Every other sport has, somewhere on the internet, a place where people who love it gather to think out loud. Football has a hundred. Basketball has thirty. American football has — oh, you'd better believe it — a stat for the third Tuesday of October. Cricket, the most absurdly varied and most quietly cerebral game in any language, deserves more places than it has. We made one of them.
Cricket Times is for people who think about cricket the way other people think about jazz: with affection, with arguments, and with the conviction that the music is more interesting than the marketing.
The heart of the paper is Test cricket — the long form, the five-day mystery, the format where a session can turn on a single ball and a career can be defined by an hour before tea on the fourth afternoon. That's the truth, and we won't pretend otherwise. But cricket is bigger than its longest form, and the paper goes wherever the game is interesting. Selectively rather than dutifully, as the editor likes to say. You can love something a lot and something a little less, but it is still love.
So if you came here for Test cricket: welcome — this is your seat. If you came here for the white-ball game: also welcome — pull up a chair. If you came here because someone sent you a link and you weren't entirely sure what cricket even was, but the writing seemed to know what it was on about: especially welcome. Stay for the writing.
The free part of Cricket Times is not a tease. It's the actual paper. Articles, statistical analyses, country-by-country results, head-to-head comparisons, batting and bowling records, the Test Cricket Oracle quiz on the first of every month, the Voices section, narrated audio for the long pieces — all of it open, no login, nothing to wait for. If you came here from a friend's link or a Google search and never sign up for anything, you'll still get the whole thing as it was meant to be read.
This isn't generosity, exactly. It's a belief that good writing about cricket — any cricket — is rarer than it should be, and the answer to "rare" is "share it widely." The articles you read were written for you whether you ever pay a penny.
So why does a paid tier exist at all?
Because someone has to keep the lights on, and the someone is — well, hi. It's me, Ivan. One person, one passion, one site, and a non-trivial monthly bill from the various services that quietly hold the whole thing together — hosting, domains, email, the database, the audio pipeline, a handful of others nobody thinks about until they stop working. The paid tier is how Cricket Times keeps existing on the days when the writing is hard and the bills don't stop arriving.
Subscriptions are also how the paper grows beyond one person — and if you write about cricket and would like to be read here, the about page has more on that.
But "support the work" is a thin pitch on its own — a noble one, but thin. So the paid tier comes with things that make subscribing feel like joining the studio rather than just paying the rent.
The first is the archive. Every article ever published, browsable by author, era, team, format, statistic, and topic. The free tier gives you any single article you click on; the archive is where you go when you remember reading something a few months ago about the third innings at Headingley and you'd like to find it again. Or when you'd like to find six other things like it. The free site is a daily paper; the archive is the bound volumes on the shelf, organised properly.
Then there is the simulation tool, which lets you ask the question every cricket fan has had at the bar at midnight: what if? What if Lara had been in this batting lineup, what if Sri Lanka had had Marshall opening the bowling against Australia, what if the third innings had been twelve overs longer. The simulator is built on the same statistical models that power the analysis on the site, and it will give you genuine answers, which you may or may not want to hear. It is the most fun a spreadsheet has ever been allowed to be.
Connected to all of this — and quietly important — is data export. If you've used our filters to build a real analysis (a peer-comparison cohort, a venue-adjusted bowling table, a particular slice of the captaincy data), you can take it with you. Not a raw data dump — the actual analysis you built, the way you built it, exportable to a spreadsheet. For the readers who do this kind of work, it's the difference between admiring a tool and using one. We did not want to be the kind of site where you can see the answer but not work with it.
There are also smaller pleasures: the past Oracle quizzes as they roll into the archive at month-end (the live quiz on the first of each month stays free for everybody), the leaderboard across all editions for those of us who keep score, and the audio archive of every narrated piece — for slow afternoons, long drives, and the days when reading feels like work.
None of this is locked in a vault somewhere. It's locked in a room with a key on the door, and the key is roughly the cost of a cup of coffee a month. The price is what it is because making this work cost real time, and the work continues only if some readers decide they'd rather it kept happening.
And, since you've come this far — one more thing.
Subscribers also get Behind the Scenes, which is the editor's notebook. Pinned notes, half-formed thoughts, drafts in progress, photos from the desk, the occasional cricket ball with words written on it in marker. It's posted irregularly, like all good notebooks. Subscribers can reply, replies become threads, and threads occasionally become arguments about whether Headley really should rank above Bradman, or whether Harry Brook's Test record will look better or worse in twenty years. (The first one: probably not. The second one: ask me again in twenty years.)
It's not the headline reason to subscribe. It's the thing that makes subscribing feel less like a transaction and more like a key to a small, noisy room where the writing actually gets made.
If you read all the way down here, you and I are almost certainly the same kind of person. The kind who read the cricket section first, even when the cricket section was three lines long. The kind who, in any pub argument about greatest ever, has a strong second-favourite opinion to deploy if the obvious one gets shouted down. The kind who knows what a good ball looks like before it pitches, regardless of how many overs it's allowed to last.
Whichever box you pick below — and whether you sign up for the newsletter at the bottom of the page or never sign up for anything at all — thank you for being here. The paper exists because of readers like you, and frankly only because of readers like you. Cricket lives a little longer every time someone reads about it on purpose.