Writing About Cricket

The Nightwatchman Podcast

Guests: With Tanya Aldred and Vithushan Ehantharajah

Twitter began in 2006. By 2007, it was hosting 400,000 tweets per quarter. A year later it was 100m. A year after that, it was fifty million per day, and sometimes, if Tendulkar was batting perhaps, a million or so of those were about cricket.

Twitter, instagram, the over by over news reports and below the line comment offered new avenues for immediacy, but posed the question, how do you report on a game that the audience has been discussing in real time? In an arena when an hour sometimes feels like a year, what kind of long-form writing can prosper?

In this episode Jon speaks to Vithushan Ehantharajah, one of the most distinctive and original voices of this new and uncertain era, as lethal with 140 characters or a David Brent meme as he can be contemplative and deeply readable over a several thousand words.

He also talks to Tanya Aldred, one of the very best writers on the game since she began in 1996, about her early experiences as a female cricket writer, the culture of the press box and whether cricket is yet to have its #MeToo moment.

The Nightwatchman Podcast

Written and hosted by Jon Hotten

Produced and edited by James Wallace

Sponsored by Rathbones