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It wasn’t the ‘God of cricket’ that got to bat first on the 140-character pitch; that honour, in fact, fell upon the Lord’s!
The iconic Lord’s Cricket Ground, which completed 200 years in 2014, made a historic debut on Twitter in Aopril 2007, barely a year after the micro-blogging platform was born.
In the early days, the Lord’s Twitter handle – @HomeOfCricket – disseminated information about the start of the game, rain delays and scores, among other cricketing messages.
But an Indian cricket fan was not far behind the Lord’s in his enthusiasm to bring cricket onto the world of Twitter.
On November 24, 2007, Theyagarajan S, who was studying Computer Science in Tiruchirappalli’s National Institute of Technology, debuted on Twitter with the handle @meninblue.
In a chat with this reporter over Twitter’s direct messaging system, Theyagarajan said it started off as a hobby project for him in college.
He said he used the bot (@meninblue) to receive cricket scores as Twitter had the provision to send out tweets as SMS. (A bot is a software application that runs automated tasks over the Internet.)
The famous Melbourne Cricket Ground (@MCG) came on board Twitter in 2009.
That same year, many more cricketing bodies, including South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, West Indies and England and Wales joined the platform. However, the cricketing bodies in the Indian sub-continent were somewhat late to the party.
The first tweet by the Indian cricket body BCCI came in September 2010 and related to the Champions League of that year.
Among India’s neighbours, Sri Lanka’s cricketing body posted its first tweet a few days before the BCCI. It said: “Our Joy, Pride, Passion… Let's Celebrate Sri Lanka Cricket!”
Pakistan’s first tweet on April 1, 2014 said: “Hello All Cricket Lovers! PCB is alive and kicking on Twitter now. We look forward to your comments. Pride, yes, prejudice, no.”
The International Cricket Council (ICC) made its Twitter entry a few months before the start of the 2011 Cricket World Cup.
The first tweet of the global cricketing body was about Sachin Tendulkar.
On August 13, 2010, the ICC’s first tweet on its verified account said: “Listen to Sachin Tendulkar's views on the ICC Cricket World Cup 2011.”
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