From the Pitch-Side Notebook to the On-Chain Ledger: Who Owns Cricket's Memory

There is an old scorebook in the small room beside a club ground in Chattogram. A page from a 2026 match. One bowler's over-by-over figures, first written in pencil, then traced over in ink, then corrected in red. Three versions of the same over, on the same page, on the same day. I asked Nurul Haque, the groundskeeper, which one was true. He shook his head, then said: the one he could still remember.

I have returned to that answer many times since, each time differently.

November 2026. The stands at the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium were empty. In the Bangabandhu T20 Cup, Liton Das made 103 off 58 balls for Gazi Group Chattogram. A strike rate of 177.58. Fours, sixes, cover drives — every seam of the pitch seemingly memorised. But there was no roar, no applause. I wrote about the silence between bat and ball: in empty stadiums, silence did not stay silent; it learned our names. While writing, a question circled in my head that I could not print that day: where was that 103 actually recorded? In the scorer's book? On the broadcaster's server? In the board's database? Or on the server of a private statistics company whose copyright the board does not hold?

Four places, four versions. Exactly like that red pen in 2026, except the pen is now digital.

Cricket today is not only a game on a field. It is an accounting business. And into that business a new ledger is entering: the blockchain.

You have to understand how the accounting is made. A ball is bowled, and then it scatters into six places. The scorer at the ground writes it down first, on paper, in pencil. Then the broadcaster's feed — ball tracking, Hawk-Eye, speed gun. Then the statistics provider, which sells live data to clients. Then the fantasy platforms, where millions build teams off that number. Then the media, which turns the number into a story. And finally us, who remember it.

At every layer the number shifts slightly. Whether a run was a no-ball or legal, whether a catch was clean or brushed the grass — that decision passes through at least three human minds before it reaches paper. What a television viewer sees on replay, what a scorer sees from the ground, and what a data operator types on a screen are three different realities.

The first entry of blockchain into the cricket world, though, did not come through an accounting ledger. It came through collectibles. In 2026 the ICC announced a partnership with the India-based company FanCraze, which produced digital collectibles called Crictos — clips of famous moments, with ownership written on-chain. Rario, another India-based cricket NFT platform, signed deals with players and leagues. The fan-token world — the Socios-Chiliz model — had heated up in football and wanted a foothold in cricket.

Then 2026 arrived. The NFT market collapsed. Many digital collectibles fell close to zero. A large share of those who advertised themselves as the future of cricket are gone today.

Still, the accounting question remains. Because cricket's economy is now tied into a web of auctions, contracts, agent commissions and image rights — and at every knot of that web hangs a number whose truth someone disputes.

I have been writing on cricket for sixteen years. In 2026 I started a page called BDCricTeam, when there was no institutional route into cricket writing — only scorecards and the smell of a ground. After joining Chattogram-based Port City Pitch in 2026, my first major assignment was Chittagong Vikings versus Rangpur Riders in the BPL. Mohammad Saifuddin, nineteen years old, conceded 18 runs in the 20th over, and the Vikings lost by five wickets. I filed 900 words about the city's collective exhale. Since that day I carry a pocket notebook — Pitch-Side Images — with one sensory detail per over. That habit taught me that accounting and memory are never the same thing.

What blockchain can do in cricket is not prevent statistical fraud — it is write a birth certificate for every number.

Picture one over. Saifuddin bowling, nineteen years old, the 20th over, 18 runs gone. Inside that over sits the speed of six deliveries, line and length, field placement, wind direction, pitch moisture, and how much load went through his shoulder. Today not a single fragment of that information is in Saifuddin's own hands. It sits on the board's server, in the broadcaster's archive, on the data vendor's machine.

A distributed ledger can do one simple thing here: keep proof of who created each record, when, and in what context. Nobody can later change a number, because changing it would require changing every copy on the chain. When someone corrected that 2026 scorebook in red pen, no one could afterwards know what the original figure had been. On a chain that is impossible.

This is the most practical use — recording a player's workload. One of my settled views is that early-maturing young players get overused; their bodies are not finished, yet they are pushed into senior rhythms. Saifuddin bowling the 20th over of a BPL match at nineteen — a teenager carrying a franchise's fate on his shoulder. Those 18 runs are not only a count of runs; they are a count of a body's debt. But Bangladesh has no central ledger recording how many overs that bowler has sent down across domestic cricket, the BPL, the A team and the national side in the past twelve months, or how many days of rest he received.

If a bowler's over-count sat in one immutable ledger, the word fatigue would stop being a guess and become a readable fact. Franchise, board and selector would all see the same number. Nobody could say they did not know.

