

   I’ve read this several times and I have no idea what the chap is trying to say.

   1. He says that he likes the article very much and that the Indian cricket team is justifiably the butt of jokes at the moment.

      Happy to help.

      Meanwhile, the comments on Cricinfo have taken a slightly more combative turn. It seems that some people (well Babu at least) think(s) that Alex Bowden speaks on behalf of Team England.

   2. It isn’t even a proper equation. They need an equals sign if I remember rightly. If it was a proper equation Bert would be able to graph it.

   3. It’s all very clear. What you do is take Interesting, add Awesome, then add 100. Then multiply the result by shames. Given that 100 is just a number, it is crucial for this to work that Interesting and Awesome are also dimensionless indices. The final answer will then come out in metric Shames.

      I did the calculation and found that the answer is 1.6 kiloShames. That’s a lot. By comparison, England in the 90s peaked at 988 Shames (World Cup 2003), and Chris Gayle in Smudge’s photo below is 1.13 kShames.

      The world record of 1.7 megaShames was set jointly at Lord’s by Giles Clarke and Alan Stanford. It is not expected that this will ever be beaten.

7. Incidentally KC, you wrote some time back how much of a better player Gayle would be if he stopped putting so much effort into being “cool”. From the look of this picture he may have taken your advice.

   http://www.espncricinfo.com/bangladesh-v-west-indies-2011/content/current/story/533511.html

8. “The world record of 1.7 megaShames was set jointly at Lord’s by Giles Clarke and Alan Stanford. It is not expected that this will ever be beaten.
   ”

   I dismiss that comment.

   1. Surely you discard it?

9. vry wel said Alex Bowden sir.the topic name should be ‘something to happy about’

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