Anything non-IPL is so AN Other

AN Other is, unarguably, the best fielder the English-speaking cricket world has ever known. Don't take our word for it - it's all there in scorebook after scorebook from decade after decade, which tell us someone called AN Other took catch after catch and had a hand in run out after run out.

Often they played for both teams in the same match, and in games that took place simultaneously thousands of kilometres apart. Better yet, they've been at it for more than a hundred years.

Perhaps their longevity is explained by the fact that they rarely bat or bowl, leaving them fresh and free to cause havoc in the field. How do they do it? They don't.

AN Other is scorer-speak in English for, "I don't know who took that catch, and neither does anyone in the batting team. Ask someone from the fielding side? I couldn't be bothered."

At least, that used to be the case before these days of electronic everything, scoring included. But the term might have a use in modern cricket.

This year's IPL is scheduled to start at the Chinnaswamy next Saturday and conclude at the same ground on May 31. Nothing else in cricket has mattered since the end of the Men's T20 World Cup a dozen days ago, and nothing will until the champions lift the trophy. It could all be shoved into the 'AN Other' file and forgotten without even being remembered.

For example, eight significant matches were due to be played on Friday alone. They ranged from fixtures in the Logan Cup and the Plunket Shield to a five-team women's T20I tournament in Nigeria, to South Africa's concurrent men's and women's T20I series in New Zealand.

Who knew? Open a friendly neighbourhood cricket app on your phone, and you will struggle to pick out the non-IPL news. This is not a complaint. The sooner cricket's dinosaurs wise up to the fact that the game's future is not only heavily dependent on the ongoing growth of the T20 game, but specifically of the T20 franchise boom, the better.

Consequently IPL marketing is here, there and everywhere, and it is being retrofitted with behind-the-scenes clips from pre-tournament pep talks and even footage from online meetings conducted before the player auction to reveal how franchises decided to set up their squads.

It's nuts-and-bolts, nerdy stuff, and it tells us there's nothing about the IPL that people don't want to know. Or perhaps it tells us there's nothing the IPL doesn't want to tell us. Besides the stuff it doesn't want us to know.

George Orwell was onto this years ago when he apparently said: "Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." We don't print anything nearly as much as we used to do, George, but your point stands in the online age.

The IPL is exponentially more about public relations than it is about journalism. Why put up with those pesky reporters digging about for real stories when you can tie them up in knots of work for weeks on end by flooding the zone with mostly banal, always harmless, invariably positive "content"?

Then again, the South Africans in New Zealand could do with some manufactured banality to take the attention off what really matters. At Eden Park on Friday, their women's team's six-wicket loss was followed by the men going down by eight wickets. That put the Kiwis 2-1 up in both five-match rubbers, or one more win away from clinching the series.

First Rosemary Mair cleanbowled dangerwoman Tazmin Brits for a six-ball duck to set the tone for an innings that was pulled back from the brink by Kayla Reyneke's unbeaten 34 off 20. But, given the short straight boundaries at the home of New Zealand rugby, the South Africans were always going to struggle to defend their total of 149/7. The unsinkable Sophie Devine's 55 not out off 38, Maddy Green's 25-ball unbeaten 34, and their stand of 84 off 53, took the Kiwis home with eight balls remaining.

Still, Reyneke - who hammered 28 not out off nine in South Africa's 18-run win in Hamilton on Tuesday - told a press conference she was having fun: "I'm trying to ride this wave as long as possible, and it's a good wave to be on."

South Africa's men caught no waves. They shambled to 68/6 in the 12th, and without George Linde's 23 off 19, Gerald Coetzee's eight-ball 16 and Nqobani Mokoena's unbeaten 26 off 20 they wouldn't have scraped together their total of 136/9. New Zealand chased that down in 16.2 overs, with Devon Conway and Tom Latham sharing an opening stand of 96 off 66 and Latham scoring 63 not out off 55.

Still, it was all firmly in the AN Other category of cricket. As, almost, was Kenny Postman - a favourite on the Border club cricket scene in the 1970s and 80s. Once, as the seam-bowling allrounder stood at the top of his run, a scorer, more judicious than some in their craft, called from the boundary, "Bowler's name, please?"

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