Another area is contracts and auction money flows. At a BPL auction a player's price is set, but inside it sit match fees, performance bonuses, a share of image rights, an agent's commission. Those layers are not transparent on paper. A smart contract can encode them: this much for so many matches, a bonus if a strike rate crosses a threshold, and image-rights money routed straight into the player's wallet — no one in between able to hold it back.

Another of my settled views applies directly here: player agents are cricket's biggest hidden cost. The more rumour and haggling noise there is, the more distorted the market becomes. A chain will not reduce that noise — but it will force a visible answer to where the money went.

The more contested ground is ownership of history. The ICC-FanCraze Crictos model was the sale of memory as clips. I do not walk that road. Cricket's real asset is not the clip; it is continuity. My professional habit is to follow one player from a port-city ground through domestic seasons to a World Cup stage — what I call the quiet thread. Liton Das's 103 off 58 is not a standalone thing. Behind it lie a thousand balls left alone in the Chattogram nets, failed series, a changed coach, the drive home after being out for twenty-nine. The accounting of that continuity is today scattered across five platforms, and complete nowhere.

Imagine a chain recording not only what happened but how — net sessions, coaching notes, injury dates, selection decisions. Then Liton's 103 would be not just an innings but visible proof of a seven-year thread. A reader could reconcile it themselves. But I stop there, because reconciling accounts and understanding a story are not the same act.

Who owns cricket's data — in Bangladesh that question cuts deeper. Between the BCB, the franchises and the broadcasters there is no clear line anywhere on data ownership. If a Dhaka franchise is sold to a foreign investor, does its scouting database — five years of domestic performance written into it — get sold along with it? No document answers that.

A public, permissioned ledger could partly fill the gap. The board would remain the owner, but the record would be immutable, and a player could hold a certified copy of his own career data. Today a Bangladeshi cricketer does not have an official export of his own fifteen-year career in his own hands.

But here too lies a danger that is rarely written about. A ledger that is universal is not only a ledger of memory — it is a ledger of valuation.

Suppose every ball of every domestic match is written on-chain. Then a nineteen-year-old bowler's strike rate, economy and injury history all begin to carry a price like a public asset. Franchise and agent would see the same number, but the advantage would go to whoever analyses it better. Transparency does not create equal opportunity for unequal players; sometimes it builds a new market in which young bodies become tradeable goods faster. The teenager we tell to protect his shoulder may hear the chain tell him what his shoulder is worth.

The most mysterious layer is the gap between accounting and weather. In my notebook, beside an over, I do not write only 0-0-8-1. I write: Chattogram in April, salt wind, sweat running down the left sleeve. The same figures — 10-0-38-2 in Dhaka in January and 10-0-38-2 in Chattogram in April — are identical on paper and two different professions in reality.

A ledger holds numbers. It does not hold weather. And half of cricket's truth is weather. That is my largest objection, and from it comes the next question.

Everyone assumes that better records mean truer memory. It works the other way.

Cricket's most valuable records are not numbers. They are arguments. In that 20th over in 2026, was the ball a low full toss or a missed yorker? Had the Rangpur batsman already left the crease? No chain can hold the answer, because the answer is a decision made by human eyes, and those eyes differ. Blockchain can stop forgery; it cannot stop dispute — and dispute is cricket's lifeblood.

Another misconception: blockchain removes intermediaries. It does not remove them; it relocates them. The person who once wrote the scorebook now writes to the chain — but who is allowed to write, who validates, who runs the nodes: the board, the broadcaster or the franchise decides that. Power is not lost, only moved. What we call a neutral chain is, in the end, a few institutions' computers. That sentence is not new in cricket's history — power never gives up the ledger, it only changes the ledger's language.

A third error: digital collectibles are cricket's digital future. The 2026 collapse settled that. A clip's price rises and falls, but the groundskeeper's memory in Chattogram never falls to zero — because it is not anyone's property.

And above all: cricket's memory is powerful precisely because it is incomplete. Because that 2026 page holds three versions, we are still talking about that over today. Had one flawless version been written to a chain, we might never have looked back. Forgetting is not cricket's flaw; it is its editing instrument. A game that remembers every ball can no longer dream.

So must the pitch-side notebook and the on-chain ledger be kept apart? Perhaps not. Perhaps what is needed is a boundary: the accounting off the field — contracts, commissions, workload, injury — belongs on a chain, because there transparency is needed. The accounting inside the field — the fear in an over, the doubt in a catch, the smell of an innings — should stay on paper, corrected in red pen, incomplete.

Nurul Haque still writes in pencil. His scorebook will never go on-chain, and it should not. But in the room beside his, a nineteen-year-old bowler will bowl the 20th over this evening, and no one yet keeps the ledger of what that load is doing to his shoulder. Will the chain keep it — or turn it into a faster instrument of sale?