Ducking Beamers: A Cricket Blog

I’m coming very late to this sad piece of news, but I wanted to write my own note for Amy S., one of my favorite cricket bloggers. Since I compulsively read her site after discovering it earlier this year, I wondered why she hadn’t posted in a while; I even started to resent her silence, as if it were a betrayal to cricket blogging (and to me, a loyal reader).

But now, of course, we know what happened.

You know, blogs have been around now for the better part of this decade, but it’s still a bizarre mechanism to me, drawing close together a band of strangers.  For a good stretch of time, I couldn’t write a single post without linking to Amy S., whose humor absolutely floored me. When she reciprocated, I felt that momentary surge we all feel as bloggers faced with comments and links, when we think for a second this enterprise isn’t completely a vain, self-indulgent exercise, but something more important. There’s that pull and push of close and far: I knew nothing about Amy, not her profession (a journalist, like me), or her politics (Kevin Rudd! The Prime Minister?), but I knew her voice.

There’s an argument in some quarters that the Internet amounts to nothing more than a million daily outbursts, shot out into an ether few can remember the next day. The New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier described the sentiment best in the Times:

“The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered. The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”

But with Amy at least, I’ll remember. The silly pictures, the Albie Morkel posts, the hilarious fixation with A.B. de Villiers — they gave us a person, someone who deserved to tickle us for years and years. Goodbye, Amy.