From huddling around the radio to enjoying live cricketing action on large high definition screens, the experience of following a cricket match outside the stadium has come a long way. As stadiums across the country erupted in cheer or fell silent in despair during the ICC World T20 matches, so did Twitter.
The group stages of the tournament have become the most tweeted about international cricket event, with 6.4 million tweets for the league stage. For Indian fans, many of whom consider themselves armchair experts on the game, social media has changed the way the game is experienced.
Views and opinions are no longer shared with people in the physical space. Instead, they are broadcast online. Often, some tweets even receive a response from players and experts. The conversation and engagement starts way before the game, with analysis, jokes and memes going viral during the build-up and the excitement continues till way after the match is over.
To put it all in numbers, the engagement on Twitter the moment India beat Australia by six wickets saw 16,000 tweets per minute and when India beat Pakistan, there were 12,000 tweets per minute. The India versus Pakistan match was, in fact, the most tweeted T20 international ever, with 1.12 million tweets or 67 per cent higher than #INDvPAK at Asia Cup 2016.
Ankur Bhatia, a cricket fan, said: “Every group of cricket watchers has among them the boisterous watchers, the optimists, the pessimists and the nervous ones. We can now include the tweeters who share every emotion online. Their eyes are on the screen, but their fingers are busy typing away and engaging with a million other people.”
The experience, said Bindya Singh, makes the experience so much more complete. “Instead of listening to the commentary, which can sometimes get monotonous, the parallel discussion online is a lot more fun. Even if you do not engage in it, a lot of jokes and extra information are being shared.”
Social media has also given fans the chance to take part in polls and post-match questions that are answered by the captains of the teams. The tournament has seen a 63 per cent growth in #AskCaptain tweets per match over Cricket World Cup 2015, with 32,000 tweets sent so far.
Social media has surely changed the way fans engage with each other during the game and after, with even those who do not follow the cricketing action getting involved with sharing tweets like the one of Virat Kohli shaming trolls who attacked his relationship with actor Anushka Sharma or M.S. Dhoni’s wife Sakshi tweeting to fans celebrating outside her house to keep it quiet so that her daughter does not wake up.
The winning moment of the India versus Bangladesh match has even been recreated by the expert commentary team of Star Sports for a bit of fun.
