From Scorebook to Blockchain: Cricket's Memory and the Search for a Witness

On an evening last December, I sat in the press box of the Sher-e-Bangla National Cricket Stadium in Mirpur. To my right, a data operator in his thirties worked a ball-by-ball dashboard on his laptop; to my left, a scorer approaching seventy was still entering every delivery into a handwritten notebook. Their totals matched; their methods did not. After each ball, the young man sent the data to a server where, once written, it could hardly be altered. The older scorer smiled—if his notebook were soaked or torn, nothing would be lost, because the memory lived in his head. That evening a question rose in me: where does cricket's memory actually live—on paper, in a person's mind, or in a ledger no one can erase? I have spent forty-seven years looking for that answer. Since joining the sports desk of The Daily Star in 2026, my evidence has rested on three things: the club cricket notebook, the national team's scorecard, and the broadcast timestamp. My notebook taught me that memory has a pulse. In 2026, after spending thirty-two weeks with Abahani Limited Dhaka, I understood that a club's true history is written not in its trophies but in the sweat of its training ground. Today that very pulse has brought me to the junction of cricket and blockchain. That cricket is a game of accounts is no new truth. When the first scorecards were printed in nineteenth-century England, the game was already bound to paper and pen. The Wisden Almanack, published in London in 1864, survives to this day as cricket's archive. In Bangladesh, that older club tradition is still alive. At Abahani, Mohammedan or Sheikh Russel matches, ageing scorers enter every ball into handwritten notebooks. No one scans those notebooks, no one digitises them; they gather dust in club cupboards. Then came the digital age. Ball-by-ball data, Hawk-Eye, Statsguru—cricket is now an ocean of numbers. Into that ocean, around 2026, slipped another technology: blockchain. Put simply, a blockchain is a digital ledger where, once information is written, it cannot be changed. Many computers hold copies of that ledger at once, so no single party can erase it. In cricket, this technology entered through three doors—fan collection, player transfers, and the integrity of records. The first door is fan collection. Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, arrived in cricket around 2026. FanCraze partnered with the International Cricket Council, while platforms such as Rario joined hands with several cricket boards. Fans no longer merely buy match tickets; they can buy a digital moment of a star cricketer—say, a Shakib Al Hasan yorker or a Mushfiqur Rahim cover drive—whose ownership is etched on the blockchain. That ownership cannot be forged, because it is written in an unalterable ledger. The second door is player transfers. In the BPL or IPL, a cricketer's contract carries countless conditions—match fees, performance bonuses, injury clauses, release terms. A blockchain-based programme called a smart contract can enforce these automatically. Fulfil the terms and the money moves on its own; break them and the transaction freezes. This idea is not unfamiliar to me. For years I recorded the conditions of player transfers and saw how disputes often arose over whether terms were met. In a paper contract, settling such a dispute takes lawyers and months; in an unalterable ledger, it would take seconds. The third door is record integrity and anti-corruption. Cricket's deepest wound is match-fixing. Investigations rely most on records of transactions and communications. A blockchain ledger could help preserve those records—if a log existed of which agent contacted which cricketer at what hour, investigation would be far easier. The evidence in the hands of an anti-corruption unit could not be deleted by anyone. A fourth dimension is data ownership. When a ball is bowled, who owns its data—the board, the broadcaster, or the player? Blockchain's proof of ownership can answer that. From my forty-five years of observation, I can say cricket's data is never neutral. Who collects it and who publishes it is the real question. Blockchain does not answer that; it only says that whoever wrote the information cannot be altered. But who wrote it is still decided by people. Now to Bangladesh. Our cricket board, the BPL franchises, the clubs—none yet use blockchain-based contracts or ticketing. Yet its use is growing in world cricket. After 2026, many franchise leagues launched fan tokens, letting token-holders vote on minor club decisions. That model carries a risk: if the fan is only an owner and the game only an asset, what becomes of the stadium's quiet loyalty—where a grandfather sits in the same seat every Saturday? The true beauty of a match lies in its uncertainty. Cricket's greatest pull is that no one knows the outcome of a ball not yet bowled. Blockchain does not reduce that uncertainty; it merely clarifies the accounts of transactions. And clarified accounts can never replace the emotional space of the game. The held breath in the gallery before a six, the roar of a thousand people at an LBW appeal—none of that can be written into any block. Here my kinesiology-trained mind stops. However precise a number, a person stands behind it. In one BPL match, a pacer conceded 28 runs in his final two overs. The record says he failed. But I sat in the ground and saw that his back muscle was strained, and that he clutched his knee between deliveries. That truth appears in no database; it appears only in the eyes of a witness. One evening, two cricket matches ran on two screens at once—a BPL game on one, a Bangladesh international on the other. Two screens, one heartbeat. On such nights I learned that a fan's heart can hold many events at once—but its core tune remains single. Blockchain cannot catch that tune; it only keeps the notes. My second doubt runs deeper. Behind the claim that blockchain will make cricket transparent lies a hidden assumption: that a game which is measurable is a game which is fair. But cricket's history shows that its greatest injustices have occurred behind the cover of numbers. A spinner is dropped after conceding 40 in four overs, yet the data never showed that he bowled through a finger injury. An opener scores five ducks in a row, but the notebook never recorded that someone in his family was ill. At fifty-four, in 2026, I spent fourteen weeks of lockdown in Dhaka. I arranged food deliveries for fourteen players' families but never asked for credit. In that time I wrote a seven-part series, the Empty Stadium Diary. I understood then that a player's true condition never appears on a broadcast scorecard. If blockchain cannot capture that condition, then it is only a ledger of capital, not of witness. I now teach young journalists how to follow a quiet, reliable locker-room ethic. I tell them: whatever the technology, be a witness first, an analyst second. I keep time not because I fear it, but because the game needs a witness. So my conclusion is not simple. Blockchain has a place in cricket—in contract transparency, in fund accounting, in anti-corruption. But the truth of the field, the fatigue of the player, the faith of the fan—these will remain written in human hands, in notebooks, in memory. At sixty-five, I still trust the quiet ritual more than the loud prediction. The question now lies before the cricket boards: will they make the fan a partner, or a customer? The final whistle does not end the story; it hands the notebook to the next keeper.