This is interesting. I agree with the opening post quite a lot but I have a different take on the reasons for it. It's not the quality or state of the cricket - there have been many, many interesting things to discuss over the last six months and we're at quite an interesting phase of cricket at the moment with the potential decline of Australia, the maturity of Sri Lanka's fast bowling stocks and the decline of the West Indies just to name a few things. We've had interesting declarations to discuss lately, the quality of pitches being a hot topic and we've had a bowler breaking the test record for the most wickets - shortly after the former holder of the record retired along with his partner in crime no less!
The problem, IMO, stems from what I think of as the "unwritten Cricket Chat code of conduct" that has developed over the last six months. After a while, I noticed the opinions of the religiously regular posters of recent times - including myself - started to mould together somewhat. It's interesting... if you look up the early posts of many members (even newer ones who weren't youngsters when they joined), their opinions of players are vastly different to what they are now. They've tried debating their original opinion, lost the debate because they had a worse case (which does not mean they are "wrong", by the wrong), and formed what is a somewhat generic viewpoint across Cricket Chat. There are a number of these generic opinions held by Cricket Web that aren't held as universally elsewhere, based purely on the strong case an argument for it would hold rather than the true opinions of the members involved.
This, I've found, is usually only found with player comparisons, and usually only contemporary ones. Players of yesteryear have maintained their reputations regardless of their stats, rightly or wrongly, but current players seem to all eventually gain their own generic CW opinion after they are debated. Once this happens, a lot of the members either just adopt that opinion because they are convinced by the argument, or give up stating their opinion on said player as its a lost cause. As this occurs, posts regarding players become more centred around "which player has the best case?", "which player's game-by-game statistical analysis is better" or "which player is most deserved?" rather than "which player is better?" or "which player will do the best job?". The first three there are a lot less debatable than the second two, which creates much less interesting discussion and much more CW drones repeating the pre-determined opinion of the player until his performances dictate a change there. Eventually, everything becomes boring and you get posters like Goughy (and myself, to a much lesser degree) who are on this forum for long periods of time throughout the day and yet post little.
How do we solve this? Well, I don't know. I think it's an underlying problem throughout the forum and I've been trying to make a conscious effort to state my opinions on the quality of players rather than my opinions on the cases players have against others, but I don't see a way out of it short of some new blood.
And it was in jest y'know. I've said it any number of times, it doesn't sound good, for CCers or OTers, to moan about "it ain't what it were in the olde days". The fact is there'll be good spells and bad spells. Of course there'll be a time when things are good again, there always are.
See, I feel that if most of these are agreed upon (and I'd say it's far more convention on here that Warne = Murali where almost nowhere else have I ever seen this suggested) then it makes CC a better, not worse, place.
